Back to school means backpacks, homework, packed lunches...and for a lot of people with emetophobia, one giant thought:
HERE COMES STOMACH BUG SEASON.
Someone throws up in your kid's classroom. A child comes home saying their stomach hurts. You hear that a stomach bug is “going around.” Suddenly you're asking questions, checking who was absent, counting 48–72 hours, changing handwashing routines, monitoring your kids, avoiding activities, or lying in bed wondering:
Is tonight going to be the night?
But what if the problem isn't stomach bug season?
What if it's the way we've learned to live during it? Or should we say "avoid living" during it?
In this episode, Katie and Ally talk honestly about their own back-to-school fears, kids vomiting at school, anticipatory anxiety, the desperate desire for a “crystal ball,” and all the ways emetophobia convinces us that if we just prepare enough, monitor enough, or avoid enough, maybe we can finally feel safe.
Except...there's going to be another September next year.
And another one after that.
So instead of spending September through spring trying to “get through” the scary months, we're asking a different question:
How do we actually LIVE during them?
We talk about radical acceptance, uncertainty, dropping safety behaviors, magical thinking, the “and then what?” exercise, resisting 48–72 hour countdowns, letting our kids go to school, and accepting that sometimes we can do everything “right” and still get sick.
And Ally gives us a new name for stomach bug season:
The season of letting go.
The season of opportunity.
The season of challenging ourselves.
The season of retraining our brains.
Because our kids only get one childhood.
We only get one life.
And we don't want to spend most of it waiting for the next person to throw up.
The goal isn't to stay perfectly safe.
The goal is realizing we don't have to.
