Doing Something About It

Right so we've established that I suffer from emetophobia. The Western world's sixth most common phobia; the phobia of being sick. Yes, nobody enjoys being sick but this is a mortal FEAR. One which affects my daily life and has progressed to causing anxiety, panic attacks etc. Yes, it's my fault it got this bad and yes, I'm going to do something about it.

I've been exposing myself to the very thing that makes me the most scared. Videos of people being sick, feeling sick myself etc. but I haven't quite got round to actually being sick. This is something that (reportedly) is done towards the late stages of a certain kind of therapy, I believe some forms of CBT.

CBT?

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: A form of psychotherapy which works with the individual to try and alter their negative thought patterns permanently and do eradicate negative behaviours.

Whether this will work for me or not, I can't be sure. I've followed a CD course prescribed by my doctor but found a great deal of errors in the text and as a former Psychology student I just couldn't take it seriously. The guy reading it had a brummie accent too which certainly didn't help. Still, I'm going to try and give it another go from the 'CBT Workbook for Dummies' and see how I go at my own pace.

My prediction is that even though I'm trying to be open minded about it, int he back of my head I think it won't work, so therefore it won't (QED...I'm clearly not being open minded about it). Personally I think that hypnotherapy would be far more useful, so that I can relive whatever experience of being sick terrified me so much when I was younger, and gain an adult perspective on it.

That, however, is something I can't gain without a visit to the doctor. Queue panic, nausea, more panic etc. etc......