What is it you fear the most?

[Hypo]

Have you ever tried to get to the bottom of your HA?

What is you fear the most about being ill?

Is it dying?
leaving family/friends behind?
The process of dying?
Going through horrible treatments?

No one wants to get sick obviously, but what is it that really scares you?

For me it is leaving my kids behind but I think with a lot of soul searching it has a hell of a lot to do with my fear of losing control and my brain latches on to HA. I am scared of losing control and know there isn't a huge deal I can do as I believe that when your time is up it is up. You can not smoke, have a healthy diet but if it your time to go then that is it.

I have always been fearful, I am scared of being scared and I find the world a hard place to live. I don't like the unpredictability or fragile-ness (is that even a word??) of it all. I don't like that tomorrow I could wake up and a loved one could die, or my husband could run off, or I could lose my house etc etc. My dad basically left me, doesn't care about me and that has made me a very scared person and distrustful of people and the world around me.

Now I know where my fears come from I have to hard task of working on accepting that I have little control over certain parts of life.

If you haven't sat and done a lot of thinking about where your fears come from I recommend that you do.

[cpe1978]

Haven't got time to say anything other than that is an excellent post and very very true and relevant. It also shows what fantastic progress you are making towards understanding and dealing with the mechanisms that underpin health anxiety.

[Chelsea35]

My fear is death even though there is nothing anyone can do it still gets to me I'm only 17 but I look at my whole family and think am going to loose them all no matter what I do and to be honest I get really upset may sound sad but no one really understand how it makes me feel and when I tell people they just take the mic if am honest I try not to let anything get to me but it just gets me into trouble at college it was like that at school to I have a big attitude problem and I don't know what has brought this on because I was never that sort of kid I used to be a kid that didn't say anything to anyone and since year 9 of high school I have started to think to myself screw you all basically because I have had enough

[Fishmanpa]

My cancer recurring. I have a 50/50 chance in the next 16 months.

Positive thoughts

[clover1201]

I fear the unknown - the unknown of death, of my childrens life without me, the uncertainity of any legacy im to leave. Im selfish, I want to live, I want to watch my children grow up, I want to see them get married and have their own children. I want them to see the love that their children bring them, the same love they have brought me. I want to grow old with my husband, i want to make new friends, see new places and be everything i can be for everyone i can be it for. I want to beat this beast, I want to show it that it may have one a few battles but i won the war. I want to grow in love for God, grow in faith and then, when im certain of my salvation and done all of the above i will be ready and willing to go home.

[Ats666]

Me too I fear leaving my children, the thought if their life without me and them forgetting me. It's such a horrible fear.
Great post xx

[StephanieM]

For me its what happens after death Im terrified to even think about it, the idea of eternity and the unknown. Sounds so stupid but for example I can't watch any science programmes about the universe or anything like that because I get so freaked out and scared. If I think about death before bedtime I won't sleep. Im only 25 but I've lost a lot of my family including my dad really young so I guess it stems from this

[Tanner40]

Great post, Hypo. You're making excellent progress in finding out where your anxiety comes from. My younger brother died on my eighth birthday. Death has always been my greatest dear. Rationally, I know that none of us get out of this world alive.

[jared]

Dying and having The Lord Jesus say to me, "Depart from me I never knew you" because my relationship with God is not as strong as it should be. Next to that is the most prominent fear of the method I go, which I'm thinking is artherosclerosis and heart attack which my dad had a few years prior.

[Hypo]

I fear the unknown - the unknown of death, of my childrens life without me, the uncertainity of any legacy im to leave. Im selfish, I want to live, I want to watch my children grow up, I want to see them get married and have their own children. I want them to see the love that their children bring them, the same love they have brought me. I want to grow old with my husband, i want to make new friends, see new places and be everything i can be for everyone i can be it for. I want to beat this beast, I want to show it that it may have one a few battles but i won the war. I want to grow in love for God, grow in faith and then, when im certain of my salvation and done all of the above i will be ready and willing to go home.


