Free seminar
A whole day of emetophobia help, free
Rob Kelly ran a one-day seminar taking a room full of emetophobes through the programme from start to finish. The whole thing was filmed. All four parts are below, in order, and they cost nothing to watch.
How to use them
Watch them in order. They follow the Emetophobia-Free manual, so if you have the book you can read alongside them, and if you do not, the videos still stand on their own.
The one thing that matters is what you do afterwards. Understanding why you have this fear is the start of getting rid of it; putting the actions in is what finishes the job. If you want somebody alongside you while you do that, a licensed coach will take you through it — find one here.
What emetophobia is
Emetophobia is a fear of vomiting, or of other people vomiting. It is one of the most common problems people come to The Thrive Programme with.
The research puts somewhere between 0.1% and 8.8% of the population as having a fear of being sick (Hout & Bouman, 2011) — the range is so wide because some studies count any fear and others only a severe phobia. In the UK that is somewhere between about 63,000 and 5.5 million people. Between 85% and 97% of sufferers are women.
It goes by several names: emetophobia, Specific Phobia of Vomiting, vomit phobia, sickness phobia. It often travels with other problems — a fear of gagging or choking, a fear of pregnancy, social anxiety, obsessive thinking.
What it does to a life
People with this fear go to extraordinary lengths to avoid anything that might lead to vomiting. They avoid public transport. They stay teetotal, or steer clear of pubs where other people might be sick. They are obsessive about hygiene and about how food is prepared, check use-by dates, and often will not eat anything somebody else has cooked. They take time off work or school, or cannot work at all.
A fear of becoming pregnant is common, because of the morning sickness — some avoid pregnancy altogether. Those who do have children can be consumed with worry about them being ill, and feel unable to look after them when they are.
And most sufferers say nothing, because they expect to be told it is not a big deal. That is why it is known as the secret phobia.
Why so many people have been let down by treatment
Veale and Lambrou (2006) found that 29% of the vomit phobics in their sample had had some form of therapy for the fear, and rated it as largely ineffective. They noted that clinicians generally regard it as difficult to treat, with high drop-out and poor response.
That is not because the phobia is untreatable. It is because the treatment has usually gone after the sick rather than the beliefs and the desire for control underneath it. Here is how this programme works instead.
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.