Category: Emetophobia

Appreciation Post: The Importance of a Support Network

~ Bee x ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t posted in a few weeks because I haven’t been in the right headspace or physical space… I started treatment for my Borderline Personality Disorder this week, Emotional Coping Skills Group Therapy, which was causing me a great deal of stress and worry. Last weekend I was in London and the week prior to that my parents, who are a significant part of my life, were on holiday so I subconsciously planned in far too many activities so that I wouldn’t feel the need to reach out to them if I had a bad day and make them worry. That, alongside normal day-to-day stress at home and work, has led to a rollercoaster few weeks that has made me sit back and really appreciate the people I have in my life because I honestly hate to think where I would be without them.

For a start, the people I have at work. This treatment programme will be taking me out of the office for an afternoon each week for fourteen weeks and the fear that this would mean I’d annoy my colleagues was causing me a whole world on stress on top of the treatment itself. But they have been wonderful, and really I should have expected nothing less – from the encouragement and positivity before my first session, to the reassurance that it was all okay and the immediate interest they took the next day it made me really stand back and appreciate the support that I have from all of them. They’ve made something I am petrified of that little bit less daunting and I know that, on a bad day (like the one that left me in tears on Friday) they all rally round and make the effort to understand and help me work out what’s going on and find solutions and coping mechanisms. Whilst my parents were away I had a day of horrendous dissociation which put me close to crisis and I was ridiculously grateful to have someone I could ask to go on a twenty minute walk around the grounds so I could talk through how it felt and ground myself – knowing that there are people I can explain even the most confusing and ridiculous sounding aspects of my mental health too without judgement, who will do nothing but try to help and support me. Thank you all.

Next, the people I’ve had in my life for years – the best friends who have put up with so much of my mental health it is unbelievable, yet are still there for me every single day. Having a friend that, when I was particularly concerned about my parents going away I could nominate to be my surrogate and text all my worry instead so that I wouldn’t ruin their holiday; and that same friend who I could call on late in the evening before I started my treatment to come round and keep me calm because I was getting into a state. Or friends that I know I can message and talk about all the random rubbish and they will tell me the truth and make me see sense, but also take the time to understand and learn about what is going on so that they can help me get better. Even the fact that they are still willing to socialise with me despite the days that my mental health has gotten in the way and made me rubbish company, they still give me the chance and for that I am getting the opportunities to practice and keep getting better. The last few weeks have been hard, but having people to socialise with and talk to when I need to sort out my head has kept me grounded and stopped me locking myself away and letting a depressed mood take over completely, and despite the bad days and how close I have been to spiralling downwards they have helped me still have good days, so for that I am extremely fortunate.

But one of the biggest challenges I have faced, and one of the appreciations it has made me want to make sure is out there for the world is for my parents. Not having them here for a week and actively trying to keep going on my own and not contacting them, even when I was close to crisis, made it impossible to ignore just how much they are a part of my day-to-day life – the normal conversations and contact that anyone would have with their children but also just how much they provide a support network. How often I have a bad day and ring my mum to cry or talk it through so that I can hold it together in front of the rest of the world, or a bad emetophobia day where they provide a significant coping mechanism. Proving I could do it by myself was important and another important step in my recovery, and allowing them time away to relax and not worry about me was even more so, but it also made me grateful for the fact that I do have them there – they are my biggest cheerleaders and people I can turn to no matter what and I am ridiculously lucky to have them. With their support, and the fact I can turn to them on the bad days but equally celebrate the good days with them, I have made it through mental health struggles we weren’t sure I would beat and it is that that gives me reassurance that, with their support, I can do it again this time. So thank you Mum and Dad for everything you put up with and everything you do.

Above all these last few weeks have made me remember just how fortunate I am for the people I have in my life, but also that we need to appreciate those people we have – I am not always an easy person to know, when my mental health is bad and confusing and hard to understand, but they’re all still here and because of that I have a much greater chance of recovery. So never forget the people in your life and always remember to say thank you, and return the favour when they need someone on their side too. So, for all the wonderful people I have in my life – don’t forget I’m always here for you too and I love you all.

Bee x

Under The Spotlight: My Emetophobia

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emetophobia
ɪˌmɛtəˈfəʊbɪə/
noun
extreme fear of vomiting.
It’s ironic that I had planned on writing about my emetophobia today, as my mood has spiralled this afternoon and with it came an overwhelming amount of anxiety…. to the point I’ve just cooked and then thrown away two dinners because I convinced myself they weren’t cooked properly and were too high risk after just one mouthful…. I felt so pathetic not being able to fight the anxiety as I scraped them into the bin…

The emetophobia started creeping in when my anxieties developed at college. I became desperately afraid of vomit and anything to do with it – someone else being ill, myself being ill, someone on TV being ill, even people saying any permutation of the word that wasn’t ‘vomit’ or ‘being sick’ – any other slang term or reference could induce a complete sense of panic and leave me temporarily unable to function.

The emetphobia completely stole my life – I could barely socialise unless it was a completely safe environment and with people who I could trust. I couldn’t do what normal 17 / 18 yo’s did, like going clubbing, and my self-esteem was rock bottom. Nobody thought I’d be able to function normally again.

