I suffered from emetophobia for my whole life and yet I was in my thirties when I finally found out what I was actually suffering from. Not having ever heard about emetophobia and not having any appropriate support or resources unfortunately lengthened my struggle and made my recovery so much more difficult.

I am painfully aware that if I would have known then what I know now about emetophobia I could have spared myself some extremely painful experiences. I guess most of us wish we would have known some things when we were younger to prevent making the same mistakes over and over again. Unfortunately, I had to learn in the hardest of ways and my mistakes came at too high of a price. My inexperience with this condition gave it the time and space to grown, to strengthen its grip on me, to overpower me and come to the point of ruling my whole life leaving me powerless and fearful of my own body and mind.

Today I want to use the things I learnt in the hard way to maybe help someone who’s only starting to feel the grip of this condition and maybe even help them to escape from it before the condition takes control over their whole life. So here are the ten most important things I wish I’d have known a long time ago, which I believe would have made a big difference in my life and how I lived it.

1. It’s an actual condition

My obsessive and irrational fear of vomiting is an actual condition called Emetophobia. Emetophobia is a specific condition that presents a specific type of symptoms and therefore requires a specific type of treatment. I wish I would have know this fact as thinking that any therapist was suitable to help me with my problem only led to a long list of misdiagnosis and wrong treatments. As any other specific condition Emetophobia requires professionals trained in this specific area, who are familiar with the specifics of this condition and the right ways of treating it.

2. I’m not alone

For most of my life I felt as the weirdest person on the planet as I had fears and emotions nobody else seemed to experience nor understand. Over time this led me to become deeply depressed and isolated as I simply never felt I fit in. I longed all my life to belong somewhere, to find people who felt the same things and thought in the same way as not finding those people meant being simply crazy. Only by finding out Emetophobia is a real condition I learnt that about 6% of the world’s population suffers from it and the majority of them being women.

Therefore there were people like me, I was not alone and even tough till this day I still haven’t met one of those people I know they exist, I’ve seen their photos, read their articles and found myself in so many of their struggles. I know there will come a day I will meet one of them, and I already know it will be one of the best days of my life as I’ll meet of my ‘my people’ but until then I will never feel alone in the world as I’ll know they are out there, fighting my same daily battles and surviving them day by day.

3. It wasn’t my fault

When you suffer from something people have never heard of most of the time you hear things like “Stop with that, nobody likes being sick!” or even “Just stop thinking about it”. People often tend to see your fears as your own choice which is completely insane as I cannot imagine anybody choosing to feel so incredibly terrified and scared at all times. When you are forced to refuse invitations to social gatherings or trips people see it as your unwillingness to spend time with them and again assigning it to your own choice. And yet none of it is my choice and neither my fault.

Emetophobia is a condition that is often triggered by a traumatic incident correlated with vomiting, often going back to young childhood or even as back as before one’s memory. There have been studies that are even showing that there might be a genetic predisposition to Emetophobia. Therefore I can finally shed from my shoulders a lifetime of feeling guilty for being like this, for feeling what I feel, for fearing what most people don’t and by consequence acting in ways people cannot understand.

4. It’s NOT and eating disorder

Emetophobia can be so severe to cause a sufferer to starve themselves because of the intensity of their fear of vomiting which can often lead to a visibly malnourished physical state. As most people and even most therapists are not aware of this condition the most common misjudgment and misdiagnosis is an eating disorder, for the only reason that the person is refusing to eat normally despite the reason behind it being completely different to the one behind an eating disorder.

And even tough a person can repeat a billion times to their therapist that they do not want to lose weight, that they actually hate being that thin and weak, so often the therapist’s inexperience and way too often their unwillingness to open their mind and spend some time researching their patient’s real fears leads to a very quick and easy conclusion that it must be an eating disorder, most commonly anorexia nervosa. Being misdiagnosed and misunderstood can not only lead to a wrong treatment, to an incredible amount of frustration and anger but it can cause the person to waste precious time which could have been spent treating the condition they actually and preventing it from developing further.

5. Other conditions can stem from Emetophobia (especially if this one is not treated)

Emetophobia can often lead to quite a large variety of anxiety correlated condition as it causes the person to live in a constant state of worry and stress. As the person is extremely scared of being sick they might start avoiding all sorts of situations and develop a series of behaviors in order to keep themselves “safe”.

The conditions that most commonly stem from Emetophobia are OCD, agoraphobia, social anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks and panic disorder. Even tough these conditions can be treated individually it’s important to keep in mind that the underlying problem is still Emetophobia and that none of these stemming condition can be solved if the main fear of vomiting is not being tackled and treated appropriately.

