The BrightLife Center for The Rapid Relief of Emetophobia (Fear of Vomiting)

How Do I Know If I Have Emetophobia?

Worries and doubts are common for most people, at least some of the time. However, for some people, worry becomes so excessive, it monopolizes much or most of their time and energy, robbing them of their ability to interact effectively with others, or to attend responsibly to other important activities in life. For those with an ongoing, incapacitating worry that they will become nauseated or vomit (or have to witness others vomiting), to the degree it shuts them down in life, such individuals could be said to be suffering from emetophobia.

Most individuals who seek treatment for an excessive fear of vomiting at first have no idea there is even a clinical name or description for the problem they are having. Many are surprised to learn that this particular expression of anxiety-related challenge is somewhat common in our culture.


Why Is Treatment of Emetophobia Using Standard Forms of Medical or Psychotherapeutic Intervention So Often A Challenge?

As with most anxiety problems, the first attempts at securing professional help are directed to the person's primary physician. Believing emetophobia to be a medical and/or mental disease or disorder, many of these physicians will quickly prescribe anti-anxiety or anti-depressant medications in an attempt to get the symptoms under control. Others will refer their patients for standard psychotherapy, and yet others will refer their patients to medical and/or psychological individuals or organizations that purport to specialize in treating phobias.

The "state-of-the-art" for the treatment of phobias in traditional psychotherapy uses either cognitive-behavioral forms of therapy ("CBT"), psychopharmacology (psychoactive drugs or medications), or both. CBT most often takes the forms either of

1. Standard talk-based therapy — most often the case with relatively inexperienced therapists who just haven't come to understand yet that you can't "talk someone out of" a problem with emetophobia (or any other phobia, for that matter), or
   
   
2. Graduated exposure therapy (also known as desensitization or — in its most excruciating from — flooding), in which the client is encouraged to endure ever longer periods of time in increasingly greater proximity to their greatest fear — the vision (usually by way of film) of others vomiting.

While effective in some cases, both of these approaches seem to suffer from serious limitations.

Standard talk-based therapy

To begin with, it's clear that you can't simply "talk someone out of" an emetophobia problem. After all, if that were possible, you'd have done it for yourself a long time ago, wouldn't you?

Standard talk-based therapy tends not to work when dealing with emetophobia for one very good reason — emetophobia is not a consciously-driven problem. After all, you didn't wake up one day and consciously decide to have this problem, did you? Of course not.

Well, if you didn't consciously decide to have this problem, there's really only one other part of you that could be responsible for creating this problem — and that's your subconscious mind.

The fact is, emetophobia is driven almost exclusively by totally subconscious processes. This is why, despite your best conscious efforts, you've been all but completely frustrated with all your conscious efforts to this point. It also explains why this problem has felt so far beyond your control.

Because both self-talk and standard talk therapy are very conscious processes, little or nothing changes at the subconscious level, the place you really need to go in order to successfully impact this problem. Attempting to use conscious processes to alter an almost totally subconsciously-driven problem is therefore almost always an exercise in futility — you're dealing with apples and oranges here. No wonder things don't change!

Graduated exposure therapy

On the other hand, graduated exposure therapy calls for clients to endure — often over painfully protracted periods of time — direct exposure to whatever the client perceives as potentially dangerous: germs, children, illness in others, and so on. Although the logic behind this approach is understandable, the fact is, this is an unnecessarily painful way to cause a person decrease their sensitivity to whatever is so fearful — especially when there are a number of vastly preferable options available that are at once powerful, effective and immediately available to help a person eliminate the unwanted emotional reactions either to the sight of others who are sick, or who fear themselves to be in imminent danger of themselves becoming sick.

At BrightLife, we feature some of the most powerful mental repatterning techniques available anywhere. While powerful, they are also amazingly straightforward in their application, and when applied conscientiously, virtually always effective — no matter how many other programs you may have tried and failed at in the past.


Just What Is "The BrightLife Method"? — And How Can You Be So Sure Your Program Will Work For Me?

From our standpoint, a lasting, permanent solution for emetophobia is disarmingly simple. We approach our work in this area very similarly to how we approach our work with any irrational fear — which is really all we do at BrightLife Phobia And Anxiety Release Center.

Here's the idea:

You must understand that it's never what's out there that causes, or "forces" a person to respond with anxiety to a given event, situation or circumstance. Instead, it's a person's individual perception of that object; it's how we each mentally interpret what's out there — it's the meaning we each unconsciously assign to a given event that determines how we feel about it.

When we teach you to change the meaning you unconsciously assign to a given anxiety-provoking "trigger" (e.g. "If I get too close to that person, I could catch what he has, and then I'd probably get really sick"), you literally change how your brain perceives it. When you change how your brain perceives a particular trigger, you can't help but feel — and therefore respond — totally differently to it. No drugs and no exposure therapy necessary!

Check out this powerful (unsolicited!) testimonial, received just this past Christmas:

At BrightLife, we feature some of the most powerful mental repatterning techniques available anywhere. While powerful, they are also amazingly straightforward in their application, and when applied conscientiously, virtually always effective — no matter how many other programs you may have tried and failed at in the past.

What Makes "The BrightLife Method" So Uniquely Effective?

As specialists in human behavior, we at BrightLife Phobia And Anxiety Release Center are expert at identifying the way our clients individually think about the things they fear, and then literally changing it at the level of perception.

And here's what great about that: Consider that whenever you change your perception of anything — it doesn't matter what it is — you can't help but FEEL differently about it — even if you didn't believe you could.

And isn't that what you really want — to change how you FEEL when encountering nausea or vomiting, so you just can't FEEL so irrationally fearful about it anymore, no matter how hard you try?

Our work is so effective, we have been featured on numerous local, national and even international print, radio and television, including our appearances in the Montreal Gazette, KNX 1070 NewsRadio in Los Angeles, Esquire Magazine, as well as the Discovery Health Channel's six-part television series, Things That Go Bump: Facing Our Fears. On that program, Dr. Robert Mantell assisted a client to eliminate an intense twenty-year phobia in just 15 minutes! See the video here!

2010 W. Avenue K, # 644
Lancaster, CA 93536

email: info@fearintopower.com TOLL-FREE: (866) LIFE-NOW

BrightLife Phobia and Anxiety Release Center has been awarded the prestigious "A Rating" for outstanding Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction by the Southland Better Business Bureau!
	BrightLife's Founder and Executive Director Robert Mantell, Ph.D. is a member in good standing of the American Counseling Association (Membership #06162446).
	BrightLife's Founder and Executive Director Robert Mantell, Ph.D. is a member of the American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress.
	BrightLife's Founder and Executive Director Robert Mantell, Ph.D. is a member of the National Center for Crisis Management.

	BrightLife's Founder and Executive Director Robert Mantell, Ph.D. is a member of the California Counseling Association.
	BrightLife's Founder and Executive Director Robert Mantell, Ph.D. is a member of the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors.

BrightLife Phobia & Anxiety Release Center is a division of:
BrightLife Coaching, Consulting & Training Services, Inc.

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