Passing on the Pain

There is a lot of neurological garbage in my family, including anxiety, bipolar disorder, OCD, and Tourette Syndrome, among other stuff. It is difficult to have to watch my son deal with this stuff, some of which I recognize all too clearly from myself.
Since he has gone off medications during the summer, he has been suffering the effects of anxiety very much like my own. He throws up when he is anxious, the same thing that happened to me when I was very young. But he doesn't FEEL anxious; he just feels the physical symptom.
So he doesn't make the connection between the circumstances and his symptom and just thinks he is sick.
I don't let him stay home. My mother let me stay home from school a lot when I would throw up, and she shouldn't have. She should have been helping me deal with what was provoking the anxiety at school and at home, and she didn't. How could she? She never dealt with her own anxiety or the terrible problems my father had that spurred it on.
Now I have to watch this anxiety cripple my son the way it has crippled me. Everytime he wins a prize or is praised for some talent he has, such as photography or working with disabled kids, he runs in the other direction as fast and as far as he can. There is something terribly anxiety-provoking about succeeding for him that is worse than failure. I have always been the same and it has made my life difficult and unhappy in many ways.
I am angry at myself and my stupid genes for causing my son to have to deal with this. It wasn't bad enough that I had to. But I can't get him to understand that the anxiety that so puzzles him when he sees it in me is a reflection of his own.
He was offered a job he very much wanted at the start of summer, working at the high school with the disabled kids he had worked with his whole high school career. He turned it down because he was afraid of the responsibility, afraid he would let people down or somehow harm someone.
He was unwilling to discuss it with me, but I have been there many many times, and I can tell him that it's only anxiety, not fact, that makes him feel that way. In his case, it's particularly odd since no one ever told him that he didn't have the ability to do anything at all. In fact, he is always saying he gets tired of us telling him how good he is at various things. My case was different, since my family never lost an opportunity to tell me I was incompetent and even stupid and most of my teachers concurred until I got to college.
It is painful to watch and be unable to help because he is unable to hear what I am saying or even to let me say it.