Another frustrating part about emetophobia is the fact that it induces anxiety and a symptom of anxiety is feeling sick, feeling sick further induces anxiety and makes the emetophobia worse and this is a vicious cycle which means it is hard to get any relief. This led to a variety of behaviours that were all grounded in this inherent fear:

  • If someone was sick on TV I would have to cover my ears and run out of the room until I was sure it was over. I probably looked extremely dramatic clutching my head and curling up in a ball on the stairs still trying to hide from the noise. Despite this we continued to watch medical dramas which, in hindsight, seems a little illogical, but I suppose works sort of like exposure therapy and we could use how strong my reaction was as a way to judge how far I’d come as I started coping better.
  • I had ‘safe’ foods that I knew wouldn’t make me ill and that is what I stuck to, being adventurous, even though I thoroughly enjoy different foods, was a great source of anxiety. I am so grateful that I can enjoy food again but, as today proves only to well, depending on my head space I can still be slightly too obsessive over ensuring high risk foods are properly cooked and haven’t gone off.
  • If I felt sick then I would sit up all night, until my body could no longer resist the exhaustion and fight off sleep. This is because my association with being sick is that it happens in the night – that was when I was sick more often as a child – so if I didn’t sleep then this couldn’t happen.
  • I became addicted to Polo mints because mint is commonly considered to reduce nausea. I could go through multiple packets in a day and, as I was popping them so frequently, had to take to breaking each one into quarters just to make a pack last a little longer.
    • I actually gave polo’s up as a present for my mum’s birthday one year when I was starting to overcome just how severe my phobia was and, to this day, I can’t eat Polo’s without feeling sick (definitely some irony in that). In saying that I have since switched to other brands of mints but my reliance on them does not go as deep, it is only on a really bad day to I find that I desperately need them, the rest of the time they are a ‘nice to have’.
  • I became obsessed with Gaviscon. This started because the GP could not work out a reason behind why I always felt sick. I would drink it straight from the bottle and in quantities greater than recommended, particularly before bed, and carry around sachets in case I was overcome by feeling more sick than normal when out. This behaviour I could justify wasn’t a problem because it was prescribed by a doctor. Again, this behaviour has diminished but it is still rare you will find me without a few sachets of Gaviscon in my bag and a bottle in the cupboard.
  • Digging my nails into my arm and stomach. Initially this started as biting on my knuckle and the pain gave some release to the feeling sick, I’m not sure when the biting became digging my nails in but I’m pretty sure it was because hurting my arm was easier to hide when I was sat in a lecture theatre or out for dinner, particularly from my parents. And I’m not going to pretend I have broken this habit; the scars on my arm, which remains littered with fresh marks during a bad week, prove otherwise.
  • Texting my mum. This is still my number one coping mechanism and must drive her crazy but because she once told me that she can tell that my behaviour differs when I’m genuinely ill and likely to be sick, I started asking her if I was ‘acting funny’ multiple times a day. I will still ring or text her from any situation to ask or just let her know I feel sick so that she can tell me that I won’t be. And thankfully this reassurance is now often the only thing I need to do so that I can control my anxiety.

The fact I managed to get to a point I could work in care with children and young adults for whom vomiting was something I would have to face is something I am both extremely proud of and, when I think about how bad I was, I am still surprised by – there was a point I don’t think any of us thought I would make it this far. I think it does help that, due to the nature of the life limiting conditions of the individuals, it was not a sort of sickness that I could catch and I don’t think I will ever be able to remain completely calm in the face of a stomach bug, but at least it no longer rules my life… except for on a bad day.

But the emetophobia is something I will always carry around with me, even though I’ve come so far, and will still creep up on me and take back control. Like a few weeks ago when a friend came round and said he’d been sick the day before, he wasn’t sure if it was a bug… so I am ashamed to say I followed him around and anti-bac gelled everything he touched when he wasn’t looking… I even threw the pen used away…

Bee x

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My Mental Health Story: The Beginning – School and College

~ Bee x ~ 1 Comment

So, how far back do we look to get to the beginning of my mental health story? I guess we should look at secondary school and college because that’s when there started to be a recognisable problem disrupting my life that I needed to do something about and was the first major period of challenge I faced in my mental health…

School:

I was extremely academic at school and heavily invested in extra-curricular opportunities – whilst working towards my GCSE’s I was also a Peer Supporter, English Prefect, Senior Prefect, Tutor Representative, Head of the Prom Committee and created a Peer Support Website that won the Princess Diana Anti-Bullying Award. I was always striving to be the best I could be and a lot of my anxieties and subsequent diagnoses are reflected in that attitude, the early signs of what was to come. I could never achieve highly enough, even the highest grade wouldn’t be enough because the score itself wasn’t perfect. And, in some ways, this served me well – I achieved a fair number of really good grades – but it is this unhealthy attitude that developed into all the things I still struggle with today. In hindsight, now we know what to look for, I guess a lot of the signs of Borderline Personality Disorder are apparent back then.

