Tag: emetophobia cure

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.

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Safety Behaviours

Do Safety Behaviours Work?

Along with avoidance of the feared stimulus (nausea, someone else saying they feel or were sick, seeing something associated with vomiting), a safety behaviour is something that you actively do to avoid vomiting at all costs. Some examples of typical safety behaviours are:

  • Sucking on mints
  • Taking ginger (candies, tablets, tea)
  • Drinking ginger ale or another fizzy drink
  • Sipping water
  • Chewing gum
  • Sniffing peppermint or eucalyptus essential oils
  • Taking an OTC stomach medication such as Gravol (Dramamine), Pepto Bismal, Divol, Tums,
  • Taking a prescription anti-emetic such as Ondansetron (Zophran)
  • Taking a prescribed “Rescue Medication” tranquilizer such as Xanax, Ativan
  • Taking prescribed stomach medications such as Omeprazole
  • Carrying a plastic bag in your purse or pocket at all times
  • Carrying a “safety kit” with any of the above items with you at all times
  • Wearing a face mask before Covid-19
  • Washing hands, changing clothes, showering
  • Opening doors or pressing buttons with your sleeve
  • Checking “best by” dates on food
  • Drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, taking illegal drugs
  • Asking someone for reassurance, when you know what they’ll say every time
  • Practicing large muscle relaxation and/or slow breathing not to calm down, but so you won’t vomit
  • Needing to be with or talk to a “support” person when anxious/nauseous.

How many of these can you relate to? Are they helpful or do they work? Well, what if I told you that they most certainly don’t work and that you should really try to slowly give every one of them up? I imagine that might make you very anxious. Without working with a therapist, it might be difficult to give these up on your own. It is the same with avoidance behaviours – stopping them is really difficult without some sort of professional help. Nevertheless, there are determined people out there who are reading this right now who can do it if they try!

So, do safety behaviours work? The answer is yes and no. Yes, they make you feel better in the moment. They calm you down. Some of them most certainly prevent vomiting although the odds of you vomiting without them are pretty slim anyway. But no, they don’t work to lessen your anxiety and in fact most of them will make your anxiety worse over time. So the more you use these behaviours the worse your phobia will get. Let’s look at why that is.

Engaging a safety behaviour presupposes the wrong thing: that the problem is vomiting. I’m sure it will surprise many of you to hear that vomiting is not the problem. Vomiting is normal, natural and neutral. It isn’t dangerous or harmful. It can’t hurt you, so there’s no need to avoid it or fear it. (I know that’s not what you actually think right now; I’m just pointing out the logic.) The problem is anxiety. Your anxiety around vomiting is what’s not normal. It’s way out of whack for what vomiting is – just a yukky, unpleasant thing that nobody likes. There are many of these things in the world: diarrhea, Pap tests, proctology exams, colonoscopies, doing your income tax, picking up dog poop, flossing your teeth. None of these is dangerous or harmful, but if the universe could eliminate any one of them we’d all be happy about it.

Anxiety/fear/terror should be reserved for dangerous things like alligators, grizzly bears, home invasions and nests of gigantic furry venomous spiders. It doesn’t have any place in the normal yet yukky things of life. Your emetophobic brain has somehow mixed up vomiting with all the other deadly things you need to be terrified of. So you avoid it at all costs and then come up with these safety behaviours to keep you “safe.” The thing is, you ARE safe, whether you vomit or not! But I know it doesn’t feel that way.

The road to recovery is long and hard with emetophobia. One important part of the journey, however, is slowly giving up your safety behaviours so your brain comes to realize that you’re just as safe without them as with them. You also need to slowly stop avoiding the things you’ve been avoiding. Either with a therapist or on your own, you also need to slowly change your thoughts from the catastrophic “OMG vomiting is horrible/terrible/awful/the worst thing ever” to something more normal such as what your non-emetophobic friends think about it (ask them, write down what they say, memorize it, replace your catastrophic thoughts with these thoughts every time you think them.) It will take time, but eventually it will work.

Once you come to realize that anxiety is your real problem, you can focus your energy on working on that, instead of on preventing vomiting. This will make your phobia better, which is really what you want.

There is a ton of information on this website that will help both you and your therapist get your anxiety under control!

Anna S. Christie1 Comment

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

Emetophobia and the fear of sound

Emetophobia is not just the fear of vomiting. It is also the fear of anything to do with vomiting. The sight, the smell, the sound, the contagions. Most of my clients are more afraid of being sick themselves than they are of seeing or hearing other people. But yet, whenever someone in their own house is sick, they’re usually terrified that the family member has somehow contracted Norovirus and that they’re contagious.

