winter

We had our first snowfall this past week, and it snowed again last night. There is still some left on the ground this morning. It's beautiful, but it signals the start of winter to me, or as emetophobics refer to it, the season of illness. So it's leaving me with a general feeling of dread.

I haven't been sick at all in the past two years, not even a cold. Which is not normal. I used to get a cold per year like most people, and I'm guessing the reason for my healthy streak is that I started working from home two years ago, so I'm no longer in an environment like a school or office where illness spreads around like crazy. You'd think it would be reassuring, but I just keep worrying - will I get sick this year, and will it hit me harder than usual since it's been a while? I am taking that class now, so I'm back in contact with the notoriously unhealthy college crowd. Plus I've been trying to force myself to go out places as much as possible. Which is of course a good thing, a great thing. It's sad that I keep having to remind myself that it's not worth trading all life experiences to avoid a mild illness once in a while.

I've been reading other emetophobia blogs out there, and some of these people have so much more contact with vomit than I can imagine having. This woman Robin in particular amazes me. It seems like she has to deal with vomit frequently because of her kids, and she also has gotten sick herself due to morning sickness and a stomach virus in the past few years. She has survived and even kept a positive attitude throughout all of it. It makes me start to think brave thoughts like 'wow, does this even matter? I'm sure I would survive it too. Why am I so worried about this all the time? I should just never think about it again.'

But then an hour or so goes by, and I feel something "weird" in my body, and everything brave or rational goes out the window. I keep getting a scratchy throat (from our heater, I'm assuming), and even though I know it can't be from illness, I still worry that it is. I try to ignore it, but it actually causes my appetite to go away. Then I have to force myself to eat, and when I do, I feel anxious the whole time. If I try really hard to focus only on my stomach, I will realize that I feel absolutely nothing there. But emotionally, I feel like I am moments away from throwing up. It's bizarre.

emetophobia survey

Friday night of a hectic week. Sounds like a good time for a survey, followed by a lot of lying around and not working for two days. I've seen this posted a few places - not sure where it came from originally.

1. Does your family know of your Emetophobia? I don't think so. To make a long story short, we have serious communication issues in my family.

2. Do your friends know of your Emetophobia? Yeah, probably all of them do. I'm pretty open about it.

3. Would you tell a stranger that you have Emetophobia? I guess it depends. I think the only strangers I have told are doctors / dentists so that 1) they would prescribe me anti-emetics 2) they wouldn't prescribe me anything with nausea or vomiting as a main side effect. It doesn't usually come up in normal conversation for me.

4. If you are currently in a relationship, how long did you wait to tell your partner? We were friends for a while before we started dating, so she already knew all about it.

5. Are you scared to have kids? Of course. But underneath all the fear, I don't think I want kids anyway, so I'm not too concerned about it. My life is pretty stress-free compared to the average person's life, and I have a hard time handling that tiny amount of stress. I can't imagine adding the stress of raising children to that. 

6. If you are a mom who suffers from Emetophobia, how do you deal with the struggles of your kids being sick? N/A, but I'm sure I wouldn't deal with it well at all. I feel panicked even when our cat throws up and usually run to hide in the next room.
 
7. What age did you discover that you had a problem? I was around 11 and found a website describing emetophobia. I can't remember if I was actively looking for an explanation. I had recently had some problems with missing a lot of school because of "feeling sick," so maybe.
 
8. What type of methods have you tried to reach recovery? I've never really believed I could get rid of the phobia completely, but to cope better, I have tried just about everything. Exposure therapy, talk therapy, CBT, ACT, affirmations, all the basic relaxation techniques (meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, deep breathing, visualization), yoga, mindfulness, and hypnosis. Most of this I still do, because I find it all helpful. The only thing I haven't given a fair chance is long-term medication. The side effects scare me too much, so both times I tried it, I stopped after the first dose. 
 
9. When was the last time you have thrown up and why? I was nine years old, and I'm pretty sure it was just a basic stomach virus.
 
10. When was the last time you saw someone else throw up? I'm not sure I remember. I've done a really good job of avoiding seeing it, even if all I could do was shut my eyes or turn my back on it. I feel like my last "direct experience" with it was December 2007 when I went into a stall in a communal bathroom in my college dorm building and then heard the girl in the stall right next to me start throwing up. I ran out right away.

