What is Emetophobia?
Emetophobia is an irrational or excessive fear of vomiting. But nobody likes to vomit. A phobia is distinguished from an ordinary fear by the irrational and excessive anxiety caused by the stimuli for the phobic individual.
So, hundreds of millions of people may fear vomiting, but they don't alter their daily lives because of it the way emetophobics do. The fear is also all-consuming; for most emetophobics, vomiting is their single worst fear. In casual conversation, many phobics say they'd rather die than vomit.
It's not an overstatement that for many phobics, anxiety about vomiting ruins almost every day. There is another phobia related to emetophobia called social phobia. (Social phobia is a general fear of being judged by other people.) People who are social phobic often have a fear of vomiting in public, but this is not the same as emetophobia. People with social phobia vomit in private with no more anxiety than a normal person would have. (Of course, emetophobics fear vomiting in public at least as much as social phobics do. And some people have both emetophobia and social phobia.)
What is the Cause of Emetophobia
Like all fears and phobias, emetophobia most commonly develops from a childhood fear that has never been outgrown. Perhaps a traumatic incident was witnessed when young, a person being sick close to them or on them, maybe they themselves being sick or perhaps they saw someone else being sick under traumatic circumstances.
When a traumatic scene is witnessed as a young child (before the age of 16 years old in my experience) the subconscious mind as the body's 'protector' works out the best way to prevent the incident repeating itself. The way this works in practice is that the subconscious attaches negative emotions or feelings to vomiting and in future this teaches the person to steer away from 'dangerous' situations. Whilst the subconscious is doing all this 'protection', the conscious mind is struggling to find out where this irrational behaviour is coming from.
The incident that was experienced, as a young child was interpreted incorrectly at the time and the subconscious "bottled up" or"locked away" that experience at the time. The person still acts like that frightened yound child, even though they are now an adult. When 'stuff' happens to us when we are young, we are relatively short on intelligence and life experience. This deficiency causes us to interpret situations to the best of our limited ability with the limited data available. Nine times out of ten, this interpretation is incorrect but because of the conscious mind's difficulty in accessing the subconscious, it can't work out why we react to certain situations in an irrational way.
The actual phobia manifests itself in different ways. Some sufferers experience it almost all the time, others just in response to direct stimuli. Some sufferers spend a number of years free from emetophobia and then a particular incident triggers the subconscious to remember the childhood event in question and then the fear of sickness starts or restarts.
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