Lonelymum, as you know I emailed you most of my 'story' earlier today so please don't be bothered to read this miserable 'I'm an emetophobe' case study again! I thought I'd post some of it here because it's nice to share one's troubles with people who might understand.
I started to be very afraid of anything to do with vomit at around 6 years old but it developed into a life altering phobia by the time I was 8. It had a dreadful impact on my school life as I was terrified of being sick at school and like all emetophobes every tiny incidence of my own sickness turned into a weird way of thinking. For instance I had been sick twice on a Thursday before age 8 so I was especially terrified of Thursdays and would spend much of the day hiding in a cupboard outside the classroom. Eventually the only way I could cope with school was to not eat or drink anything at all until I got home in the afternoon - I figured that if my stomach was empty then there was nothing to be sick of. This of course left me frightfully thin (I was 4 stone for years through school and remember my parents glee when I hit 4.5 stone around aged 13) and there were endless talks of anorexia etc. etc. and I never did tell a soul what I was really afraid of. When I left school I was a better for a few years, mostly because I could stay home a lot. Then I got involved in studying art and that was a good channel for me and I went on to do an MA and a PhD. I've always avoided relationships because of a fear of catching germs and because I couldn't explain to people why I didn't eat unless I was at home.
To cut a long story short, it has made my life miserable too, really miserable and prevented me from doing so many things I'd have liked to do. Around 5 years ago I also got some health problems related with not having eaten enough for so many years which meant it actually became hard for me to eat without pain which made everything worse.
In terms of therapy. Because my phobia often left me with a dangerously low weight, the GP's etc had no option but to take it seriously. It was always annoying because I think deep down they thought I was anorexic and never believed me when I said I wasn't. I long to eat normally and not be this weight. First of all I saw a professor of CBT at St. Thomas' hospital who was lovely but really truly nothing he did helped other than having such a nice man to talk to once a week. I saw him for 2 years. Then he became ill and I saw a colleague of his who's a psychoanalyst so I kind of fell into that treatment and within a couple of weeks I realised this was a much more relevant form of treatment for me than CBT. I've been seeing him now for just over 4 years. In that time I got pregnant and had dd.
Now, in terms of 'aversion' therapy which I have never believed in in relation to emetophobia, I am living proof that it doesn't work! I actually wasn't sick once between the ages of 13 and 37 and it was suggested to me that if I was sick it would help reduce the fear on more than one occasion. Like you said in your thread the thought of being sick was too much for me to face. But at 37 when I got pregnant with dd I had non-stop sickness for the first 5 months. I had to be hospitalised a couple of times and put on a drip. It was literally my worst nightmare come true and it's the main reason why I will never attempt to have another child although I know how dreadful that sounds. If, after all that daily vomiting for 5 months I still have the phobia then how could one or two events of vomiting cure it?
The reason I believe in psychoanalysis is because although never promising a 'cure' as such it helps enormously to understand why you think like you do and most importantly to work out how and why this thinking came about. I've worked out with myself that I am afraid of 'shame' of the way people would look at me / judge me if I vomited in public. I can't bear the total self-disgust associated with vomiting and with me I think that goes much deeper than the phobia itself. For instance I also have a fear of blurting out something awful to someone, basically of anything oral becoming out of control. I don't know if this is making sense.