How friends and family unwittingly help to maintain your Emetophobia

Becoming aware of the often-unnoticed ways your significant other — your partner, family and friends — could be helping you to maintain your phobia may be the missing piece of the puzzle needed to overcome emetophobia. In this week’s episode, Rob and Joe delve into the important role significant others play, and how they can help you beat your fear of being sick.

A significant other holds a special place in our lives. However, when it comes to emetophobia, these individuals can unintentionally play a collusive role in maintaining the phobia. Their actions, driven by care and concern, may unknowingly reinforce the fear instead of helping you overcome it.

Instead of challenging the unhelpful beliefs of the emetophobic individual, significant others often try to provide immediate relief by soothing their anxiety and making them feel safer. While this may temporarily calm the person down, it inadvertently perpetuates the phobia. Reminding someone that they possess the strength and ability to cope with their fears will do a far better job of reducing the fear in the long term.

Feelings versus facts

Remember, with phobias, it’s not the thing itself that’s scary, it’s how you react to it — and you can change your reaction. Just because you’re terrified, doesn’t mean IT’S terrifying. Feelings are not facts.

For example, if your loved one runs out of a theatre performance because someone is sick in the back row, instead of saying ‘let’s drive home’ (escaping the situation), the loved one can gently challenge and say ‘you can cope with this, you can go back in — look, no one else is panicking, they’re all enjoying the performance and you deserve to as well’.

Changing the collusive dynamic

One of the most challenging aspects of overcoming emetophobia is transforming the dynamics within collusive relationships. Often, individuals have been dependent on their significant others for a long time — for emotional support, self-esteem validation and overall wellbeing. It requires significant, active effort on both parts to change these unhelpful dynamics, but it can be done, and relatively swiftly.

We strongly recommend sharing this episode with a significant other and having an open discussion about how they can support you — there is no blame involved. If this feels too much, you could highlight 5 different areas you need help with and see if they’d support you with them. For example, instead of automatically providing reassurance that the food is cooked thoroughly, the significant other could gently challenge you by asking ‘what do you think? Have you eaten chicken of this colour before? Were you okay?’

Advice for the significant other

Of course, as a significant other it can be stressful seeing your loved one suffer, and you want to do what you can to help them — but gently challenging can be enormously beneficial in the long term. It’s a fine line though: you don’t want to be too forceful and become visibly stressed yourself. You also need to anticipate that your loved one may be reactionary, because they’re so used to you colluding with them. Try your hardest to stay calm. It can be helpful for the emetophobia sufferer to give you permission to help, so they feel in control.

This episode featured discussion between Joe Manuel and Rob Kelly.