11. What type of foods do you avoid? I don't think I avoid any food all the time, it's more situational. I avoid cooking any raw meat myself, because I don't trust myself to do it right, plus I don't want to deal with that kind of "contamination" stress. I hate trying anything new, so usually I make my wife try it first, and if she doesn't get violently ill from it (she never does), I might have some. I'm afraid of restaurants I've never been to before, so I try to stick with chains. Same for groceries - I have my safe "brands" and hate buying a different brand or the generic brand. When I know I have to go out somewhere, or when I am already in public, I try to go for simple / bland foods only like sandwiches or pasta. Oh, and I always avoid alcohol. The only alcohol I've had in my life was a tiny sip of champagne when I was really young (New Year's Eve).

more on road trips

The test run drive went really well. I didn't even need to get out my written affirmations. It was a quiet, non-stressful drive. Most of the time we were surrounded by farmland. On the way there, I could feel the anxiety start in my stomach at times, and I just tried to bring my attention back to the external world - the music playing, the scenery. I read somewhere (no clue where, my brain is way overloaded with self-help books and websites) about playing a game with yourself to calm down where you look for something that starts with the letter "A", then the letter "B", etc. So I used that to distract myself too.

Sometimes when I start to "feel sick" I view it as a kind of black and white transition where I've left the realm of calmness / happiness, and that's it - now there's no going back. But on this drive I happened to be able to tap into logic (for once) and realize that only a few seconds had passed between feeling absolutely fine and feeling "off" in some way. Obviously I still was absolutely fine and was able to return to feeling that way with a little effort.

I felt a little "sick" after eating in the restaurant too, but it didn't last long, maybe about five to ten minutes of the drive back home. All in all, I'm super pleased with how it went, although I do keep thinking about how tame a challenge it was compared to the much longer trip coming up. My main areas of concern are:

-- the drive itself. We'll be on the road longer, there will definitely be more traffic and crazy drivers. Plus having to eat during the drive.

-- staying in a hotel. The last time I actually threw up, I was in a hotel, on vacation with my family. I know some emetophobes have bad associations with certain foods because they were sick after eating them. That didn't happen to me, but I guess I associate hotels in general (well, they do all look alike and smell alike) with the experience and feel slightly unsafe in them.

-- I'll be meeting my nephew for the first time. He's a little over a year old. I might have to hold him. Part of me really wants to. I've loved him since the day he was born and the first pictures went up on facebook. But part of me worries he will spit up on me. Or get sick on me? At what age does it stop being called spit-up? I have no clue, but really it makes no difference to me.

-- eating in general on the trip, eating away from home, eating around other people. I need more practice with this.

We are planning to have a couple more of these "test run" trips, if we have time to fit them in. The goal for the next one is to go eat somewhere and then go out shopping instead of coming straight back home.

road trip

In a month, we're going to be taking a trip to Virginia to visit family. We'll be driving, and the drive down there takes about 12-14 hours. I'm starting to get really nervous about it. The last time we took a road trip, it was to a city about three hours away. I had a horrible anxiety attack during the drive, and the stress of it not only ruined the trip, but it stayed with me for months even after getting back home.

As a test run, we are taking another smaller trip this weekend to upstate Vermont. This drive will only be one and a half to two hours, nowhere near the length of the VA drive, so maybe it isn't the most challenging test run possible, but that's probably a good thing. I think what I really need is some confidence-boosting, and hopefully this is small and easy enough that it will be a complete success. Plus we're going to be eating breakfast once we get there, in a diner that I've never been to before, so that will make the whole experience a little scarier. My goals are to eat a small snack before we leave, eat a normal-sized breakfast at the diner, and keep my anxiety down as much as possible.

It's already starting to get cold here, and we have had to turn our heat on a few times in the past week. Not being used to it, I got a mild sore throat for a couple days, and ever since then, I have been on edge about every tiny little thing happening in my body and have convinced myself several times that I am coming down with some illness. I'm seriously frustrated with myself. I don't think I have been working hard enough at fighting these irrational thoughts. I've been neglecting affirmations. I'm going to take a list of them with me on this car trip so that they will be easily accessible if/when I get anxious.

