Category: Specific Fears

Anna S. ChristieLeave a comment

The Gut-Brain Connection

If you’ve ever noticed your stomach flip during a stressful moment or having to rush to the bathroom when you panic, you already know the gut and the brain are deeply connected. For people with emetophobia, this connection can become a vicious cycle: anxiety stirs up the gut, gut discomfort triggers anxiety, and round it goes. This is called a feedback loop.

Our bodies were built for survival. When the brain perceives a threat, it activates the fight-or-flight response. Blood rushes to your muscles, your heart pounds, and digestion slows to conserve energy. That’s why you may suddenly feel queasy, bloated, or unsettled in your stomach during moments of panic.

The problem for people with emetophobia is that normal digestive sensations—like gurgling, fullness, or mild nausea—get misinterpreted as danger signals. “What if this means I’m going to vomit?” That thought alone spikes adrenaline, which in turn intensifies stomach upset. The gut-brain loop becomes self-perpetuating.

Understanding that anxiety can mimic illness is powerful. It helps you separate what’s truly dangerous from what’s just uncomfortable. To recover from emetophobia, we must learn how to tolerate a certain amount of discomfort without reaching for a safety behaviour such as a stomach remedy. Other safety behaviours when we feel this “gut reaction” include things like pacing back and forth or saying stuff inside your head intended to calm you down. Some examples are “you’re ok,” “you’re not going to be sick,” “you’ve felt like this before,” etc.  The other thing people with emetophobia do inside their heads is escalate the problem with “what if” questions. “What if I’m sick?” What if I’ve been poisoned?” “What if I get so anxious that I vomit?” “What if I have a panic attack?”

Remember that gut sensations are just that – sensations. We humans eat something different every day of our lives, and our gut must adjust with acids, bacteria, bile production, liver function, cleaning out the toxins, amount of water in our gut (intestines), gas bubbles, and so on. This is all normal, and it’s every single day. People without emetophobia just ignore it for the most part.

The next time you feel anxious about gut sensations, try to tolerate the feeling and the anxiety that arise without doing or thinking anything to stop it or to calm yourself down. The more you can tolerate uncomfortable feelings, both physical and emotional, the less likely they are to show up. Just roll with it and get on with the things in life that you value. Over time (many months of practicing this), you will get to the end of a day and think “hey – I didn’t even notice anything in my gut today!”

Anna S. Christie

I’m Afraid to Get Better

I’ve had many clients over the years gingerly tell me that at least part of them is afraid to get over the emetophobia. I know their reasoning before I even ask. “You’re afraid that if you get better, you won’t be so careful, and you’ll end up getting sick.” 

“Yes.”

Most of them understand that this doesn’t make sense, but many do not. Either way, they’ve been embarrassed to tell me. I blame a lot of it on other therapists who have been judgmental of them in the past when they’ve come in for emetophobia treatment. In fact, many therapists who don’t understand emetophobia or how to treat it have told their clients that they just don’t want to get better. They usually conclude this when they can’t think of what to do with these clients that to help them. 

Sometimes the refrain is picked up by parents who are also at their wits’ end about what to do with an emetophobic child who doesn’t want to eat, drink, go to school or go to therapy. They conclude that the child/teenager doesn’t want to get better or is afraid to get better so they’re not “trying.” 

I do get it. I remember at least thinking that I might be afraid to get better when I had emetophobia. Yet I desperately wanted to get better. I knew it wasn’t logical – after all, if you get better that means you’re not afraid anymore, so whether you’re “careful” or not, it really doesn’t matter if you get sick because you’re not afraid of it anyway. That may have been too confusing a sentence. Sorry! Think of it this way: a person has a severe phobia of puppies. Especially those fluffy, bouncy, slobbery Golden Retriever puppies. Ya, these guys:

Yes, there are many people terrified of them. They have panic attacks just like you, and they do everything they can to avoid going anywhere where they might see one, and they never watch Disney movies and close their eyes during most TV commercials. If one of these phobics accidentally stumbled on this page they’d be crying right now from seeing that picture. Don’t even say in your head that you think it’s ridiculous!!!! These things aren’t logical, as you well know. 