This is a lot of it for me as well. Except the God part as I am an agnostic.

I have just watched three of my children lose their father to cancer, he would have been 40 on the 8th Jan. It has been heartbreaking but also quite eye opening, no matter what, we do go on when we lose someone. My children while heart broken are still going on and living their lives. There will always be a massive hole in their lives, they will always miss him and it is awful how he never got see them grow up.

But I want to ask you, and I am not picking on your post, just that it resembles a lot of my fears too... every parent feels this way, right? no one wants to die young and leave their kids behind so why do you (me and others too) take it to the extreme and think we are dying all the time?

It's perfectly normal to worry about leaving your kids behind, every parent would have felt that fear to some extent but why do we take it to the extreme? Is it because our brains are wired differently? or is it something deeper in ourselves?

My mum had similar fears but she didn't have HA or anxiety in general. She put that fear into the back of her mind and lives life with it only crossing her mind for seconds once in a blue moon. Why can't we do the same?

---------- Post added at 09:07 ---------- Previous post was at 08:59 ----------


Great post, Hypo. You're making excellent progress in finding out where your anxiety comes from. My younger brother died on my eighth birthday. Death has always been my greatest dear. Rationally, I know that none of us get out of this world alive.

That is the only thing we are guaranteed, which kinds of sucks.

I am sorry for your loss, that must have been awful and very scary.

My 10 year old has HA since his father got cancer and died because like you, he has seen how fragile life is from such a young age but is too young to put those fears into perspective. Going through such a loss at such a young age is terrifying. It was only nights ago my 14 year old told me that it finally hit him that everyone he loves is going to die. My 10 year old is now in therapy and they are all having grief counselling.

One thing I have found that is talking openly about death and dying has been good for my HA. I guess it is the non avoidance thing. I sat with my ex husbands dead body twice, watched my children sob over it. strangley enough it took some of the fear out of it for me.

I am sorry if this sets anyone off, that isn't my intention. My only intention is to get people to dig a lot deeper if they can.

I am FAR from over it. HA still rules most of my life. I am still scared every single day of well.. everything. I just now know that for *me* my cure is in acceptance of the things we can't control and death itself and lack of avoidance. How I get that full acceptance is the tricky part.

---------- Post added at 09:13 ---------- Previous post was at 09:07 ----------


Me too I fear leaving my children, the thought if their life without me and them forgetting me. It's such a horrible fear.
Great post xx

They would never, ever forget you.

My children have all but built a shrine to their father. They got a hamster and named it after their dad. We have photos everywhere. It has only been three weeks but I know they will never, ever forget him.

My fear is that while three of mine have two very involved step parents, legally they have no rights. Also, my husband has bi-polar and I have five kids altogether. I don't think with his illness he would cope as they have special needs too. My mum isn't getting any younger and their step-mum while wonderful, may very well re-marry as she is only 28 and perhaps then she won't want to have three step children from her deceased husband living with her and a new partner.

My husband is an amazing father but when he gets ill five kids would be too much for him and while I know he would always try his very best to keep them all together if I died his mental health would go downhill and the reality is there would be times he couldn't cope without loads of help and I don't know who would give that to him. I need to do a will and give him some legal rights to my first three children because as it stands, he would have no say in what happens to them.


I am not saying this to be depressing, I just fully believe that if we can openly talk about our fears we can begin to heal.

[unsure_about_this]

dying, treatment. I did a placement in a funeral directors in 2002-2003 doing my NVQ in IT (why the training provider sent me do my placement I do not know, nobody at the training provider wanted to do their placement here, we all joked it will not be us, or other people, by accident I saw two bodies lying in their coffins in the chapel of rest.

---------- Post added at 12:51 ---------- Previous post was at 11:20 ----------

Also leaving my family behind, not be able to do things if I was ill.