Why avoiding things is making your emetophobia worse.
When you have emetophobia, avoidance is one of the most natural responses. It feels so much easier to just not go to that party, or miss out on seeing your friends, or to not try that new restaurant. By avoiding, you think you are guaranteeing yourself safety, and you feel like you have mitigated the risk of catching a sickness bug, or seeing somebody throw up. You become a skillful liar, and don’t know what FOMO feels like. I used to enjoy just staying at home because I felt like I was protecting myself and that was the best feeling. But, since overcoming my emetophobia, I now realise how damaging my need for avoidance actually was.
Why this avoidance feels so logical.
The short-term relief you gain from feeling like you have dodged any exposure to sick creates a vicious cycle. Firstly, you identify an upcoming event to be too risky, maybe it’s a birthday party for one of your friends. There’s going to be alcohol, and people drinking said alcohol, and people getting drunk, and there could even be people throwing up. Then, you need to come up with an excuse. “I’m sorry, I’ve got my in-laws coming” or “I’m sorry, I have an early work meeting”, literally anything will do, as long as it sounds somewhat believable. Now, you feel a slight pang of guilt, but most importantly, you know you won’t have to go and therefore you are safe. You have taught your brain that this party was definitely too dangerous, that it would’ve been really awful and scary and out of your control, and you’ve done the right thing by not going. It means you don’t have to face any anxiety or uncomfortable emotions. Your brain learns - “avoiding = safety”, and the cycle repeats for every future event. The issue with this is, you are never giving yourself a chance to see that some of these experiences would not have been as bad as you imagined them to be. You can’t say for sure that this party would have been full of drunk people throwing up everywhere because you never went. You aren’t able to show yourself any tangible evidence that you would have been okay.
Despite this feeling like the easiest, safest option, it’s actually just reinforcing a really harmful belief that you are only protected when you avoid.
The illusion of control.
Avoidance is really about trying to gain certainty over a specific situation. It is about you wanting to know for sure, that you won’t have to encounter sick and you won’t get ill. There is one problem with this however, with emetophobia, you can’t ever be sure that you won’t be exposed to sick, whether it’s yourself or somebody else vomiting. Therefore you can take all the precautions: washing your hands multiple times, wearing a mask in public, avoiding crowded spaces, only eating food cooked by you at home, never stepping foot on an aeroplane, and the list goes on. But even after you have done all of this, you still can only ever be 99.9% sure that you won’t be sick. Because, emetophobes, even if you do all your safety seeking behaviours, control and avoid everything within your power, you still only gain a tiny bit of relief for maybe an hour, and then it feels like you are back to square one. It feels like there is still somehow a way that you could have gotten ill. Maybe you feel you didn’t wash your hands enough times, or maybe that bread had mould on it and you didn’t realise, or maybe that person sneezed a bit too close to you and they could’ve had a sick bug. It really is never ending. The safety which avoidance promises you, can never actually deliver.
What avoidance does over time.
After repeating this cycle for a few months, or a few years, your world shrinks smaller and smaller. Your list of safe things is so short, there are only 3 places you can still go. What might have started as avoiding one restaurant turns into avoiding eating out altogether, and so on. You likely won’t even notice until you realise even small things feel too daunting. And let me just say, this is not your fault. When you have a fear of sickness, you are doing the most rational thing in your head, which is to run away from any perceived threat. This is how we are meant to function, and how our primal selves would have behaved many millions of years ago, so it is in our DNA. However, sickness is not a threat, it is not dangerous, even if it feels it right now. Because you have created this significant belief that you should be scared of vomit, it’s natural that you would do everything you can to make sure you don’t have to deal with it. But unfortunately, in doing so, you shut yourself away from the world.
What breaking this cycle looks like.
Putting your foot down and saying enough is enough is a hard step to take. After all this time you feel like you have done such a good job at making sure you haven’t had to face your worst fear, so why would you rock the boat now? It is not about making drastic changes in a short period of time, or doing something that absolutely terrifies you. In order to get your freedom back, you have to start gradually doing things which you previously feared. It could be going for a coffee in your local cafe, or going into the supermarket to buy your favourite food for supper. Whatever it might be, just take the first step. By gaining new experiences, and challenging the old narrative in your head that everything is a threat, you are building up evidence that you can cope. Despite everything your old thinking was telling you, you are not going to listen anymore. It is completely normal and okay to create a bit of anxiety about taking yourself out your comfort zone. Learn to tolerate this mild discomfort and push through because you will feel amazing. You can start to open your world back up to all the joys in life, and rebuild a social network, because humans need connection!
You’ve got this!
This is probably the most common part of emetophobia, feeling the need to hide away. But that is also what makes it so easy to start working on. You only need to start with one small step, take it at your pace. Make sure you are celebrating every new experience and add it to the belief that you can do things and still be okay. After years of staying tucked away in my home, I promise it does get easier. There are so many experiences waiting for you out there!
If you are wanting more structured and in depth support on other areas you can work on to help you overcome emetophobia, I am always here!