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Oct. 17th, 2008 05:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckSo, today ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
theferrett posted an essay about panic attacks and how to cope with them. Then zoethe posted an essay about coping with a partner who has panic attacks. Both essays have good advice, but they're addressing a form of panic attack that's utterly alien to me. That's not how my own brain works.
My own experience isn't universal either. Judging by what I've read, my particular brand of panic attacks probably wouldn't be considered 'panic attacks' by professionals. I'm not sure what words they would use. I've never managed to pry a label out of anybody. I call them panic attacks because they're what happens when I panic.
These are something that's happened all my life, but I was in my mid-twenties when I realized what was happening and started trying to put it into words. It's another one of those things that, if I'd understood it and been able to explain it, would have made my teenage years infinitely easier. Unfortunately, as with the various foods that tasted good but made me feel sick after I ate them(1), I only knew something was wrong not what it was. The words I used to speak of it didn't communicate what I was actually experiencing.
I have panic attacks under fairly specific circumstances. There's more than one way to get there, but they tend to result from an accumulation of stress and over-stimulation. Usually, the final trigger is tiny, trivial, ridiculous. The trigger, however, isn't the cause. It isn't everything going on and may, in fact, have nothing to do with the major causes.
From the outside, it looks like I'm arguing for the sake of arguing. I reject offered solutions because they come across as threats, and I will defend stupid ideas with all the multi-syllabic words and contortions of logic and illogic that I can manage. I tend to maintain a reasonable tone, at least for a while, so that many people don't even realize that (a) my brain isn't connected to reality and (b) I'm fighting as if this is a matter of life and death. Attempts to reason with me are doomed because right at that moment I'm terrified out of my mind and have shut everything off except obsession with whatever I'm arguing over and anger that whoever I'm talking to doesn't understand that I'm right.
The only helpful thing that another person can do right then is to back away to give me time to calm down. Given that space, I will come back, but the perceived threat has to be gone first. That means that the person I'm dealing with needs to walk away, capitulate or change the subject to something completely unrelated and (with any luck) neutral. I can't recognize right then that my brain has disconnected from most of the world. The only thing I know right then is that what I'm arguing about is the most important thing in the world and that I need to convince the idiots arguing with me that I'm right.
To sustain the panic, I *have* to fight against something. It doesn't matter what I'm against or what I'm defending. I could be claiming that all plants are actually purple or that walking from one end of the house to the other three times in succession is impossible or that I do love my family. I'll defend the two false statements as vehemently as the true one (and false ones serve better because people fight back when I argue something false). As long as I'm arguing, I feel anger rather than fear or despair. As long as I'm arguing, I don't perceive the other stresses and stimuli that have been wearing me down. Pain goes somewhere else, too.
During my teenage years, my parents spent a lot of time arguing with me when I was panicked.(2) They kept trying to offer strategies to solve whatever complaint I had without realizing that, while their strategies were sound (and generally what I ended up doing), the complaint was utterly irrelevant to what was going on. Instead, I'd panicked and seized on the difficulties in implementing their strategy as the rock that I could cling to keep my head above the water.
The two primary things that cause panic attacks for me are an unexpected additional stress when I'm already over-stimulated and an unexpected extra stimulus when I'm in the middle of stressful (but generally necessary) planning.
I do court the latter because I tend to complain about the difficulties involved in whatever I'm planning. It's a way of releasing some of my fear of the situation and a ways of helping myself brainstorm the obstacles that I have to address. I always do it at a point in time when I'm not yet ready to address those obstacles. It's not that I don't think there are solutions. I'm just not yet to the point in my process where I can process possible solutions. Having solutions thrown at me right then can throw me into a panic even if they're good solutions. I've figured out the parameters of this type of panic attack better than I have the other because this is the sort I used to have with my parents.
The former type of attack is what I had the first day of Safety Town last summer when I got a lecture from the woman in charge about me and Cordelia not being allowed in the building before it was time to take her to class. It could happen any time I go out and becomes more likely if I'm trying to deal with policies/rules and lots of people and complicated transportation issues. I suspect that it's an underlying cause of my fear of making phone calls. I don't know all the ins and outs of how this one works. I'm still figuring it out.
These are *my* panic attacks. They don't generally have to do with disordered thoughts, and they don't come with physical symptoms. They simply occur at the point where my mind can't handle any more and continue as long as something-- anything-- continues pushing at me. I warn people about them now. The warning doesn't always help because the behavior comes out of nowhere from the point of view of the people around me and because people who haven't experienced it aren't used to dealing with temporary irrationality of this sort.
I do live with generalized anxiety and agoraphobia, disabling levels of both. I suspect that my fibromyalgia wouldn't be disabling by itself, but it and the anxiety feed each other and devour resources that I might use to find balance. My base level of anxiety is incredibly high. I'm not afraid of anything specific. I simply live with *feeling* threatened all the time, with not being able to put aside and forget the things that most people don't think about.
These days, I explain my baseline by asking people if they remember how they and pretty much everyone around them felt on 9/11 and the days immediately following. That's the only time I've seen people around me living with the same level of fear that I feel all the time.