Okay, so now imagine that someone who has a phobia of puppies comes to me for treatment. On intake, they whisper gingerly that they’re afraid to get over the phobia because if they do, they might end up not caring any more and then they’ll just go get a puppy some day. 

Did that make you scratch your head? But it’s the same thing, right? EVERYONE with a phobia is afraid to get better in case they stop being “careful” to avoid what they fear. What if someone gets over their spider phobia and just throws caution to the wind and starts gardening? What if someone with a clown phobia gets better and just starts going to kids’ birthday parties? You’re getting the idea, right? And yes, I know that if you’d rather be afraid of puppies or clowns or even spiders for that matter right about now.

So first of all, the obvious: if you don’t have emetophobia you won’t care if you get sick, or risk getting sick because you won’t be afraid of vomiting anyway. But secondly, and I speak from experience here, you’re not going to just let all hell break loose and start licking the bottom of your shoes or your fingers after shaking hands with sick people or whatever. I’m no longer afraid of vomiting but I sure as heck don’t like it. I might risk eating something that seems wonderful if I’m not sure about it or who cooked it, but I don’t want Norovirus – I had it ten years ago and it wasn’t very nice: the worst part for me was the fever, chills, exhaustion and body aches. So even though I don’t fear vomiting any more, I still wash my hands before I eat and I don’t put my fingers in my mouth or nose unless I’ve just washed my hands thoroughly for 20 seconds and not left my living room.

Get better, ok? Don’t be afraid of it! Getting better is awesome.

Anna S. Christie2 Comments

Chemotherapy

Emetophobia and Chemotherapy

I took some liberties with the Halloween videos available on Canva this week – lol!

Pretty much since the birth of the internet I’ve been finding and talking to people with emetophobia. My first computer experience with internet was 1996, and by 1998 I discovered, after 39 years, that my phobia had a name and that there were other people like me! By the year 2000 I was a moderator of “emetophobia.org” – a discussion forum that quite quickly went to 10,000 members. There was no such thing as Facebook groups at that time. This website had so much traffic that you could go there any time of the day or night and find someone with whom you could talk. Thank goodness for time zones!

The great thing about a discussion forum (which still exists, by the way) is that topics can be organized into sections, and you can view the topics to see if you’d like to partake of that conversation. Now, Facebook groups have pretty much taken over the emetophobic community. Our latest podcast was about the pros and cons of social media support groups.

Despite changes in how emetophobics talk with one another online, there is always this question, “What would you do if you got cancer? How could you deal with chemotherapy?” Usually the responses are something to the tune of “I’d rather die.” Sound about right? It’s not.

I found the breast lump when I was just 37. My youngest of three children was only 11 years old. My world came crashing down, for a number of reasons only one of which was being freaked out about having to have chemotherapy. I had had some treatment, but I was still terrified of vomiting. I had always told myself that I would rather die than vomit, and thus I would rather die than take chemotherapy. I was serious about this. But let me tell you something: when death looks you right in the face, with a ghoulish sneer and an open door to utter darkness, you’ll take the chemo.

The reason we say we’d rather die than vomit is that our amygdala at the back of our brains is responsible for our survival and whenever it gets triggered it shouts out just one message: “Danger! You’re going to die!” With a phobia, for some reason the wiring in our brain isn’t just right and when we experience the phobic stimulus (nausea or someone else vomiting) our amygdala gets triggered. So we avoid vomiting at all costs, the way we avoid certain death. We believe that vomiting and death are pretty much equal and because we’re not faced with death we fear vomiting more. Avoiding death is pretty simple when you’re young and healthy.

But then actual death comes along. And suddenly they’re not equal anymore, and somewhere in our messed-up brains something clicks as if to say, “ok so vomiting isn’t really as bad as death and I sure don’t want to die.”

