Tosca suffers from emetophobesalso vomiting named. “The thought of puke makes me freeze and I can’t act more.”
Tosca (40): “Ever since I was little, I’ve been afraid of everything that has to do with vomiting – and to my knowledge I never threw up after my fifth year of life. Even when I was very ill, I still preferred to keep things inside rather than cross my neck. I can best describe this fear as total panic as soon as I think I’m going to throw up or if others around me do. As a result, I am constantly on my guard. Are there no sick people around me? Is anyone complaining about a stomach ache? No stomach flu? Am I not nauseous myself? I avoid all ‘risky’ situations.
Dodging that has become second nature to me. For years all my attention was focused on what was happening or could happen outside of me. To give an example: my parents had a cafe, you can understand that I didn’t like going there at all. All those drunk people at the bar; before you know it, someone will cross his neck. I was never drunk as a teenager, I didn’t dare. Imagine that… And eating something that was possibly a day past its date, I really didn’t. On holiday abroad I was also very difficult with food. I never ate on the street or even in a restaurant unless I had to make sure the food was really fresh. In fact, I’d rather be hungry than risk getting food poisoning and throwing up.
Making vomit sounds
A phobia not only determines your actions, it also makes you lonely. At least that’s how I experienced it. No one feels what you feel, so there is little understanding from your environment. As a child I was bullied quite a bit with my anxiety. Boyfriends made vomit sounds when they walked behind me, just to piss me off. And that worked too. Every time I panicked blindly, but at the same time I also felt a lot of shame. As a child you don’t want to be different from the rest at all. So I decided to talk about it as little as possible. People thought it was crazy anyway. This made me even more isolated and an outsider. Something that has remained that way throughout my childhood.
The real confrontation and also the search for why I am the way I am started when I got into a steady relationship and my husband and I started talking about children. Even before I even got pregnant, I already felt panic and all kinds of questions arose. Because you have to take care of children, children get sick, they sometimes have to spit. You are of course responsible for your children and especially when they are sick they need you. How would
I deal with it? Who cleans up that vomit then? Scenarios like this raced through my mind. Then I realized: this can’t go on like this anymore, I have to find a way to deal with this more relaxed.
At the time I went to our doctor to get advice. I already knew that there were special therapies, with the starting point not to avoid the fear but to confront it. In the case of emetophobia, for example, you may be asked to watch images or videos of someone throwing up or showing vomit, or to listen to each other’s vomit stories in group sessions. Terrible, I thought. Just the idea. This was not my way, because everything that gives you attention grows, including the negative.
My doctor agreed with me. But what could help me? And what was the basis of my fear? That’s what I wanted to find out. Through relatives I found out that when I was about three years old, I was left home alone and then I fell ill. I probably had to throw up and I experienced that as very scary. I must have been terrified at that moment; that’s how that panic really feels, like fear of dying.
I think my phobia is linked to this event. But looking back in time is not a solution at the moment. Knowing where something comes from is one thing, but learning to deal with it is what matters. After all, I’m alive now.
Inner struggle
My husband and I have had two children. Of course they are also sometimes sick. When they were very young, we had the rule: if you have to spit, you go to daddy. When my husband was not at home and the children were sick on the couch or came home from school feeling sick, I really managed to get my neighbor to babysit for us. I had a practice at home and made sure that I always had to work on those days. That’s how much impact that fear has.
Any ‘normal’ mother would drop everything to stay with her sick child and cancel her work or clients, but I don’t want to think about that! At the thought of puke I freeze and I really can’t act anymore. That entails an enormous inner struggle, because as a mother you naturally want to take care of your children, especially when they are not feeling well. Fortunately, they can fend for themselves as they get older.
My husband supports me and he understands intellectually – not emotionally. It is also impossible for ‘ordinary’ people to feel such intense fear. I personally don’t know anyone else who suffers from this irrational fear. Even putting a vomit-stained T-shirt, romper or dirty bed linen in the washing machine is too much to ask. I believe I’ve only done that once in my entire life. Then I quickly left it to my partner again.
Winding roads
Outside the home, there are many more situations where I am confronted with my anxiety. I don’t drive on winding roads with the kids, because motion sickness is always lurking. No group travel in a bus or boat for me either. The strange thing is that the fear of the fear gradually becomes greater than the fear itself.
That fear completely runs off with you. I can reason very well that vomiting is just a cleaning process of your body, but emotionally I don’t experience it that way. Especially in a room with a lot of people who could suddenly become ill and where I can’t leave in one, two, three, I get terrified.
Fixated on others
I’ve done everything I can to get rid of this fear, but in the end the process of becoming aware of who I am and what I do has helped me. And it still helps me. I now function better and my phobia no longer controls my daily life as much as it used to. That is not only pleasant for me, but also for my environment and loved ones, who weighed in on my fears and with whom I could not do or undertake certain things. Still, I don’t necessarily look back with sadness on what I had to endure. It’s a part of me that I had to overcome.
Because of my phobia, I had been very fixated on others my whole life, so I had lost myself quite a bit. By constantly avoiding situations and checking on how people are doing – Does he have a headache? Does that make him nauseous? Isn’t it wrong? Should I prepare to flee? – you give the phobia an awful lot of charge and power. It’s exciting to fight this because you don’t know what it’s like to live without that phobia. That is also so paradoxical: you want to let go because the fear is in your way, but at the same time that phobia has given you a sense of control and hold on all along, and somewhere you don’t want to lose that. You know how to deal with the old situation, but the space created by letting go of that is unknown and therefore something to be afraid of. With my story I hope to encourage others with this phobia. You can look for yourself what helps you or at least gives relief. My advice: take matters into your own hands. Doctors sometimes don’t know how to help you get rid of your fear, because every person is unique.”
This article originally appeared in Marie Claire April 2019.
Text: Natasja Bijl | Image: Dương Nhân (Pexels)
2023-08-27 11:30:51
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