6. Avoidance is Emetophobia’s best friend and my worst enemy

When suffering from emetophobia a person will very likely develop a series of avoidance behaviors which will inevitably increase in time. It might start by avoiding just a couple of foods that present the highest risk of getting sick, just a few very crowded and loud places that might trigger the fear and then it will gradually start expanding by avoiding more and more foods often reducing the person to eat just a few dishes over and over again.

Then it might go from avoiding just those few public places to any social gatherings, family meals, to eventually avoiding going out of their homes at all. Traveling. If a person is not aware they’re suffering from Emetophobia they might start avoiding foods, places and situations not knowing that by doing so they are only reinforcing their fear believes, feeding their Emetophobia and trading their freedom for a apparent and temporary feeling of “safety”. They will not see their comfort zone gradually restricting itself before noticing they have actually stopped living in order to avoid possibly dying by vomiting.

7. I cannot always believe what my mind’s telling me

Learning that my mind cannot always be trusted was the first step towards my recovery. There was a time when I believed every single thing my mind would tell me, all the worse case scenarios it would present me with, all the ‘what ifs’ and the ‘you can’t do this’. I believed it because I never knew I shouldn’t and also because it was so persuasive that I felt I didn’t have a choice but to believe it. I also had anybody or anything telling me the opposite.

I had to learn in the worse possible way that my mind can be so persuasive to even created an actual physiological reaction within my body by sending adrenalin which would rush trough my body making me feel I’m in actual danger and that I should protect myself and later on avoid any such similar situation. My mind managed to produce such reactions up to several times per day, reactions known as panic attacks, which would make me feel in danger in situation which were not actually dangerous at all, and making me live in a constant fight or flight mode without letting my body or mind to relax.

I’d start seeing danger in all places but the only one that actually was a mine zone, my own mind. By learning that my mind not only can, but most of the time actually does, tell me lies I learnt that I have to start questioning it, doubt it and make sure that the lies are not a simple produce of fear. By doing so I can now distinguish a feeling from a fact, which is a great tool in the fight against Emetophobia.

8. Emetophobia is a part of me but does not define me

As much as Emetophobia can be as powerful as to dominate one’s life that still doesn’t mean that the condition is something that defines it. As I am not defined by the fact that I have green eyes, or the fact that I work with clay or even the scar I have on my knee from a heavy fall as a child I am neither defined by the fact that I suffer from a condition called Emetophobia. These are all part of me, but none of them individually defines who I am.

9. Anxiety causes nausea

I’ve spent most of my life trying to explain to people around me that my fear wasn’t irrational because not only did I fear vomiting, but I spent most of the time feeling nauseous and therefore, extremely alert and distressed that the worst might be just around the corner. What I didn’t know at the time is that anxiety and panic attacks cause nausea, so just by being anxious and panicky, I’d create the feeling of nausea which would trigger even more anxiety and more panic and end up in a never-ending vicious cycle.

Learning that anxiety and panic attacks cause nausea helps remind me in those situations that the nausea is not a sign of an imminent and so feared episode of vomiting, but a mere consequence of my own worry. Nowadays when I feel nauseous I assign it to anxiety most of the time, which doesn’t make my fear disappear, but it does help me not to go into a complete panic mode. I do this by reminding myself that nausea is a simple reaction to my own worry and anxiety and that if I can create it, then I can also work hard to make it go away using relaxations methods, turning to art, cuddling up with my pooch or simply putting on some music and singing my heart out. It’s crucially important to engage in any grounding activity that will bring me back to the present moment.

10. Vomiting in not dangerous

As much as this might sound silly and nearly ridiculous to most people, to me it’s one of those big lies my mind has been telling me for as long as I can remember. Most people experience vomiting as a natural body reaction to a bug or to any kind of substance that might be harmful to the body. Vomiting is in fact one of the body’s defence mechanisms and is therefore not dangerous, but actually strictly necessary for our own wellbeing at times.

Emetophobes can have such a control over their body reaction to vomiting that they can stop themselves from doing so even though their body might desperately need it in order to make them feel better. Not knowingly, Emetophobes might be harming themselves far more by resisting to vomit when the body naturally needs it to remove whatever is harming the body. Even though my irrational perception of vomiting is that it might cause me to choke and die (due to a very traumatic event in my life when it almost happened), today I rationally know that vomiting is an instinct and shouldn’t deserve as much attention as I’m giving it.

I’ve seen babies vomit and then laugh seconds later showing no signs of any distress. When I get scared I keep telling myself, if babies can do it, so can I. It might sound silly, but believe me, sometimes these silly things can save me from a total meltdown and a full-blown panic attack.

Jelena Mohnani