Fear of vomiting or emetophobia as it is sometimes called, can take two forms. It can either involves a fear of being sick yourself and/or a fear of other people being sick and often the two coincide.

Fear of vomiting can stop you doing all kinds of things. Sometimes it feels like you have to build your whole life around avoiding situations that might make you sick – like eating out in public or on trains, buses, planes or even on car journeys. There have even been cases of women who wanted to have children but avoided becoming pregnant because they were so worried about morning sickness.

Fear of vomiting is surprisingly common and usually comes from a traumatic event that occurred in the past. Maybe you can remember it and maybe you can’t according to the severity of it. Sometimes the subconscious mind will even cause amnesia as a way for you not to remember the event. However, in this extreme events… even if you do not remember the event, it can still cause stress when need to confront a vomiting situation, whether it be your own or someone else’s.  Whatever the stressful situation or event was that took place it results in an association being made in your mind between vomiting and fear.

The good news is that you can let go of it if you have a desire to. The human mind has the power to heal certain conditions just by using your imagination. Whatever you imagine, if you do it on a repeated basis will become a reality in the subconscious mind because the subconscious mind does not understand the difference between an imagined or a real memory. Therefore you can create new positive memories to replace the old negative ones of the past.

It allows negative fears of the past to stay in the past, replacing negative memories with new positive ones bringing them into the present.  Knowing that, when you make a decision having to do with being around people who vomit or where it may occur often like hospitals or doctor’s offices or have a situation when you are in contact with such people, realise that your initial response is not of the actual occurrence but 90% of that decision or feeling comes from the past. This is the case in all of our decisions. The decisions comes from how we feel about it from past experiences and only 10% from the actual events. So allow yourself to live in the moment and not worry about the past and let go of those fears – treat each new situation as it occurs and use only the 10% response instead of the 90% past events.

Therefore, allow hypnotherapy and counselling to assist you to:

• Calm down your emotions around the thought of vomiting.
• Allow you to disassociate the fear and the vomiting and allow you to relax with the possibility of either yourself or someone else vomiting
• Allow you to manage such an experience and lead your life in a normal and satisfying way again.

For further information contact us on (03) 5223 2370 or via email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.   

Karen Holt Clinical Hypnotherapy and Counselling

Clinical Hypnotherapist

AMAHS, MASCH, NFH