If you're a mum who finds herself checking the thermometer every thirty minutes, Googling symptoms at 2am and still not feeling reassured, or lying awake listening to the baby monitor long after you should be asleep, this post is for you.
If your child's illness seems to affect you differently to other mums, there's likely a very good reason for that. And it's not because you're uptight, dramatic, or not cut out for this.
When Your Child Gets Ill and It Feels Like So Much More Than Just a Bug
#nurserylife is basically a rite of passage but it doesn't make the constant barrage of bugs any easier to deal with.
However, for some mums, every illness feels like so much more than just a bug.
Your child has a cold and you are so, so anxious. The logical part of you knows they're probably fine but another part of you is absolutely convinced that this could be something serious. Will you spot the signs in time? Will you know when to get help?
You check the thermometer and then you check it again thirty minutes later because what if it was wrong? You Google the symptoms, scrolling through NHS pages and parenting forums hoping to find the certainty and safety you're desperately searching for.
And does it help? For about thirty seconds, maybe.
But then the anxiety comes rushing back and you need to check again.
Oh, and you also might be having to pretend you're completely fine about the whole thing because your partner or the people around you don't quite understand why you're "so stressy" about what is probably just a virus, which means that you're carrying all of that anxiety completely alone. Which is exhausting.
Here's What Might Actually Be Going On
I work with this all the time as a therapist. A client will come to me feeling completely at her wit's end because she can't seem to switch her brain off. She's confused about why she's so anxious; she wasn't like this before she had children. She's exhausted and just wants to enjoy being a mum.
But when we start digging together, this anxiety almost never came out of nowhere.
She starts to tell me her story and mentions something like a really difficult birth or that her baby spent time in the NICU. There is often a moment where something felt really, really wrong and she didn't know if everything was going to be okay with either herself or someone else.
These experiences can leave a mark which is often invisible, even to the person carrying it, and this can often show up later as anxiety.
When your brain lives through something really scary (something that was too much to fully process at the time), it doesn't file that memory away neatly with everything else. It keeps it on standby so that you will be ready to react at a moment's notice if anything vaguely similar comes up.
So when your child gets ill, your brain isn't just responding to a temperature and a runny nose.
It's responding to the worry about the illness in the present and ALSO to that scary thing in the past that never quite got processed.
The brain works on the premise of 'better safe than sorry'. If something big and frightening happened once, it's going to make absolutely sure it's on its guard going forward so that nothing like that ever happens again. And the way it does that is through anxiety; keeping you alert and on the look-out for danger.
When we look at things this way, is the anxiety really so confusing?
Why Checking and Googling Isn't Helping (Even Though It Makes Complete Sense That You're Doing It)
The checking and Googling makes complete sense because you're looking for safety and certainty in a situation that feels genuinely threatening to your nervous system.
The problem is that the checking and Googling won't help with what's really underneath because the thing that needs attention isn't on any thermometer or NHS website.
While checking might give you temporary relief, it's not going to shift the anxiety in any lasting way if what's really driving it is a scary past experience that is still sitting unprocessed in your nervous system. Your brain is responding not just to your child's current illness but also to the past danger it lived through. And until that past experience gets properly processed, your brain is going to keep responding this way because, as far as it's concerned, keeping you on-edge all the time is keeping you safe.
What Actually Helps: EMDR for Birth Trauma and Health Anxiety
This is where therapy comes in and specifically, where EMDR can be a complete game changer for mums in this situation.
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. While it's a bit of a mouthful to say, it's genuinely one of the most effective evidence-based approaches available for working with this kind of thing. (You might want to Google it).
EMDR isn't talking therapy, which means you can't fall into the trap of only activating the thinking part of your brain while keeping the memory at arm's length which, as I talked about in a recent reel, is exactly what can happen when we stay purely in the cognitive and wonder why we still feel so anxious despite understanding our patterns really well.
Instead, EMDR uses specific techniques to kickstart your brain's own innate, healthy memory filing process. Your brain already wants to file these difficult memories away with everything else. It's just that scary memories can get stuck because they were too much to process at the time they happened, and sometimes our brains need a little bit of help to unstick them.
The process helps your brain to file difficult past experiences as really over. Those memories get stored with everything else rather than kept separate and on high alert. Once those old memories are put to bed, your brain is finally able to respond to situations in the present at face value instead of responding to them through the lens of the past scary thing that felt a bit similar.
What Changes After EMDR
The shift I see in clients after going through this process is genuinely so moving to witness.
Mums who used to spiral at the first sign of a sniffle find that they can respond to their children being ill with the same level of concern as any other mum. A mild temperature no longer sends them into a tailspin. They feel calm and capable rather than terrified and overwhelmed when they take their child to the GP.
They're not less caring or less attentive; they're just no longer being ambushed by the past every time the present throws something vaguely similar their way.
That is what healing actually looks like and it is absolutely available to you if you're open to doing this kind of work.
Ready to Find Out More?
If any of this has landed for you, I'd love to help.
I'm Ruth, a psychotherapist based in Formby, Merseyside, specialising in postnatal anxiety, birth trauma, and the unique challenges faced by mums of young children. I offer face-to-face sessions in Formby and online sessions across the UK.
To get started, head to the link below to book a free 20 minute call; we'll have a chat about where you're at and how I might be able to help.