I lurk on emetophobia threads on here and find them helpful, but I feel a great deal of shame about my own emetophobia which I have had since a traumatic experience in childhood (my Mum going through and dying from very aggressive cancer from which she was constantly vomiting and writhing in pain from when I was 3 onwards.) I think the shame comes from the fact that she was the one who was suffering and not me, and therefore I could only watch helplessly. And how I should never, ever complain about my own experience.
Despite my phobia, I have young DC who get ill a lot and I have finally got to the point, and things have been so bad the last year (we have had norovirus or some stomach virus equivalent three times since last December) that I honestly don't know how to cope anymore. I don't know how more closed I can make my life, how much more I can diminish my limited exposure to food, to public places, to other people, to my children.
I have tried many different therapies, including CBT, hypnosis, the thrive programme, counselling and exposure therapy, all with varying but not successful results.
I can't define between my own feelings of anxiety and panic and feelings of illness anymore. I can't think straight when I am feeling ill or when anyone else is feeling ill. Everything I can prepare myself with in times when I am calmer, just goes out of the window when I or others are sick. I don't know if it's my feeling of shame about it that prevents me from talking about it properly and making myself better. I know that at times in my life when I was living at university, for example, and my friends were vomiting from drinking too much, I admired the ease with which they did it and just got over it. And the ease with which others watched them while eating a kebab or something!
I also worry about my children and how this is affecting them. I wish them a life where they can feel that all illness is temporary and only briefly unpleasant and feel optimistic and not fearful about the future like I do. But I don't know how to model that for them.
I am not a naturally fearful person and I don't have low self esteem. I have worked really hard to afford and make a life for myself and my children. I am physically tough and mentally resilient to everything except vomit. How am I in a place where it is this that can tip me over the edge? I have always been searching for some other reason that makes me emetophobia, like it's a side effect of something bigger. But it's not. It's the front and centre of all my problems.
I know so many of you experience this too. I don't know what other options to take? I know that I have felt better about vomiting when I have lived in nurturing communities and had people I could regularly share my feelings with. My life right now, since lock down, is so cut off from others. Does anyone feel the same?