"I don't need these thoughts. I can choose to think differently."

CBT websites

I'm lucky enough to have access to regular therapy, but I know that's not the case for everyone. Even with it, most of the work you do is on your own. I usually prefer working through self-help workbooks, but I have also spent a lot of time on these two websites MoodGYM and E-couch. They both walk you through cognitive behavioral therapy skills and have a bunch of exercises you can do to practice. They're free, as opposed to the workbooks, and you don't have to worry about running out of space when you write your answers (or having to make twenty copies of a certain worksheet).

There is also this Beacon website where you can browse through other online self-help programs.   

yoga / anxiety cat

I reached my yoga goal - three times this week. Now if I can just keep going, establish that as a routine, I'd be so happy. There are a bunch of other things I should be doing to improve my health (sleeping more, balancing my diet, etc.), but it never works out for me when I try to tackle them all at the same time, so I am focusing on just one for now. When I'm all set with the yoga, then I'll move on to something else.

I only started doing yoga about a year ago, so I still consider myself a novice (especially since I have not been able to consistently stick with it yet). It took me a while to find a DVD I liked. At first, I was using one that was way too easy, and I felt like I wasn't doing anything. Then I switched to another and had the opposite problem - it was super advanced. I couldn't even keep up with that one. Eventually I started using this YogaAway one, and it works perfectly for me, for now anyway. I love it because 1) it repeats each position/stretch several times, giving you ample opportunity to get the feel of it and make sure you are doing it correctly, and 2) the voice-over tells you exactly when to breathe in and when to breathe out the entire way through (and in a way that isn't awkward). I have a hard time maintaining deep breathing on my own, so I find that really helpful.

My anxiety has been higher than usual this past week, and aside from yoga, I've been trying to ride it out with funny movies and websites. I found this Anxiety Cat tumblr today and laughed over it for a long time. I can relate to almost every one of the entries.

projection

Another thing I wanted to talk about from that book (No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth by Ken Wilber).

Part of the book talked about the psychological concept of projection and how everything we feel is just a projection of a deeper subconscious feeling. Like if we feel obligated to do something, it's because we actually want to do it - otherwise, we wouldn't care at all and would feel no obligation. For anxiety, the deeper subconscious feeling is excitement. I started thinking this over and wondering if some part of me could feel excited about vomiting. Which is impossible to imagine. But if I substitute "fear of losing control" for "fear of vomiting" I can easily imagine having a subconscious feeling of excitement about losing control. I even consciously fantasize sometimes about being a different person, one that isn't reserved and uptight all the time. Of course, that's assuming "fear of losing control" has anything to do with this phobia. I feel that it does, but I don't know for sure what the main underlying "cause" is.

But the concept also seems to fit with the social anxiety I have. If someone doesn't care at all about social interaction, about being around other people, then chances are they won't have social anxiety (or they'll have it, but it will have no effect on their life). It's only going to bother someone who deep down is excited about being around people, talking to people, having other people look at them, etc. And thinking about it that way makes me feel more willing to face the anxiety. For example, at some point during the class I'm taking, I'm supposed to give a presentation, and I've been thinking about it and dreading it ever since I heard about it. But put the nice projection spin on it, and I know that deep down, I'm actually dying to give that presentation. So why try to think up ways to get out of it? 

centaur / mind-body

I've been trying to figure out what my little blog picture should be, what image could be associated with emetophobia. I'm reading this book No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth by Ken Wilber, and a couple nights ago I got to this part of the book that was talking about the centaur as a representation of a unified mind-and-body:

"A centaur is a legendary animal, half human and half horse, and so it well represents a perfect union and harmony of mental and physical. A centaur is not a horse rider in control of her horse, but a rider who is one with her horse. Not a psyche divorced from and in control of a soma, but a self-controlling, self-governing, psychosomatic unity."

I love this. This is the emetophobic issue. We see our bodies as "the enemy" that we have to fight and master. It's the source of what we fear, so we want to escape it, but it's not something that can be escaped. It's us.

