So it is possible to get past this, if you want.
I had my sons play math based games, read math books full of paragraphs and not problems, and so on. You might try engaging in math as recreation. Read books like "The Number Devil" and "Alice in Flatland" and "The cartoon guide to statistics" (or any cartoon guide book ever on any subject, because they are all basically awesome) and "How to lie with statistics."
Try to figure out what pieces make you stressed and look for a way to fix that piece of it. For example, if it is about dealing with people face to face, then email them an answer. Something like that can help break the pattern of stress and help you reboot your emotional relationship to the subject.
Best of luck.
I did my first few years of school in Ukraine, where the importance of math was drilled into us regularly. My grandmother was a retired teacher and insisted on us learning our multiplication tables before we started first grade. My mom absolutely loved math and drilled its importance into us. At school math seemed like one of the most important subjects. We'd get a lot of homework in all subjects, but my most concrete memory of homework was sitting sometimes for hours in my room at home solving math problems.
In 1999 we moved to the US. School was very hard, but mostly because of the language barrier. I excelled at Math because a) it was something I didn't have to know much English for and b) it seems like for the first few years the things we were taught in Math class in the US were things we had already learned in class in Ukraine. Aside from the other kids laughing at my "weird" way to do long division on the board I was really good at it. The thing is - I wasn't good at it because I was enthusiastic about math at that point, just because we were going over stuff I had already learned in Ukraine.
As I started middle school I was still ahead of everyone for a couple of years, but eventually our US schooling caught up with our Ukrainian schooling. Suddenly we weren't going over stuff I already knew anymore, and our teachers didn't seem to drill math into us as much as they did in Ukraine on the whole. My grandmother was no longer there to insist that we practice aggressively and my parents kind of adopted a more Americanized attitude as well, I think.
By the time I graduated high school (by that time in Australia), I was "ok" at math - maybe a little above average. But I wasn't excited about it and didn't go out of my way to really internalise the concepts we were going over in class.
I now regret this deeply. I had the perfect opportunity to learn, both with that original approach from Ukraine and parents who were _very good_ at math. But I fell into complacency when importance of math wasn't pushed onto us as much anymore and didn't learn as much as I wish I did. I think I would be a much stronger programmer today if I had, and now I'm considering taking some sort of math course independently to get better.
Junior year in highschool, I bombed the first math test (37/100 points) and was about to drop the class, when the teacher pulled me to the hallway and urged I stay with it.
This guy was known for being the toughest teacher in the school and I was afraid of him, as was just about everyone.
I gave it a 2nd chance, still convinced I'd fail because this guy was impossibly hard. He'd assign 4 hours of homework each night, that even the smartest kids couldn't regularly complete. I'm not kidding, I'd regularly be up past midnight working on these assignments. You were afraid to not complete them.
So I tried real hard, and got better. By the end of the year I had the highest overall average in the class, mainly because his expectation of hard work urged me to put in effort I didn't know I could do.
Years later I took on Math as a 2nd major in college, directly because this guy taught me I could do it, even though I wasn't good at it.
The learning experience taught me that I could solve any problem if I had enough determination.
Then came my last high-school year, and I got the worst teachers ever. I started neglecting math in favor of more enjoyable subjects like Chemistry and Physics. And my grades started dropping.
After high school I got into software engineering, and I aced most courses, but math.
And until today, I say that those teachers may have cost me a lot. As I screwed-up many interviews when math questions came up. (I'm talking signal, and Fourier series, etc, ..)
I may be in a totally different career now if only I had teachers that cared a little more.
I really learned calculus 1 after taking it during summer classes for the third time in college. Learning it really well did something for me. It gave me confidence that other subjects within math were within my reach as well. I am not a mathematician. My eyes glaze over when I see funny symbols. But I know I can learn it if I have to.
So my advice: Give yourself a really good chance to learn some core math concepts. It will do wonders for your confidence.
It's clear that it's a psychological thing. If I were you, I would go watch 'Good Will Hunting' movie (and watch it again if I think I had already watched it) and substitute Hunting's negative 'personal experience' with 'mathematics related experience' and assume that I'm 'Will Hunting' (while watching the movie :-).
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My personal experience is little different. I didn't have any negative experience/memory when I was learning mathematics (and science) at school; instead, I always felt comfortable with any STEM related course/subject. But I had a very miserable experience when I had to learn English as a second language[1] at school.
At that time, I started strongly believing in the idea that no matter what I do, I will never be able to learn English as ESL as it always felt like an alien subject (literally :-)) and there was nothing I can use to get a handle on it. No wonder, I felt nervous and hopeless in my English classes.
Somehow I was able to reach college (in my country it corresponds to the grade 11-12 of high school education in most western countries) with shear brute force[2]. In the 11th grade, for the very first time, I had an English language teacher who gave me some hope that one can learn and overcome all language related problems. Though he only taught English literature (which can be more intimidating when one is at beginners' level with lots of self-doubts and anxiety), his teaching style was really inspiring[3] and it changed my whole perspective about learning a new language. Later on, I realized that it wasn't my (or other students who couldn't afford tuition fees of private ESL teachers) faults that couldn't learn the language, it was the teachers' fault as they were not really qualified to be English language teachers, at the very first place.
Now I feel quite comfortable with English language[4] and afore-mentioned story is only a memory now, one from the distant past.
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1- to be precise, it was my third language I had to learn at school in a non-English-speaking country; I lived in a deprived part of the country and had a financially humble background.
2- memorized anything English related to get into the next class and didn't let any English language related handicaps stop my progress.
3- at-least that's how I felt at that time. I distinctly remember, some of the students, I personally knew, were only finding insignificant flaws in his English language related skills.
4- I'm very far away from being an expert in English language but I'm very happy with my progress I've made till now.