I believe my phobia began sometime before I can really remember, but it was made a thousand times worse between the ages of eight and nine when my dad was sick with colon cancer. He was vomiting often, and it sounded like death. Sadly, he did die when I was nine so that probably reinforced the phobia for me. To this day no one has sounded as horrible or as unique as my dad when he was sick. I thought in later years that perhaps I was imagining it, or at least embellishing the memory. Until one day when I was in my forties I heard my aunt (dad’s sister) talking to another sister about how awful my dad sounded when he was sick. She recounted visiting him in the hospital once after he’d had surgery as a young man. In those days anesthetic was ether, and it made people terribly sick. The funny part about the story is that she went to the nurse’s station to ask his room number, but then heard him vomiting at the end of the hall in his room and knew right away by the sound that it was him.

As time went on, I married and had three children. My husband did not vomit for 32 years, even though he’s not the least bit afraid of it. I could not have chosen a more appropriate mate. But then there were the kids. When we had a young family we were pretty cash-poor, so there was no way I could go to a hotel room. After my successful emetophobia treatment we were a bit better off, but I no longer needed the hotel! Back when the kids were young if I heard anything that remotely resembled them being sick in the night I would race down to our basement rec room, curl up on a most uncomfortable couch and plug my ears tightly with my fingers. And cry. There was lots of crying back then. My kids would cry for me, and I would cry for myself and my husband was probably crying that he had to deal with it all. Those kids are 44, 37 and 35 now and I have seven grandchildren. They’re all very well-adjusted, educated and productive members of society with no phobias of their own and I have a great relationship with each of them. I share that not to brag, but to reassure you that if you’re doing what I did your kids can still turn out ok.

I’ve had clients who book a hotel room, who sleep in their cars, who go to their mother’s, who camp out downstairs or in the attic. One client insisted that their “mortgage helper” suite be left empty so she could move into it every time someone in the family was ill.

The treatment for emetophobia involves, among other things, desensitization to the sounds of vomiting. Most people with emetophobia are afraid of being sick themselves, while some are just triggered by the sight or sound. Either way, nobody likes to hear it. I used to have three or four sounds that I found on the internet which I went to great length to find, and used those in my emetophobia treatment program. But then I found this great website that has 88 sounds of vomiting, and it’s free for anyone to use! Here’s the link if you’re interested: https://www.soundsnap.com/tags/vomit You can begin by having your volume very very low, and then slowly increase it. Try all 88! The great thing is that it will desensitize you to the sound if you work on it, so you can be in a hospital ward with the curtain drawn, be a couple rows behind someone on a bus or plane, or be in your own house minding your own business and listen to someone vomit. It’s all the same. Good luck!

Anna S. Christie

Coping With Emetophobia – The S.T.A.R. Plan

Often before people with a fear of vomiting can get help they are left alone, terrified and feeling hopeless. They might not even know that being afraid of vomiting has a name: emetophobia. Some academics refer to it as “Specific Phobia of Vomiting” or SPOV. The treatment for emetophobia involves making a list of all the things that you avoid because you’re afraid, and all the safety measures you employ so you don’t get sick. This website has a “Resources” section that thousands of therapists already use for gradual exposure to some of those things. You start with the easiest thing on the list and work your way to the most difficult. You’ll normally need the help of a qualified therapist with experience treating emetophobia.

The goal in treating emetophobia is to have you come to the realization that vomiting isn’t the problem – anxiety is the problem. Once you get there, you’ll be able to tolerate your anxiety and do nothing to stop it. And once that happens, you will stop getting anxious in the first place. For some of you reading this, that may seem like a long way off. Others of you may think (as I once did) “I’ll never be able to tolerate that much anxiety! It’s terrifying and horrible!” It’s true that tolerating anxiety that goes immediately from 0/10 to 8, 9, or 10/10 is probably not possible. If it’s a slow rise, however, you may be able to avert it from getting to those high numbers, but if you’re like I was, it was usually zero to 10 in a millesecond.

So I came up with a plan that I call the S.T.A.R. Plan©. My S.T.A.R. Plan was inspired by the writers of “Coping Cat” and “The Cat Project” who came up with a “F.E.A.R.” plan for anxious children. It wasn’t quite right for emetophobia, but I loved the idea of a plan.

If you find yourself in a situation that triggers your emetophobia, it’s always good to have a plan. If you’re anything like I once was, your plan would be to get triggered, freak out and run. If you are triggered by your own nausea, however, it’s impossible to run, so you apply safety behaviours like asking for reassurance online or at home, or taking some stomach medication. This may help calm you down in the short-term, but as far as helping to treat your emetophobia for good, ass Dr. Phil might say, “How’s that workin’ for ya?”

S stands for “Scale” which refers to the 11-point scale that therapists use to determine how anxious you are. Zero means no anxiety at all, and 10 is the worst panic possible. When your emetophobia gets triggered, your anxiety will go up to one of the numbers on the scale. If you want to get better, it’s important for you to know what number you’re at. Sometimes you may become so anxious that you forget the S.T.A.R. plan, so it’s good to have a support person remind you by asking “what number are you at?”