College:

This is where things began to get problematic. I went from a big fish in a small pond, so involved in school life that I was completely content and confident, to the tiniest of fish in the widest lake I had ever been in… new people, new subjects, new pressures put on us by the college, and the underlying fear of having less than a year to decide what to do with the rest of your life. And this is where I started to unravel.

The perfectionism I experienced at school was still there, but the environment didn’t allow me to flourish with it like school had. From a series of hypnoanalysis sessions, we established that the development of my anxiety disorder had a lot to do with a few key points:

  • The limited amount of extra-curricular opportunities meant my already unstable identity had nothing to be defined by. I was used to being known as the person who did everything, tried to help everyone and took on positions of responsibility. I was completely lost without them, although I didn’t realise it at the time, and it is certainly related to many of my BPD traits.
  • Without those positions of responsibility, I didn’t have a strong identity, but I also didn’t have as much opportunities to seek reassurance and do things to be liked. This, I am ashamed to say, has always been one of my biggest motivators with anything I do and is all due to my inherent fear of rejection – which I can confidently say I’ve struggled with for as long as I remember.
  • This fear of rejection goes hand in hand with a fear of control which, unbeknownst to me at the time, is one of the contributing factors that led to the most crippling mental health issues of my teenage years: Emetophobia – fear of vomiting.
    • I will dedicate the next post to my emetophobia because it is far too large a part of my life to give just a few lines

I didn’t have a normal teenage life. Particularly between ages 16 and 18 when the emetophobia and anxiety ruled my life. I could barely socialise and that triggered feelings of worthlessness. I couldn’t go to town clubbing or drink with my friends, I was hardly able to celebrate my own 18th birthday, let alone anyone else’s, which is devastating when you desperately want to be a part of it and your mental illness just won’t let you.

It was clear enough to everyone close to me that I wasn’t coping in the real world that my best friends have since admitted that they never thought I’d ever recover enough to make it to University. So, I guess making it is something to be proud of. I was determined to get better. I went to the doctors and asked for help, but they referred me to the Community Mental Health team who sent me to a counsellor for CBT and the patronisation of the ‘tell me where mummy and daddy live’ cliché she spouted angered and upset me in equal measures and I never went back. So, I googled and researched and eventually found another option to try – hypnoanalysis – and thankfully that got me to a place where I started to be able to cope a tiny bit better each week. But we can go into that another day.

As we started to see the changes – which mum and I partly judged in a completely scientific manner through a weekly trip to TGI Fridays after my session to see if my anxieties had reduced enough to allow me to begin to eat a bit more normally – I was able to pass my A Levels and accept my place at University and the next chapter of my life began. But I have never fully escaped the anxiety and, on a bad day, the emetophobia can be just as crippling now as it was then; learning to cope with them better and recovering from them are two very different things.

Read what happened next in My Mental Health Story here…

Bee x

Let’s Do This…

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My hands are literally shaking as I write this… this means it is out there… for all I am open about my various mental health struggles, I’ve never put them into such a public domain before and that is petrifying. Add in what my diagnosis entails and the fear of rejection is getting more overwhelming with each word written…

I guess I first started struggling to noticeably struggle with my mental health at the end of Secondary School and going into college, around 16 years old, but in hindsight the attitudes and coping mechanisms developed long before this. At college it became crippling, my anxiety levels peaked and with it came emetophobia – the fear of vomiting. Many parts of my life completely stopped and I was sure I’d never get any semblance of a normal life again, but with a lot of hard work, hypnoanalysis and incredible family and friends I made it through and even made it to Uni… but we can talk more about that journey another day.

With University came a whole host of other issues, triggered by my desperation to live a ‘normal’ life and therefore not taking the time I needed to really recover from my anxiety disorder and decide what I wanted to do with my life, so I took the decision to leave and return home with the aim of going back when I knew what I really wanted to do.

Fast forward six years and my mental health issues never went away, they just got different. On a bad day my anxiety disorder and emetophobia can be utterly debilitating. But we’ll get to that. I ended up in an extremely unhealthy relationship and on antidepressants which I decided weren’t working and took myself off and this, in turn, led to me having seizures… I lost my licence, the job I loved and my independence, and after years of doctors and tests it turns out that they, too, are just another manifestation of my mental health and a diagnosis of Non-Epileptic Attack Disorder (NEAD) on 21st March 2018.

And after having been put back on anti-depressants which triggered a hypomanic phase (actually, that’s a funny story… I’ll tell you sometime), I was diagnosed on 16th April 2018 with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). It’s been a whirlwind, it explains so much but creates so many more challenges, and there will only be more going forward with a caseworker and treatment still to come.

So that’s where we are, and why we’re here – I have been writing since before this started and I thought, why keep this to myself? BPD is such a stigmatised disorder, and so much more prevalent than people realise, but how will we change that stigma if no-one is willing to come forward and talk about it. So here I am – we can talk about how I got to where I am, and join me on my journey going forward as I start treatment and face whatever else life has to throw at me… Hopefully we can have some fun too!

Bee x