When the Future Feels Foggy: Living with Fear of Recurrence
The Shadow That Follows Recovery
For many people who’ve had cancer, finishing treatment doesn’t bring the relief they expected. Instead, it marks the start of a new kind of uncertainty: the fear that the cancer might come back. This is known as fear of recurrence, and it’s one of the most common psychological challenges faced by people living with or beyond cancer.
Psychologists in our Tunbridge Wells clinic, often hear clients saying things like:
“Every ache makes me panic.”
“I don’t let myself plan ahead, just in case.”
“I feel like I’m waiting for bad news.”
Even if scans are clear and your team is optimistic, it can still feel like you’re holding your breath—afraid to trust the future. These feelings are valid. And you don’t have to live in fear forever.
What Fear of Recurrence Feels Like
Fear of recurrence isn’t just occasional worry—it can become a constant, low-level hum in the background of everyday life. For others, it spikes suddenly around scan dates, anniversaries, or health scares. Common experiences include:
Anxiety triggered by physical symptoms
Avoiding follow-up appointments due to fear
Difficulty making long-term plans
Trouble sleeping or relaxing before scans
Increased checking or health monitoring
Feeling detached or unmotivated because of uncertainty
This fear can interfere with work, relationships, and your ability to enjoy the present. And because it often appears after treatment, it can be misunderstood by those around you who assume the “hard part is over.”
Why It’s So Hard to Let Go of the Fear
When you’ve had a cancer diagnosis, you’ve lived through the reality that something can go wrong—even when you feel fine. The body no longer feels like a safe place. And because recurrence is a real (if often small) possibility, fear doesn’t feel irrational.
The brain, trying to protect you, becomes hypervigilant—scanning for symptoms, preparing for disappointment, bracing for bad news. But this protective response can become overwhelming, reinforcing the belief that something bad is just around the corner.
How Therapy Can Help
At The Tunbridge Wells Psychologist, we work with many people experiencing fear of recurrence. Therapy doesn’t try to remove uncertainty—it helps you build a life alongside it, without letting fear dictate your decisions.
1. Validate the Fear, Don’t Fight It
In therapy, we create space to talk openly about the fear—without judgement or forced positivity. This alone can be a relief. You don’t need to pretend to be brave or grateful. It’s okay to say, “I’m scared.”
2. Distinguish Between Fear and Facts
CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) helps you recognise unhelpful thinking patterns—like catastrophising or black-and-white thinking—and develop more balanced, grounded ways to interpret your experiences.
For example, “This pain must mean the cancer is back” can become “This is a new sensation—let’s monitor it without jumping to conclusions.”
3. Learn to Tolerate Uncertainty
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) teaches that fear and uncertainty are part of life—and that we can live meaningfully even with those feelings present. Rather than fighting for perfect certainty (which isn’t possible), we focus on values-led living.
ACT supports people to learn new tools to notice and sit with difficult thoughts, so they no longer control your actions.
4. Soothe the Nervous System
Fear of recurrence often keeps the body in a state of high alert. Therapy can include grounding and regulation tools to calm your nervous system—breathing, visualisation, body-based techniques—so that you can find moments of calm even in periods of waiting.
5. Reconnect with Life in the Present
Therapy helps you gently re-engage with the life you’ve fought so hard to live. Whether it’s reconnecting with joy, planning something for the future, or simply learning to rest without guilt—therapy creates space to rediscover hope.
You’re Not “Overreacting”
Fear of recurrence is not weakness. It’s a response to a profound threat and life disruption—and it deserves care, not dismissal. The aim isn’t to “stop being afraid,” but to reduce the power that fear has over your choices, your body, and your joy.
Support in Tunbridge Wells and Kent
If the fear of recurrence is making it hard to move forward—or simply hard to breathe—we’re here to support you. At The Tunbridge Wells Psychologist, our Clinical Psychologists offer evidence-based therapy for cancer-related anxiety, trauma, and fear of recurrence.
Using CBT, ACT, CFT and EMDR, we help you learn to live fully again—not just free from cancer, but free to feel safe in your own mind.
