Understanding emetophobia and breaking out of the cycle of fear by facing triggers
Avoiding Trigger Content?
Why avoiding videos can keep your emetophobia going, and how you can begin to change this.
If you avoid trigger content, you’re not doing anything strange.
When you have emetophobia, sometimes even the possibility of seeing someone be sick can create intense anxiety.
You might scroll past a video, stop watching a film, avoid certain creators, mute or turn down videos, cover your fears or search online to check what a film contains in advance. You might avoid crowded places, pubs, bars or theme parks in case you see someone be sick.
Sometimes your anxious reaction starts before anything has even happened. All your attention can be focused on one question
“What if I see something?”
In the moment, avoiding anxiety or seeing people being sick feels like the sensible thing to do to prevent your anxiety. But this is actually a problem that keeps you trapped in your phobia.
Every time you avoid something because you are afraid of what it might make you feel, your mind gets another opportunity to that it must be dangerous.
This needs to be overcome because if you can’t even see your fear, how can you stop fearing it.
Avoidance provides relief - that one time
It is only natural to want to avoid anything that causes you anxiety. The problem with this is that it simply makes your Emetophobia worse in the long term.
This is because it increases your fear as avoidance only creates more fear of the thing being avoided. For any Harry Potter fans out there, to quote Harmonie: “Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself”.
For those who don't get the reference, in the books, wizards were too scared to even say the name of an evil wizard, and would react with fear if they ever heard it.
Avoidance has other downsides too:
It’s only a short term solution: Avoidance quickly reduces your anxiety in the short term, but the next time you are faced with the same reminder you feel equally (if not more) anxious. So you try to avoid again, and again, and again.
It stops you realising you can cope: Everyone has a great capacity to overcome anxiety when they truly decide to face their fears. By avoiding, you never get to prove to yourself that you can get through experiencing these reminders.
Lead up anxiety: Often you can start to feel anxious before theses reminders if you think they are about to occur. Such as, when watching a film which has a scene which may lead to a potential vomiting scene. Regardless of whether it does or does not occur, you feel anxious during the lead up to it.
Your world gets smaller: The more you avoid, the more things become scary and the more things you start to avoid. Your world continues to shrink.
You can never recover from Emetophobia if you continue to use avoidance as a coping strategy.
Why do we avoid these reminders of sickness?
These types of reminders are avoided because those with emetophobia see them as potentially dangerous. So your anxiety system reacts strongly do it. For many people with emetophobia, this avoidance feels like it is protecting them from one of two feared outcomes:
“It might make me be sick”
You may believe that seeing or hearing something about vomiting will make you nauseous or gag which will then lead to you being sick.
“I won’t be able to cope”
Or you may believe that seeing something triggering will cause overwhelming anxiety, panic or a feeling that you have lost control and will then be unable to cope with these feelings.
If you believe these two ideas, then it makes perfect sense why these triggers feel scary. However, the fact that these triggers do not affect others in this way demonstrates that the content must factually be safe and that these beliefs may not be accurate. If so, we can learn to not be triggered by this type of content.
The first step in recovering from Emetophobia is to put these two beliefs to the test:
Imagine what your life would be like if these types of triggers no longer caused you any anxiety, worries or nausea. That would be nice right? Well…lets make that happen. We can achieve this by using a powerful therapy tool called a “behavioural experiment”.
A behavioural experiment when we test out a belief by changing how we act and observe the outcome. This is powerful because most of the time our anxiety is lying to us about the danger and these experiments directly prove to us that we are safe. In this case, we can prove or disprove these two beliefs by facing some trigger content in a control manner.
Won’t it be scary?
A little bit. But not as much as you think, and even if you don’t realise it yet, you are stronger than you think and you can do it. Everyone, including you has a great capacity to overcome anxiety when they truly decide to face their fears. By continuing to avoid these cues you never get to prove to yourself that you can get through it or prove to yourself you are safe.
But don’t just take it from me. Watch the video of a real ex-client of mine who had Emetophobia. She has kindly agreed to share her experience of facing these types of cues to help others also have the motivation to overcome their Emetophobia.
Ready to stop letting avoidance make the decision for you?
Recovery begins when you start giving yourself the opportunity to discover:
“Maybe I don’t need to avoid this after all”
You can do this! You can recover from Emetophobia!
If you are still not ready, you might benefit from 1:1 support.
Therapy from someone who truly understands emetophobia
Finding a therapist who understands emetophobia can be surprising difficult.
I’m David Kaneria, a BABCP accredited CBT therapist who specialises exclusively in treating emetophobia.
I’ve dedicated my career to learning about this condition, treating people with emetophobia and helping other therapist understand how to treat it effectively.
I’ve also written a textbook specifically about treating emetophobia.
David Kaneria
BABCP Accredited CBT therapist & Emetophobia specialist.
