Emetophobes and others with phobias of situations rather than objects, did you see the programme about phobias on BBC3 last night?

[DumbledoresGirl]

I watched it despite the fact that Life on Mars was on the other side and I wanted to watch that instead. I figured Life on Mars would be repeated sometime, whereas the phobia programme was unlikely to be.

Anyway, the whole way through, all I could think was, this wouldn't work on my phobia would it? And anyway, who would watch a programme about an emetophobe being exposed to their phobia? What a gross thought!

Do you think they had some other therapy other than the pure desensitisation we saw? It just seemed so simplistic. If desensitisation worked on me, I wouldn't be a phobic anymore, after raising 4 children!

Anyone else see it and care to comment?

Hello again! Always meeting you on these threads!

I didn't see the programme but when I had therapy myself, it was supposedly desensitisation. Obviously that has practical limitations. Most of it was in my imagination. I found with a bit of practice, it was quite easy to talk in a fair amount of detail about what I was imagining - without really imagining it at all. I managed to disassociate the real me, if that doesn't seem too strange. The only real life desensitisation was when she produced an audio tape of people pretending. I found this absolutely horrific and also found it extremely insensitive that the people pretending obviously found it hilarious and laughed throughout.

I think having children isn't desensitisation really. If you are like me, and I think you are, then you expect it to happen all the time and it is the dread that is really the worst. If it ever does happen, then it just serves to reinforce my mindset that it will happen and makes the dread worse.

For emetophobia, what I think we would need to do is really really desensitise gradually. We could look at books, films which start off manageable (eg they are going to be but do it out of sight and sound) to where it is slightly more graphic, building up. I think the key is to stretch the boundary where you can cope very very gradually. I think it would probably need exposure daily or even more often, working up and up.

Having children is more like what I think is called "flooding" and it doesn't work for me!

I can see how it might work but I can't bring myself to make the first step and I can't bring myself to devote so much time to something I find so horrifying.

I agree it would not make good viewing! However, I constantly need to be reminded that not everyone feels the same. There are plenty (far too many in my opinion!) of television programmes and films where the director seems to think it is exactly what should be featured! I also have, in the past, done it myself. My reaction was to tell my husband to run for his life and save himself. I couldn't accept that he just didn't mind and wanted to be around to help!

Hello Girls!

BB - I am not so bad. Dh is away at the moment and I have no thread on MN going in which I am crying for help, so I suppose his endless trips are becoming easier for me. That said, I know that one bout of illness would set me right back, so it is all a matter of time really until I am back to square one.

Steala - You are so right about the anticipation being the worst thing. I don't see how that could be replicated as other fears were replicated on tv last night. Basically, they had one woman terrified of frogs and one woman terrified of cats. With them, they built up from showing them the word frog or cat to showing cartoon pics, to showing real pics, to showing moving pics and finally getting them in contact with actual animals. I just felt that this would not get at the root of my phobia, much of which is, anyway, the anticipation rather than the actual event. The woman who was afraid of cats, for instance, coudn't even get out of her car outside her house each day without phoning her dh to get him to walk outside the house to check for the presence of cats. Now I wouldn't walk into a room where someone was being sick for anything, except if it was one of my children and I was the only adult around, in which case I would feel I had to. I wondered if the woman with the cat phobia, if she had children, would be able to "rescue" her child from a cat if she had to.

Anyway, I am rambling. I just found it fascinating to see the phobias being treated, but I do not really understand how I could be cured that way. I once googled images of vomit and made myself look at them in an attempt to see how far I could go - DON'T DO IT!!!!!!!!!! It was very disturbing.