The manual
About Cure Your Emetophobia & Thrive
The workbook that takes you through the programme at your own pace — and the woman who used it to end a phobia she had lived with for seventy-five years.
Mary had emetophobia from the age of six to the age of eighty-one. She worked through Cure Your Emetophobia & Thrive and came out the other side of it. Her story is in the short film above, in her own words.
Cure Your Emetophobia & Thrive is the emetophobia edition of the best-selling Thrive Programme book. It uses the same tools and techniques, but every chapter, exercise and example is written for people who are frightened of being sick. Everything in it is grounded in the current research into emetophobia.
How the book helps you
It is not a book you read. It is a book you work through. It is highly interactive, with exercises at every stage, and you go at your own pace, whenever and wherever suits you.
Most self-help books give you perfectly good advice, and most people stop applying it within a few weeks. That is because the important part — why the techniques work — is usually left out. This book starts there. It helps you understand your own personality, your thinking styles and the beliefs driving your symptoms, so the changes you make actually hold.
And it does not stop at the phobia. The programme works on your mental health as a whole, which is why people finish it with better self-esteem and less social anxiety as well as no fear of being sick.
What happened to 62 people who did it
We surveyed 62 emetophobes who had completed the programme. Before starting, 61 of them rated their symptoms as having a severe impact on their daily lives; the remaining person rated hers as significant.
Self-esteem, social anxiety and sense of control all improved alongside the phobia itself — which is what you would expect, because those are the things the programme works on.
Self-esteem
15.5 → 3.3 (lower is better)
Social anxiety
16.5 → 3.6 (lower is better)
Sense of control
24.5 → 5.3 (lower is better)
Doing it on your own, or with someone
You can buy the book from our shop and work through it by yourself at home. Plenty of people do exactly that.
If you would rather have someone alongside you, a licensed Emetophobia-Free coach will take you through the same programme, bring it to life and tailor it to you. You can find a coach here.
Bella Ramsey had this too.
And came out the other side.
“It’s not controlling my life anymore.”
The BAFTA-winning actor — The Worst Witch, Game of Thrones, The Last of Us — was housebound at one point as a teenager, and took travel sickness tablets and antacids to get through a working day on set. They had tried self-help books, CBT and hypnotherapy. None of it worked.
Bella went through this programme, and describes no longer thinking about sickness, no longer being frightened of it, and no longer letting it decide what they can and can’t do. They talk about all of it, openly, in their own words.
Listen to the episode →
Where to next?
Everything else you might want to read.