Travel/Healthy Anxiety? Please help.

Hi. I’m a female in my early 20’s. I’ve had anxiety since I was extremely young, (it was formally diagnosed by a therapist and not doctor along with some other things about 2 weeks ago) that has only escalated since my father passed away 5 years ago from accidental overdose. After my fathers passing I began to become somewhat of a hypochondriac. I’m overly aware of my body and any time I feel any sort of pain or odd sensation I immediately think I’m going to die. I’ve been to numerous doctors and specialists, including neurologists, gastrologists, had CT scans, too many to count ER visits, all which have ended in me being told I’m completely fine and healthy although I don’t feel as though I am. When I spoke to the therapist last week we talked about how my fear of something being wrong with me and me dying randomly most likely stems from my father’s sudden passing when I was 17. It’s almost as if in my mind I’m telling myself if I detect something going wrong early I can stop it, which just results in more anxiety. Anytime I go to travel somewhere outside my city (even if it’s just the city over) I have to make sure I have my medical cards on me and that there’s a hospital close just in case something happens. I even plan my vacations now making sure there’s a hospital close to where I’ll be.

But here is my problem. I’m in my early 20’s and I want to travel. I was overly sheltered growing up and never traveled anywhere outside of my city, especially without my family. I wasn’t allowed to go places with friends and was always told that if I did I’d be kidnapped or something bad would happen. That’s only taught me to be terrified of going anywhere alone, especially as a female. I took my first trip “alone” a few months ago (a 30 minute flight, I never left the state and was 4 hours from home) & I remember panicking the whole hour drive to the airport, I kept seeing “floaters” going across my eyes the whole time, I could feel my heartbeat in the middle of my back when I was sitting in the airport waiting to board & I basically stayed in my hotel room as I’d convinced myself I was sick and had a fever that could possibly get worse (although I wasn’t and it didn’t) and was terrified to go out. This all happened because I traveled 4 hours away from home alone to see friends visiting from another country. Now here is the real issue. I want to travel to Australia (7000+ miles away from me) in less than 5 months, alone, to see friends for a “business” kind of trip. Everything in me wants to go but I am so terrified of traveling and being so far away from home alone. I’m not sure if I’m more scared of having panic attacks so far from home and not being able to run back to my safe space (home or a hospital) or if I’m legitimately scared something IS wrong with me and I won’t be able to run to a hospital to have it checked out. Home and hospitals have become my safe space it seems like and if I can’t run to either because I’m in another country I don’t know how I’ll react. I’m also deathly afraid of airplanes and the flight to where I’d be going is 15 hours and I’ve been on flights before where I’ve convinced myself I can’t breath & almost pass out and I don’t want to go through a 15 hour flight suffering with things like that. I’ve even caused myself to panic even more by creating a scenario in my head where I feel like I can’t breathe and alert flight attendants and it causes a huge scene on the flight which then would direct all of the attention on to me (which would terrify me more) and then either I start to panic even more because I realize I’m on a 15 hour flight I can’t leave OR somehow the flight gets grounded because of me. I’m so so so scared of these things happening.


I want to travel. I want to live my life. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity that could really sky rocket my career but I am so so scared and I don’t know what to do. I’ve finished my assessments with a therapist and was told I have Generalized Anxiety, Major Depressive Disorder, PTSD, a Disassociative Disorder (and something else I can’t remember relating to the whole needing to go to a hospital anytime something goes wrong thing) but all of the referrals for therapists are on hold until ATLEAST July because they’re booked with patients. The trip would be in October which would only give me less than 3 months to work with a therapist when I’d rather be working on myself now.

Basically what I’m asking is, does anyone have anything somewhat similar to my issue that they’ve found a solution for? Or does anyone have any books or anything I can read to help myself? I’m willing to try almost anything at this point because I don’t want to miss out on any more opportunities.