Cure your Emetophobia and Thrive – Chapter 13 preview..
Chapter Thirteen: Overcoming your phobia!
Okay, well done for persevering and getting this far!
Please, PLEASE, if you haven’t completely understood everything so far, and completed all of the exercises, go back and start again. It will only take you a week or two to catch up.
Why? Why ask you to go back? Because if you don’t completely understand everything we’ve discussed so far, or, if you disagree with anything we’ve discussed so far, then you almost certainly won’t put enough effort in over the next few weeks, and you will fail to completely get over your emetophobia. You’ll probably still get a bit better, but you won’t completely conquer it.
The hardest part of their thinking for an emetophobe to learn to manage effectively is their desire for control. Because of their desire for control, they don’t tend to listen to advice; they prefer to make their own mind up. This is a great trait to have in business, which is why so many of them are very successful. It’s a shit trait to have in relation to managing their emotions, because they are basing their decision-making on FALSE or misleading information. What emetophobes THINK or BELIEVE about emetophobia isn’t true. If you make important decisions based upon erroneous beliefs, you cannot possibly create a successful outcome. So, even if you think you have understood everything so far, and you have undertaken all the ACTION’s and exercises, why not spend just a couple of days going back and recapping everything you have learned so far?
People either work through this programme by themselves (in the past with the original Thrive book, but from now onwards with this new emetophobia version) or they work through it with one of my Coaches. I am frequently asked to have just a single session or a Skype session with someone going through this book by themselves, just to help them to put it into practice. I have not gathered any specific data on this, but I would think around 99% of people who ask for help in completing the programme at home, haven’t spent enough time working through the basics of the programme. Most of my time I spend reiterating the basics to people. So please make sure you really understand everything so far.
Right. What now?
Now we need to talk about specifics.
- You don’t have a fear of being sick. You never have done. You are scared of the emotional over-reaction that YOU create.
- Because of your unhelpful beliefs and thinking styles, you have turned a ‘slightly unpleasant’ situation into a hugely disruptive symptom.
- To cure yourself of the symptom, you need to undo what you did to create it in the first place.
Let’s be honest, nobody likes being sick. It’s unpleasant, it can be messy, and it feels uncomfortable. What is there to like? I’ve treated thousands of clients, including many people with bulimia, and none of them LIKE being ill. Most of us though keep this as a small dislike; a minor annoyance that happens once every few years or so. Most of us find it easy to manage our thinking around this unpleasant experience, and we tolerate the fact that it happens from time to time. What went wrong for you? Let’s go over some of the things we have covered in the book so far…
Well, for a start it’s likely you have/had at least one parent or guardian who is/was obsessive, and you have copied this unhelpful thinking style; you are ‘in the habit’ of thinking the same way. It’s also likely that a parent or guardian (usually the mother) had social anxiety, and you have learned the same belief, and have adopted the same, unhelpful thinking style. Now add in some black and white thinking, a touch of negativity, a sprinkle of externality, and ounce of catastrophising and top it all off with a metric tonne of desire for control, and you are about there: a recipe for disaster! Your fear isn’t caused by you – or anyone else – being sick, or indeed anything at all to do with it sickness. It’s created by your unhelpful beliefs and thinking styles.
Most people, wrongly, assume that their fear or phobia is actually caused by an event or experience, and that their symptom appears as a direct result of this event or experience. If that is the case, why doesn’t everyone have emetophobia? We’ve all had unpleasant experiences of sickness, why don’t we all have the phobia? We’ve all been startled or shocked by the sudden and speedy appearance of a spider, why don’t we all have arachnophobia? Many people have had some sort of ding or crash in their car… how many people do you know with a fear of driving?
I KNOW, that if I asked you ‘when did it all start?’ you will tell me a story about a time when you were a little kid and you were unwell. You’ll tell me how horrible and terrifying and disgusting it was, and explain that this was how your issue first started. That’s not the truth though, sorry. You are not looking back in an open-minded and unbiased manner. You are not a reliable witness.
