Sorry! Therapy, feature article and more!

Wow, I can’t believe how long it’s been since my last post! I guess I’ll give a quick update because so much has happened in the last few months.

I moved away from my boyfriend across the country to go back to university so you could say that the past few months have been stressful! I’m so swamped with work for school, my job and extracurriculars that I pretty much have no time to relax, and I think that’s why I’ve been so terrible at updating my blog (aka not updating it all!)

In terms of my emetophobia, so much has happened lately I don’t even know where to begin! I’m a journalism student and I’m taking a feature writing class this semester. At the first class we had to come in with pitch ideas for our first feature that we would have to write. Since I had just gotten back from the summer and I had been writing this blog the whole time, I definitely had my emetophobia on my mind. I decided that it would be an interesting idea to wrote about emetophobia because I’m a pretty reputable source to truly understand the information I’m collecting, and also because I think that it’s such an unknown affliction that I think others should know about.

I’ve never been proud of my phobia (obviously) but I also don’t think I’ve been particularly ashamed of it either. What I discovered through blogging is that there are so many people out there who are so scared to reveal their phobia because they think that it’s stupid or silly. This is totally unfair. Emetophobia is pretty widespread (I discovered that it is actually the fifth most common phobia) and yet so many people have never even heard of it.

When I had to explain my idea in front of the whole class I was pretty nervous. I had no idea if my teacher or my classmates would think it would be a good story idea. I was so happy when my teacher really liked the idea and wanted to know more. my classmates started asking me questions about it, genuinely curious. They didn’t think it was stupid, or at least they didn’t show it if they did!

So I have actually written my article already and I am so proud of it. I really want to post it up here but I have actually submitted it to be published in a magazine so I don’t want to post it online until I find out that I’m allowed to do that.

Another really exciting thing that’s happened to me in the past few months is that I started seeing a therapist to try to overcome my phobia. As I mentioned before, I have seen a hypnotherapist in the past and I wanted to try to tackle my phobia head-on this time around. I want to be fully conscious and aware of what is happening and try to conquer my fears, although I know it will take a long time and a lot of money, which is definitely a huge downside.

Therapy is going really well. My therapist, Sara, has been helping me lower my general level of daily anxiety that was apparently really high. She explained to me that when my anxiety is already higher than average on a daily basis because I’m anticipating that someone might throw up at any time, when someone actually does throw up, my anxiety just goes through the roof. If I work on lowering my overall anxiety, then when someone throws up at least my anxiety will be lower to begin with and maybe won’t skyrocket.

I really find it’s helping and she’s helping me get into a positive mindset. I will elaborate more on therapy, specific incidents that have happened recently and more in further posts.

All the best

Marlee

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~ by marlee on November 23, 2009.