Extreme anxiety over childs health. Help please :(

[specialneedsmumoftwo]

Hi,

I think I have a major issue with anxiety! Particularly in relation to my children and hospitals.

My son was 10 weeks prem so we had a bumpy start to parenthood and spent a lot of time in hospitals.

Hes now 4, we have a daughter too. In the past couple of years my son has also been admitted to hospital twice for suspected meningitis.

Recently, I am extremely anxious about everyday life with my kids. I know that some people panic about serious illnesses, but Im the opposite.

I worry about things like falling whilst playing and injuring themselves, becoming ill suddenly or things like choking etc. I cant sit and watch them play together without panicing that something terrible will happen. I cant enjoy anything.

This has got 1000x worse since my daughter had an accident and tipped her pram and got a large bump on her head. When things happen, I freeze. By the end of the day I feel sick with nerves & dry gag.

I am petrified of the prospect of having to be in hospital with them. On my darkest days I wonder how the hell I can live my life like this forever....and think that I wasnt cut out for this parenthood worry :(

I just feel like I am wishing away their younger years by wanting them to grow up and get more robust!

:( :(

Hi @specialneedsmumoftwo

So sorry to hear you're going through such hellish anxiety every day. It's bound to intensify and take a real toll on your health at different levels until you get some focused support. You might have a few different factors interacting, mental and emotional. A trained professional would help you get to the bottom of why you can't relax and switch off the worry button when appropriate. You've had a series of critical experiences with your son and because nobody has helped you process them effectively they've set up an obsessional pattern of - I would guess - feeling helpless and powerless to ultimately shield your little ones from harm. Unfortunately, the catastrophic-scale scenarios like premature birth and meningitis episodes have become mixed up in your mind with everyday bumps and scrapes that no parent can completely protect their kids from. That's a confusion of levels of risk and probability of danger, and although you might understand that at an intellectual level, emotionally the untreated trauma you've been through needs addressing and healing.

Have you spoken to your GP about what you're going through? S/he could help you get some short term counselling with a CBT therapist to look at how you can challenge the anxious beliefs and thoughts. That could be very useful. You might also benefit from medication for a while, but that would be for health professionals to assess. If you're already using medication then speak to your GP because it's clearly not being effective. Longer term I'd suggest you strengthen your support network as much as you can by opening up to anyone you trust not to judge you. I imagine you might really fear people thinking you're somehow not coping as a mum, but actually you're suffering from a system overload as a result of having exceptionally strong maternal impulses. You just desperately need help to manage them more effectively so that you're healthy and can enjoy motherhood. If you can afford it, longer term private counselling could help you explore patterns in your background that might've set you up to feel expected to be responsible for others at unreasonable (even impossible) levels.

I wish you well and hope something I've said proves useful.

Very sorry to hear you're suffering. Please do get help - it's important for your DC. My mum was like you and it's left me a my brother with long term anxiety issues (me OCD about others safety, my bro extreme health anxiety). She inadvertently taught us to be scared of everything.