Emetophobia pregnancy - Symptoms during pregnancy

Being born, two emotions are within us: love and fear. These are natural emotions not connected to what we learn or experience later on in life. As we get older the two emotions act in different ways. With love, we gradually learn to hide that pure emotion behind guards and masks. We create barrier, after barrier, after barrier, hiding our pure love from the world.

With fear it is the opposite. When we are born we fear only two things, loud noises and falling. We are taught fear. When a baby is crawling and watches his mother scream at the top of her lungs and kill a spider with a large object, the baby absorbs the mother's reaction and interprates the spider as a treat. We take on the fears of others and then we interperate them through our own experiences.

For example, a child interperates his fear of falling through the experience of falling from a tree and hurting himself. He now connects his fear of falling with the experience of pain and the knowledge that this pain could be experienced again. We also develop fears from our own unique experiences, for example if a child is attacked by a dog on the street this could teach him to be afraid of dogs.

Emetophobia works in the same way. A child observes her parent's discomfort when they vomit; when she catches a stomach flu at age 8 this fear of vomiting is magnified by their own personal experience. She now associates her fear of being sick with pain and trauma. Alternatively, this overwhelming fear could have developed through her experiences alone. For example, she gets an awful case of food poisoning; this trauma results in a fear of vomiting which extends into adulthood. This fear backed up by experience grows and exands over time leading people with emetophobia having a phobic fear of vomiting.

The conflict between love and fear is one that we feel every day, but for an emetopobic pregnant or a woman wanting to be pregnant this inner conflict is devastating. Emetophobia and pregnancy causes huge problems for them. There is no purer love than a mother has for her child, it fills her entire body. Nothing can compare to the feeling of holding her baby in her arms and looking into its eyes for the first time, it is beyond words. Everything within her is focused on the connection of love she feels for her baby. So to be denied this is heart breaking.

Her fear of being sick and other symptoms of emetophobia feels like a brick wall that goes up as far as the eye can see, she feels it cannot be climbed over or broken through, but she needs the pure love connection she has with her child on the other side of the wall so desperately. She may want to get pregnant but her fear will not allow the pregnancy to happen, or she may already be pregnant but the panic and anxiety is overwhelming her. She lives in constant state of tension, she wants to be the best mother she can be, but her fear drags her into a bottomless pit of negativity.

The chains of emetophobic fear can be broken and the love she has for her child is within reach. The brick wall of her fear was created by her own mind, just as she placed each brick, she can remove each brick. Her love is stronger than her fear. She can use the pure love she feels for her child to motivate her mind to break down the brick wall of fear that her emetophobia causes. Her mind created the fear and her mind is more than capable of destroying it. By visualizing this love before and during her pregnancy, by the time she holds her baby in her arms, her fear will not even register. The love she feels for her baby is so overwhelming that her emetophobic fear will not even cross her mind.