Emetophobia: Why it’s NOT about your past

Your Emetophobia is NOT caused by past events.

Most people believe that what has happened in their past has a massive impact upon their future. Most therapeutic interventions — counselling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, hypnotherapy, analytical therapy — are all focused on going back and revisiting past experiences and memories, and rehashing them.

What is REALLY important to understand is that the notion that we store trauma, memories and emotions, and that they live inside our minds unresolved, is NOT true. The narrative is actually not only inaccurate but incredibly disempowering. One of the most common areas in which people give their power away is to believe that their past is driving or dictating how they experience their present.

How it feels

• We experience a traumatic event.
• We store the memory, trauma and emotions of that event at that time.
• Those things are then locked away in our mind.
• The memory, trauma or emotion can then be triggered at any time by things around us and we can’t do anything about it.

For example: I was sick when I was younger. The memory and feelings of panic and terror that I created during that time were stored in my brain. Now whenever I feel slightly nauseous, or perceive that something could make me ill, that memory and all those awful feelings come flooding back and there is nothing I can do about it.

What is actually going on

• Our brains do not store whole memories anywhere.
• We only store between 5 and 10% of an experience.
• Cognitive neuroscience research has found that memory is an active process that involves interpretation and construction at all stages (Ochsner & Schacter, 2000).
• The research also shows that we do not store emotions anywhere in our body. Any emotion that we feel, we have just created in the here and now, brand new each time.

These findings are incredibly important. If we don’t store memories or emotions, then they can’t be locked away ready to terrorise us at any moment.

The BELIEF that we have created about being sick, or about that traumatic event, IS present — and that can be worked on and changed. You are not at the mercy of your past events, experiences or traumas. You can change how you view past events and overcome your Emetophobia for good.

This episode featured Rob Kelly, creator of Emetophobia-Free.