T stands for “Tolerate.” The best way to get over a phobia is to stay in the situation and tolerate the anxiety without doing anything or thinking anything to make it go away. Different people are able to tolerate different levels (0-10) of anxiety. Your ability to tolerate the anxiety may also be dependent upon how quickly the number went up. If you can tolerate it, great. If not – move on to the “A.”

A stands for “Action.” If you can’t tolerate the anxiety, you can ask yourself “what actions could I take to bring down my anxiety?” These actions require learning and practice, which is the topic of another blog, but basically here are four actions that should help (They spell “BRIT”):

  • Breathe slowly and deeply. Slow is more important than deep.
  • Relax the major muscle groups in your body, head to toe. Relax your body. Try doubling your relaxation, then doubling again.
  • Imagine yourself in a safe, peaceful place if you can.
  • Think. I teach my clients to come up with a “mantra” of sorts to say to themselves. Mine was “You’re not in any danger,” but there are many more that my clients have come up with over the years. My favourite is “Vomiting is not dangerous or harmful. It can’t hurt me, so I don’t need to be afraid of it.”

R stands for “Repeat.” So all you have to do is go back to the beginning (the “S”) and ask yourself what number on the Scale of 0-10 are you at now? Most of the time you’ll find that your anxiety has gone down a point or two. So maybe you can Tolerate it now. If not, keep going through the S.T.A.R. plan until your anxiety is low enough to tolerate. Good luck!

Anna S. Christie1 Comment

Exposure Therapy

I’ve been “talking” with emetophobia folks online since 2000. Over these twenty years I’ve seen more people misinformed about what exposure therapy is than I’ve seen people who’ve tried it. It’s probably better to start off with what exposure therapy is not.

Exposure therapy is not just randomly running into a situation that exposes you to someone vomiting, or you, yourself feeling very ill. Yes, if you go to a birthday party and a kid is suddenly sick in front of you then I suppose you have been exposed to what you fear most. But the “therapy” part is missing. Therapy comes from the root word for “healing” and just randomly being exposed to vomiting and having the bejeezus scared out of you does nothing for your healing. In fact, it may make your phobia worse by re-traumatizing you.

For exposure to be therapeutic, it has to be structured. If you go to a CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) therapist they will normally build a hierarchy with you. Since this is difficult for most emetophobics to do, I have a good hierarchy that works for pretty much everyone right here on my website under “Resources” – “Exposure.” The current literature on anxiety and exposure therapy says that a list is as good as a hierarchy anyway. So you make a list of everything that frightens you. Or go to my website exposure section. Then you would normally begin with the least frightening thing, and progress slowly to the most frightening (which is normally watching explicit videos, hearing sounds or mixing up something that looks and smells like vomit).

Seriously. Don’t freak out. The final, most difficult steps ALWAYS seem impossible when you’re just starting out. But that’s the beauty of exposure therapy – it begins with something SO EASY and you go SO GRADUALLY that by the time you get to the difficult stuff, you hardly notice. Think of it like this: you’ve fallen down a hole, are terrified and you can’t get out. Then you notice there are a set of steps to climb up to get out. If you go one step at a time it’s easy to get up and out, but if you just look at the top step and think “I can’t possibly get up there” then you may not even try to take that first step. You’ll just sit at the bottom in the hole and cry. I did that for about thirty years.

The first steps in my online hierarchy are as simple as looking at the word “vomit.” There. You just did it. You may not have liked it, but you’re ok right now, ya? Then we look at some other words. If those are too difficult then we might just begin by imagining a scene where you’d be a little afraid.

In addition to the exposure resources I have online, I get all my clients to make a list of everything they avoid and all the safety behaviours they have. An example of an avoidance behaviour is perhaps not making medical appointments. An example of a safety behaviour is feeling nauseous and taking ginger or mints.

I usually wait until we’ve looked at all the words and drawings and cartoons and pictures and then have my clients begin to approach things they previously avoided, and/or stop using a safety behaviour. I assign this work as homework and check in each week. Then at the next session we begin looking at videos, which also start with simple things like a baby spitting up.

It’s not enough to just look through all my exposure resources to prove that you “can.” Anyone can white-knuckle it through the list and then feel great relief that the exercise is over. Your phobia will not improve. In fact, it will make your phobia worse to do that because the part of your brain that’s giving you all the trouble will say, “Wow, it sure feels good NOT to looking at that stuff now. To continue feeling good, I’ll avoid it forever.”

At each stage of the exposure, you must look at an item, record your fear level 0-10, and then either try to tolerate the fear level (if it is below 7) while still looking at the picture or use previously-learned skills to bring the number down below 7 where it can be tolerated. So you keep looking at the item until you are no longer afraid.

Sometimes if clients are recording rather low numbers for a few pictures in a row, I ask them to purposely raise their anxiety level. This ensures that the client is not “white-knuckling” their way through the pictures.

So….is it scary? The answer is yes, a little. But normally my clients’ anxiety levels only go up to about 5, maximum. That’s how I like to work with people. It’s a little scary, but it can be tolerated. Before long, they come to realize that all anxiety can be tolerated with a little practice.