Ok, you’re a bright person (you have to be bright to be obsessive, and you have to be obsessive to have your issue) and you’re probably willing to agree with the above, but you’ll want it on record that although this childhood sick incident wasn’t the total cause of your problem, it was at least the ‘trigger’. Right?
Wrong, sorry. Trigger isn’t the right word. Trigger is another one of those psycho-therapeutic terms that is, completely inaccurately, used to validate and externalise just about any behaviour: ‘The killing spree was triggered off by him watching Mad max’. Really? The guy wasn’t a psycho before watching Mad Max?
So calling it the trigger still isn’t probably true. It’s giving it too much emphasis, making it more external, and actually validating your fear. If someone had a terrible car crash, it would be understandable if they developed a fear of driving. If someone was mauled to within an inch of their life by a spider, arachnophobia would be a suitable future defence. If you almost died (and I don’t mean ‘felt like you were going to die’, I mean actually almost died) because of being sick, then emetophobia could be an understandable reaction. But it is almost certain that you didn’t. Ok, be fair Rob, probably 0.01% of emetophobes did actually experience something so unpleasant that it could, in all fairness, be described as a trigger. But even then, many people have the ability to get over traumatic things.
Apart from anything else, many emetophobics report being obsessive and controlling long before their emetophobia started. Many don’t remember an incident or incidents around the time they started creating their phobia. Some emetophobes have never even been sick (or they don’t remember ever having been sick)! There are just as many Irish people with a fear of snakes, as those from other nationalities – but there are no snakes in Ireland! What I am attempting to differentiate here is the reality of any vomit-related situation that you went through, and your experience of it. If you didn’t have a strong desire for control, if you had a more internal locus around your emotions, if you didn’t have so much social anxiety, if you weren’t a bit of a catastrophiser, and if you didn’t have at least one parent who colluded with your belief, you wouldn’t have turned a slightly unpleasant experience into a huge fear.
I’m not blaming you, nor is it your fault. But at the same time don’t let your social anxiety mask what is really behind your fear: your thinking and your beliefs. You think and believe the things that you have been trained to think and believe, just like most people. Unless you specifically undertake a training programme to isolate and change your beliefs and thinking – like this one – you would probably maintain the same beliefs until the day you die.
So – in black and white – your unhelpful thinking styles and beliefs are NOT CAUSED by your phobia,
it’s the other way around: your phobia is caused by them!
Ok, it’s probable that your thinking styles and beliefs weren’t AS unhelpful back when you were a child, back when you first started creating your phobia. Since you created your phobia, your fear and your unhelpful thinking styles and beliefs have been amplifying each other. Every time you create anxiety about sickness, you then overreact to these feelings in an attempt to control them. This in turn validates how big and huge and terrible this phobia is. It’s like the typical cycle of depression: you worry or brood about something in your life, then get depressed because of the brooding. The subsequent depression confirms that life really is shit, so you worry and brood more, getting more and more depressed as the cycle develops.
The same thing goes for emetophobia. When you first created it (remember: phobias don’t ‘happen to you’) it wasn’t a huge pathological phobia. You probably first just reacted with your catastrophic thinking style, possibly combined with your social anxiety. Then, as the years went by, you started to brood and obsess about it more and more and your desire for control (because you felt out of control) got stronger and stronger. The older you became, the smarter you became in terms of avoidance tactics, which only reinforced your fear. People don’t become depressed overnight; they wind themselves into it. Your phobia didn’t get huge overnight; you wound yourself into it. To cure yourself of it, you need to unwind yourself out of it.
Ok, so, the reason why (unless they read my Thrive book!) most emetophobics stay emetophobic and don’t overcome their symptoms is because they don’t gain genuine insights into their thinking and beliefs. In order to overcome your phobia, you have to change your thinking and beliefs. If you don’t, then any changes won’t be permanent. Let’s say we just clicked our fingers right now, and your phobia magically disappeared. Fantastic, superb! How long do you think you would last? How long do you think it would be before you created it again? Your phobia is gone, but you are still very obsessive, you still have a strong desire for control, you still catastrophise, you’re still sometimes negative, you still think in a black and white way…