Cure your Emetophobia and Thrive – Chapter 1 preview..
Cure your Emetophobia and Thrive – Chapter 1 preview… Chapter one: Belief Systems
This book is all about CHOICE. At the moment you probably don’t think you have much choice, and think you’re stuck with your symptom. Like most people, you probably believe you are powerless to overcome your fear, and therefore also feel you have no control over it. There is plenty of research that shows this is exactly what the majority of people who are phobic, anxious, stressed or ill believe as well (for example, Abrahamsson et al., 2002; Edwards et al., 2007; Walters and Charles, 1997; and Seaman and Lewis, 1995).
I am very pleased to say, however, that although you, and millions of other people like you, believe this, you are wrong in your assumptions. You actually DO have the power to overcome your fears and to thrive; you have just never been shown how to do so. I’m going to prove this to you over the next few chapters.
You don’t need to believe me (sigh of relief!), you don’t need to have faith in what I’m saying, you just need to carefully study what I’ve written, do the exercises, and practise the techniques I’m offering you. You have absolutely nothing to lose whatsoever. You’re not even going to lose the twenty quid you’ve paid for this book, because you’ve already bought it!
One of the stumbling blocks in making changes in our lives is that it can be frightening, and this is especially true for people with a fear of being sick. However, this usually only occurs when we are asked to take a big leap of faith, make a bold move, or expose ourselves to our fears. I’m not going to ask you to do any of these things. Instead, we are going to build your self-esteem, your self-belief, your ‘internal locus of control’ and a whole load of other key psychological strengths; slowly and safely, at a pace you are comfortable and happy with.
In fact, 95% or more of what you need to do, in order to overcome your fear, is to understand exactly WHY and HOW you created it in the first place.
I’m just going to say again: 95% of what you need to do in order to overcome your fear and thrive is to really understand yourself; to understand your psychological make-up, what makes you ‘tick’. When you understand exactly how YOUR mind works – the component parts of your psyche, and how they interact to create your thoughts, feelings, experiences and beliefs, then, and ONLY then, can you set about changing it with ease.
Why is the above so important? Well, it’s all about knowing what to do and putting the right amount of effort in. You need to understand yourself, in order to know which bits you need to change. When you can clearly see which bits to change, and how simple the process is, you will put in maximum effort to make those changes – because you absolutely believe and understand why they will work.
Let me give you an example: I’ve recently completed a fourteen-month research survey into ‘Thrive as a non-smoker’ – which is a smoking cessation method based on the insights and techniques within my Thrive Programme. By focusing almost entirely on changing the belief system of the smoker (to that of a non-smoker), and getting them to believe that stopping smoking is going to be easy, we achieved a 92.5% success rate. Because the smokers believed it was going to be easy, they put in 100% effort. It wasn’t that it WAS actually easy; it just felt easy because they believed they could overcome their habit, and consequently put loads of effort in. People will stop smoking when they put in 100% effort to stop… and they will put in 100% effort once they BELIEVE they can stop. The same can be said for every symptom/anxiety/illness that has a cognitive component to it.
You don’t need to undergo years of psychotherapy to understand how your mind ‘works’ (in any case, all you would do is begin to understand how you became who you are now. This book is about your future, not your past). You just need to spend a little time looking at the key elements, that create your negative thoughts, your strong emotions and your sense of powerlessness in relation to your fear. I will guide you to recognise and understand these traits within yourself, quickly and easily.
You will be able to take control of your life, overcome your fear and positively thrive, by simply MANAGING YOUR THINKING.
Think about it just for a second: as a kid you were taught how to brush your teeth, tie your shoelaces, cross the street, spell, read and write… Your parents taught (most of) you: good manners, how to eat your dinner properly, how to behave in public (unless you’re a politician!)…
But, who taught you how to manage your beliefs, thinking, feelings and imagination?
What I’m getting at here is: it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault that you are faced with challenges at the moment – you were never taught how to manage your thinking properly. You were never shown the link between your thoughts, how you perceive events, your imagination, your belief systems, your self-esteem, your success, your health, your immune system, and the belief that you can overcome anything. You will soon, however, have the power and techniques to change all of this!
A couple of pages back I said that you don’t need to believe what I have written, nor do you have to have faith in me. In fact, it would be MUCH better if you didn’t do either of these things. I’m going to train you to believe in YOU, not me. In order to do this, you need to weigh up what I am saying and come to your own conclusions. Having said that, I’m certain you will come to the same conclusions as me. In order to make this as easy as possible, I have also included lots of the research that I have studied in the course of coming to my conclusions. If you are not used to reading surveys, research papers or academic journals (and believe me, I wasn’t before I started work on this book), you probably aren’t used to seeing things like this: (Eiser et al., 1985). It’s a reference, usually for a study or piece of research already undertaken, that’s already in print, and has almost always been reviewed by other researchers and psychologists. It’s EVIDENCE. If you turned to the back of this book now, you’ll find the reference section. If you go to: Eiser et al. (1985), you’ll find all the information you need to know in order to find the original piece of research yourself. Easier still, I have put links to all these research papers in the resources section of the Thrive Programme website (www.thriveprogramme.org). As I mentioned earlier in the introduction, many books and programmes written or designed to help people to change their lives are based on little or no scientific evidence whatsoever. In fact, many go completely the other way and are based on un-provable, magical or pseudo-spiritual dogma… this isn’t, it’s based on REAL EVIDENCE.
Take your time, don’t rush through this programme. Read the scientific research, make sense of it, it’s completely RATIONAL. This is what is going to help you to overcome your IRRATIONAL fears.
It’s not your fault that you have emetophobia, but you ARE the only person who can resolve it. Resolving it means knowing and understanding the content of this book/programme inside out. Imagine you are going to sit a test at the end of each chapter, and if you score less than 90%, you need to start studying the chapter all over again. This is the level of understanding and insight you need.
Throughout the book there are exercises and ACTION!s The exercises are there to help you reinforce your learning and gain more self-insight, and the ACTION!s are what you need to do in order to make changes. Please complete all of them – even if you think they don’t apply to you.
You must complete all of the exercises and ACTION!s
– even if you think they don’t apply to you.
Additionally, there are recap sections at the end of each chapter. Please pay attention to these, as they are there to help you ensure that you have understood the chapter. If you don’t follow anything within a recap section then please go back and revise the chapter!
Remember: I have written this version of the Thrive book especially for you, based on feedback from hundreds of ex-emetophobes, and from the biggest research survey of its type.
If you need some help at any time, either get in touch via our Facebook page, or contact one of my Thrive Programme Coaches via our website. Let’s get you over this thing, and thriving…
So, here we go. Let’s start with Belief Systems.
It is our ‘belief systems’ that drive the way we think, feel and behave. But what actually are ‘belief systems’? They are sets of personal viewpoints, which provide us with a fundamental base of principles and ‘rules’ upon which we view or base EVERYTHING we think, do, say, or believe. They are created out of a need to organise and store life experiences in a way that makes sense to us. In other words, they help us to understand the world. We are constantly inundated with new information and to process this information more easily, we compare it to stuff we already know. This previously stored and grouped information is what creates our belief systems. All our different experiences are fitted together so that we can create an understandable representation of our world. We all have hundreds of different belief systems that have been built up from our many lifetime events.
There are two main types of belief system….
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