Did anyone else develop emetophobia AFTER getting sick, even though vomiting never scared you before?
I’m curious if anyone else has had an experience similar to mine because sometimes I feel like I’m going through this alone.
Before this year, I could throw up and just go on about my business. Obviously it wasn’t pleasant, but there was never any fear attached to it. Even when I got food poisoning/a GI bug back in February, I remember knowing I was going to throw up and basically thinking, “oh shit, it’s coming,” preparing myself, doing it and moving on. I wasn’t panicking.
What confuses me is that I was actually okay for about two months AFTER that. Then the nausea came back one day and that’s when the panic started. I ended up having two really severe anxiety episodes at work because of the nausea, to the point I had to be sent home and was out of work for two weeks. I started therapy after that.
Ever since then, things that never bothered me before can trigger that fear. Something as simple as brushing the back of my tongue, gagging while brushing my teeth, coughing hard enough that I feel like I could gag, or even thinking about gagging can set it off.
The weirdest part is that I don’t even think the actual vomiting is the part I’m most afraid of. It’s the nausea, gagging and buildup beforehand. Once I know I’m actually going to be sick, I’ve handled it before. But now the fear/adrenaline attached to nausea makes the whole sensation feel 10x worse.
I’ve definitely improved compared to when this first started, and I can go periods where I barely think about it and just live normally. But sometimes the fear creeps back in and I start focusing on nausea again.
Has anyone else developed emetophobia like this after an illness even though you weren’t afraid of vomiting before? And is anyone else more afraid of the nausea/gagging/buildup than actually throwing up?
I’d really love to hear from people who understand because sometimes this feels incredibly lonely, and I wonder if I’ll ever get back to how I was before.