306- CBT4Emeto- 1

I'll try to keep my entries about this particular series of CBT series trigger free, but if you suffer also from emeto, beware of the topic. Therefore, trigger warning always applies in them.

Well, today I had my very first CBT for emeto and my 3 other co-morbidly phobias that go hand in hand with : copro, hemo, and carno-phobias. 


Just like our first series of therapy sessions, which was, I remind you, for social phobia, I made a list of situations which trigger my common reactions from any of these 4 phobias, and rated them on a relative scale. This list was compiled by copy pasting this blog entry and dividing into keywords, and took me 2 weeks to make. 

Contrary to social situations which I could rate between 10 and 100 at the start of it, the one for these emeto-ones are rated 90-95 and 100. I even told my therapist that some of them are so tough, that I'd rate them 1000 if I could. 

In today's session, I could barely talk. I explained that I had been having a knot in my stomach and that I've been feeling super anxious about my therapy, due to the level of difficulty these phobias give me. I handed the printed list, which is probably very partial, but at least, it's a start. 

She asked me a few questions to decipher a couple things in my list, and we made an appointment for 11/01/2018 and I have only one exposure to do, from my entire list. 

I also asked a clarification on how I could have developed such intricate phobias, even outside of causal traumatic experiences, and she explained that due to some of the experiences I'd told her about, it was logical for some of them, and that due to my absolute avoidant acts and lack of support and diagnosis throughout my lifetime, that my phobias expanded to other areas. 

The root cause is like I would've guessed : the overall atmosphere of insecurity, lack of security, from my various traumas ( read daily impacts 4 - cptsd   and other cptsd entries for instance, or just plain PTSD, even though some of the entries overlap) and thus created many forms of anxiety, such as my GAD, social phobia, and other phobias. 

Now, she said that knowing this won't necessarily help, but I think that for me, having the mental image of a ball of yarn full of traumas and subsequent mental illnesses, I can envision myself working to unravel the yarn from any possible end, by pulling on it until it comes apart and loosened.