I want to get rid of this mind-body split, and in order to do that, I really need to commit to doing more things that will relax my body. In other words, not just sitting around and reading all the time, as fun as that is. I'm going to start doing yoga again. There was a brief period of time many months ago where I was doing yoga on a regular basis, and I know it was helping me. I really can feel how doing the stretches and then releasing the tension makes my body feel better and also seems to allow me to tune in to different parts of my body in a way that is pretty foreign to me. I don't know why it is so hard for me to stick with the habit. I would love to eventually get to the point where I do it every day, but I think for now, my goal is going to be three times a week. Starting this week. Here's hoping that posting this will keep me accountable. 

online study

I think I may be the last person in the online emetophobic community to come across this, but just in case that's not true:

www.emetstudy.org

It's an online treatment program / study. I signed up for it, and I'm really excited.

body visualization

I just finished reading Molecules of Emotion by Candace B. Pert, Ph.D. She's a scientist, and the book focuses mostly on her research involving peptides and receptors in the body. There was definitely much more scientific/medical jargon than I was prepared for, as I was kind of expecting a basic psychological self-help book. But I love science, and she breaks it down to the point where I could follow what she was saying most of the time, so I didn't really mind pushing through those parts. Especially because she interspersed the science with autobiographical narrative.

In the second half of the book, she started to pull it all together and talk more about health and emotions. Basically, through her research she has developed a holistic body-mind outlook: emotions are in the body and not just the mind; the mind can influence the body, and the body can influence the mind (a two-way communication); all systems tie together (immune, endocrine, nervous, etc.) and communicate with each other. I think most of these ideas would not be surprising to anyone these days. The book was written over a decade ago, so it was probably a more revolutionary message back then. But it was still interesting to read about the actual science behind it. At the very end, she tied spirituality into it too, another subject that fascinates me, so the book ended up containing almost every topic I adore: science, history, personal narrative, sexism / feminism, psychology, health, and religion / spirituality.

My original intention in reading it was to find something that might help me with my anxiety though, and on that front, there wasn't much that I didn't already know or hadn't already tried. She did inspire me with her many little anecdotes about using visualization to actually bring about changes in the body. For example, she talked about visualizing her pituitary gland releasing endorphins and how as a result of doing this, she could actually feel the endorphins being released and traveling all over her body, lifting her mood. I am a super skeptical person, and my thoughts immediately went to "maybe she just imagined this happening." But does that even make sense, saying she only "imagined" an increase in happiness? She still felt happier either way, which is the whole point. Goal achieved.

A similar story talked about a man who broke his elbow and then spent twenty minutes each day visualizing blood flowing to the site of the injury, which apparently resulted in the injury healing much faster than would normally be the case.

Since reading that, I've been experimenting a little with this kind of body visualization, focusing on my stomach / digestive area and imagining the resources of my body - blood, peptides, molecules, energy, whatever - all going to that one spot. The book describes the entire body and everything working within it as an "information network" so that I can imagine my stomach as an area that needs more research, since I usually find myself out of touch with it. Often I will find myself in the bizarre situation of knowing that I should be hungry (as a healthy person who last ate several hours ago) but not actually being able to feel that hunger. It's like my stomach is not accessible to me. I will get headaches or feelings of fatigue that alert me to my hunger without ever having passed through the stage where I felt it in my stomach.

The other morning before going out to breakfast, I tried this. I am not a morning person, and when I am tired, what's happening in my stomach is even more indecipherable to me. Then anxiety can take over and interpret the "strange" / unidentifiable feeling as fullness, or worse, nausea. But having just woken up, I know logically I must be hungry, since I haven't eaten for about twelve hours. I tried the visualization exercise, and it seemed to work after only ten to twenty minutes. I wouldn't say I was ravenous, but I began to feel like I could eat without there being any danger. I began to get a sense that the "strange" feeling was one of emptiness.

Which I find promising. In general, I am and always have been focused on the mind over the body. I loved school, and I love reading and writing and exploring ideas. I tend to see my body as an annoyance or (more frequently) as something to fear, and I really want to change this perspective. I want to learn to be aware of it in a more detached / mindful way, and I'm hoping one day I'll get to the point where enjoying my body, taking pleasure in it, is the rule rather than the exception.