I didn't really understand it at the time because I knew that nothing had changed except what people were thinking about and perceiving.(3) Evil and disaster are always possible. Their likelihood varies wildly. Awareness and lack of awareness of the possibility or the likelihood of something terrible happening don't change the likelihood particularly (though they have an impact on response, on prevention and on consequences). That is, the volcano's no more or less likely and no more or less able to erupt because the town at the base of it has or doesn't have an evacuation plan. The evacuation plan or lack of it affects what happens if it ever does erupt.
I spend all of my life aware of potential disaster. I don't expect it. I just know that it could happen at any time and come from any direction. I also know that it's probably not going to happen in any particular way or at any particular time. That it *could* doesn't mean it will. 'Could' includes a lot of things that are vanishingly unlikely. I don't expect disaster or anticipate it. I don't try to prepare for it, either. There are some more probably disasters that I probably ought to prepare for, but I'm afraid that, if I start trying to prepare, I'll exhaust myself because I won't be able to stop preparing, even when I hit things that are pretty damned unlikely.
(1) Suddenly, in the teenage years, I was telling my parents that I didn't like certain foods that had been family staples for years. What I meant was 'I don't like how this makes me feel when I eat it.' If I'd managed to say that, they'd probably have understood. I was born with a herniated esophagus, so the problem wasn't coming out of nowhere. It just wasn't a problem I had between weaning and puberty. This is another one that took me a long time to translate for myself. 95% of the time, when I say 'I don't like that food,' I really mean 'I almost always get sick when I eat that.'
(2) These arguments led my parents to making some decisions that I think were bad ones for me. They believed that I needed to be pushed out into the world to build my confidence in myself so that I'd not only solve my own problems but know that I *could* solve my own problems. What I actually learned from their actions was that I was performing without a net, that nobody wanted to be there when I stumbled, and I knew that I would stumble. Everybody does.
(3) A friend of ours who was doing a psychiatry residency at the time said that the only patients who weren't made worse by the mass anxiety were the paranoid schizophrenics for whom the events simply confirmed that the world was out to get them.
I'm not locking this because I hope that my experience may be useful to someone else with anxiety or to people trying to understand anxiety. I doubt that I'm the only person with these issues.
I am willing to answer questions. I just may take a while to respond to comments because I want to do it only when I'm calm. Some of the stuff I wrote about here upset me and can only be poked at in brief bursts because it leaves me feeling very helpless and aware of all the things I ought to be doing or ought to be able to do while simultaneously devouring any resources I might have for doing anything.
ETA: Feel free to link to this. I don't mind.
theferrett posted an essay about panic attacks and how to cope with them. Then zoethe posted an essay about coping with a partner who has panic attacks. Both essays have good advice, but they're addressing a form of panic attack that's utterly alien to me. That's not how my own brain works.My own experience isn't universal either. Judging by what I've read, my particular brand of panic attacks probably wouldn't be considered 'panic attacks' by professionals. I'm not sure what words they would use. I've never managed to pry a label out of anybody. I call them panic attacks because they're what happens when I panic.
These are something that's happened all my life, but I was in my mid-twenties when I realized what was happening and started trying to put it into words. It's another one of those things that, if I'd understood it and been able to explain it, would have made my teenage years infinitely easier. Unfortunately, as with the various foods that tasted good but made me feel sick after I ate them(1), I only knew something was wrong not what it was. The words I used to speak of it didn't communicate what I was actually experiencing.
I have panic attacks under fairly specific circumstances. There's more than one way to get there, but they tend to result from an accumulation of stress and over-stimulation. Usually, the final trigger is tiny, trivial, ridiculous. The trigger, however, isn't the cause. It isn't everything going on and may, in fact, have nothing to do with the major causes.
From the outside, it looks like I'm arguing for the sake of arguing. I reject offered solutions because they come across as threats, and I will defend stupid ideas with all the multi-syllabic words and contortions of logic and illogic that I can manage. I tend to maintain a reasonable tone, at least for a while, so that many people don't even realize that (a) my brain isn't connected to reality and (b) I'm fighting as if this is a matter of life and death. Attempts to reason with me are doomed because right at that moment I'm terrified out of my mind and have shut everything off except obsession with whatever I'm arguing over and anger that whoever I'm talking to doesn't understand that I'm right.
The only helpful thing that another person can do right then is to back away to give me time to calm down. Given that space, I will come back, but the perceived threat has to be gone first. That means that the person I'm dealing with needs to walk away, capitulate or change the subject to something completely unrelated and (with any luck) neutral. I can't recognize right then that my brain has disconnected from most of the world. The only thing I know right then is that what I'm arguing about is the most important thing in the world and that I need to convince the idiots arguing with me that I'm right.
To sustain the panic, I *have* to fight against something. It doesn't matter what I'm against or what I'm defending. I could be claiming that all plants are actually purple or that walking from one end of the house to the other three times in succession is impossible or that I do love my family. I'll defend the two false statements as vehemently as the true one (and false ones serve better because people fight back when I argue something false). As long as I'm arguing, I feel anger rather than fear or despair. As long as I'm arguing, I don't perceive the other stresses and stimuli that have been wearing me down. Pain goes somewhere else, too.