I went through surgery, chemo and radiation. The chemo was nowhere near as bad as they make it out to be on TV or in the movies. I only had to have chemo one time (four treatments, three weeks apart). I did get very tired and felt like hell for 2-3 days. They gave me a powerful anti-emetic – Ondansetron (Zofran) – at the time it was $30 a pill but I would have sold my cat, my dog and my TV set for it if I had to. I did not vomit. And this was in 1996 – they have much better, more efficient chemo now and a whole host of anti-emetics in addition to Ondansetron. They can give you a cocktail of about four or five of them at once if need be.

I never had a trace of cancer again. Since 1996 I’ve conquered my emetophobia, seen three children graduate university, watched my daughter dance on stage in Germany as a professional ballerina, held 7 grandchildren in my arms and loved each one like they were my own, celebrated 39 years with my husband, bought a beautiful house, been to Paris, had two wonderful and successful careers in which I helped a lot of people, published two books with a third on the way, and probably a thousand other things I never would have done if I’d said I’d rather die than have chemo. Trust me, life is so much better than death.

Anna S. Christie

The Dreaded Colonoscopy

Often I work with clients who have gastro-intestinal issues. Their doctors almost always recommend a colonoscopy. It’s a simple procedure done under heavy sedation (you’re usually totally asleep, but not under general anesthetic). Most emetophobics aren’t too worried about the procedure; they’re just terribly worried about the prep the day before. Since it’s important that your whole colon is clean as a whistle, you’re usually told to eat no fibre for a day or two, then have only clear fluids the next day, and then drink some form of powerful laxative to clean out your colon. Yes, it’s a day of diarrhea, but it beats paying for one of those “colon cleanses” at a spa, since it’s the same thing and generally paid for by your insurance or medical system. And of course it’s waaaaaay better than getting colon cancer! I myself have had several of these procedures and I don’t mind them at all anymore. Then again I don’t have emetophobia anymore so maybe that doesn’t count.

So why is it “dreaded?” Well, emetophobics worry that drinking the laxative will make them sick. Even though I’ve never talked to a single emetophobic who ever got sick from it. Some folks who have very weak stomachs and are NOT afraid of vomiting report getting sick from it. These people are not you guys! Emetophobics can control vomiting at the worst of times, and this is not the worst of times.

One of my clients, Jessica, has gone through several colonoscopies when she was very phobic, and she was kind enough to write a short post about it. So here it is:

“Three years ago I had whittled down to 100 pounds after being nauseous and having an upset stomach for seven months (an emetophobic’s worst nightmare). I finally got an appointment with a GI doctor who suspected Crohn’s Disease from my symptoms. When he mentioned the colonoscopy procedure to confirm, my chest tightened and heart stopped. How was I ever going to drink all the liquid to prep for it? What if it made me sick? I had only ever heard how terrible prepping for one was.

I made a decision. I immediately went into fight mode, toughened up, and decided to just do it. I surprised myself when it was way easier than I imagined. I was instructed to drink 64 ounces (2 litres) of Gatorade mixed with the prep medicine. To make it easier, I drank the prep/Gatorade mix with a straw over ice. I stayed calm, stayed distracted, and reminded myself it was a temporary discomfort for a healthier me. I watched a tv show and played Yahtzee with my family.

The next morning I went to the hospital, and completed the colonoscopy under general anesthetic. I woke up next to my husband and nurse. My doctor made sure I stayed comfortable in the recovery room as well. They offered me anti nausea medicine for when I was coming out of the anesthesia and warm blankets for my feet. Once I was home, it was like nothing had ever happened. I’ve had two colonoscopies in the last three years and when it comes time for my next one, I will be excited for the best nap I’ve ever had.

Nothing is as ever bad as our heads tell us it is.”

Anna’s notes: 1) Most colonoscopies are not performed under general anesthetic anymore, but rather “conscious sedation.” There’s no nausea afterward. 2) The prep mixtures are getting way better with every passing year. For my last one, I only had to drink a small bottle (less than a cup) of lemon-flavoured liquid the night before and another one the morning of. 3) Jessica met with me for about 14 sessions and is doing great! Thank you, Jessica, for submitting this for me!