During my teenage years, my parents spent a lot of time arguing with me when I was panicked.(2) They kept trying to offer strategies to solve whatever complaint I had without realizing that, while their strategies were sound (and generally what I ended up doing), the complaint was utterly irrelevant to what was going on. Instead, I'd panicked and seized on the difficulties in implementing their strategy as the rock that I could cling to keep my head above the water.
The two primary things that cause panic attacks for me are an unexpected additional stress when I'm already over-stimulated and an unexpected extra stimulus when I'm in the middle of stressful (but generally necessary) planning.
I do court the latter because I tend to complain about the difficulties involved in whatever I'm planning. It's a way of releasing some of my fear of the situation and a ways of helping myself brainstorm the obstacles that I have to address. I always do it at a point in time when I'm not yet ready to address those obstacles. It's not that I don't think there are solutions. I'm just not yet to the point in my process where I can process possible solutions. Having solutions thrown at me right then can throw me into a panic even if they're good solutions. I've figured out the parameters of this type of panic attack better than I have the other because this is the sort I used to have with my parents.
The former type of attack is what I had the first day of Safety Town last summer when I got a lecture from the woman in charge about me and Cordelia not being allowed in the building before it was time to take her to class. It could happen any time I go out and becomes more likely if I'm trying to deal with policies/rules and lots of people and complicated transportation issues. I suspect that it's an underlying cause of my fear of making phone calls. I don't know all the ins and outs of how this one works. I'm still figuring it out.
These are *my* panic attacks. They don't generally have to do with disordered thoughts, and they don't come with physical symptoms. They simply occur at the point where my mind can't handle any more and continue as long as something-- anything-- continues pushing at me. I warn people about them now. The warning doesn't always help because the behavior comes out of nowhere from the point of view of the people around me and because people who haven't experienced it aren't used to dealing with temporary irrationality of this sort.
I do live with generalized anxiety and agoraphobia, disabling levels of both. I suspect that my fibromyalgia wouldn't be disabling by itself, but it and the anxiety feed each other and devour resources that I might use to find balance. My base level of anxiety is incredibly high. I'm not afraid of anything specific. I simply live with *feeling* threatened all the time, with not being able to put aside and forget the things that most people don't think about.
These days, I explain my baseline by asking people if they remember how they and pretty much everyone around them felt on 9/11 and the days immediately following. That's the only time I've seen people around me living with the same level of fear that I feel all the time.
I didn't really understand it at the time because I knew that nothing had changed except what people were thinking about and perceiving.(3) Evil and disaster are always possible. Their likelihood varies wildly. Awareness and lack of awareness of the possibility or the likelihood of something terrible happening don't change the likelihood particularly (though they have an impact on response, on prevention and on consequences). That is, the volcano's no more or less likely and no more or less able to erupt because the town at the base of it has or doesn't have an evacuation plan. The evacuation plan or lack of it affects what happens if it ever does erupt.
I spend all of my life aware of potential disaster. I don't expect it. I just know that it could happen at any time and come from any direction. I also know that it's probably not going to happen in any particular way or at any particular time. That it *could* doesn't mean it will. 'Could' includes a lot of things that are vanishingly unlikely. I don't expect disaster or anticipate it. I don't try to prepare for it, either. There are some more probably disasters that I probably ought to prepare for, but I'm afraid that, if I start trying to prepare, I'll exhaust myself because I won't be able to stop preparing, even when I hit things that are pretty damned unlikely.
(1) Suddenly, in the teenage years, I was telling my parents that I didn't like certain foods that had been family staples for years. What I meant was 'I don't like how this makes me feel when I eat it.' If I'd managed to say that, they'd probably have understood. I was born with a herniated esophagus, so the problem wasn't coming out of nowhere. It just wasn't a problem I had between weaning and puberty. This is another one that took me a long time to translate for myself. 95% of the time, when I say 'I don't like that food,' I really mean 'I almost always get sick when I eat that.'
(2) These arguments led my parents to making some decisions that I think were bad ones for me. They believed that I needed to be pushed out into the world to build my confidence in myself so that I'd not only solve my own problems but know that I *could* solve my own problems. What I actually learned from their actions was that I was performing without a net, that nobody wanted to be there when I stumbled, and I knew that I would stumble. Everybody does.
(3) A friend of ours who was doing a psychiatry residency at the time said that the only patients who weren't made worse by the mass anxiety were the paranoid schizophrenics for whom the events simply confirmed that the world was out to get them.
I'm not locking this because I hope that my experience may be useful to someone else with anxiety or to people trying to understand anxiety. I doubt that I'm the only person with these issues.
I am willing to answer questions. I just may take a while to respond to comments because I want to do it only when I'm calm. Some of the stuff I wrote about here upset me and can only be poked at in brief bursts because it leaves me feeling very helpless and aware of all the things I ought to be doing or ought to be able to do while simultaneously devouring any resources I might have for doing anything.
ETA: Feel free to link to this. I don't mind.
