Trouble With How Some People Use The Term "panic Attack"

[maelstrom]

Thanks everyone for your input. I agree with a lot of what you said, and the thing is surely complicated. I guess what bothers me is that when people really haven't had the kind of panic attacks I've had and say they do have "panic attacks", I don't know how to react. My initial reaction is to say "oh no you don't, you have no idea what the word means!" But then...that would be unkind, and unsympathetic, and what those people are referring to must be unpleasant to them anyway, so I usually don't contradict them. I even console them, and teach them some of the techniques I've learned to handle anxiety. But deep down I still feel terrible. I feel like the world no longer has a word for what I'm going through, and people untouched by panic attacks would never understand what they are like, because to them this kind of extreme experience is nonexistent. They can only use their own experience to try to understand, but when the worst they have experienced is what they refer as these "panic attacks', how can you possibly convince them that there's something worse? And if we do this it will be comparing again, and we are taught not to compare when it comes to suffering.

So that's why I feel like I can only talk to people who have gone through the same thing. I simply give up on the others. This may sound kind of stupid, but to me the world consists of two kinds of people: those who have been affected by extreme mental experiences like panic attacks (and I know there are other things too),and those who have not. The divide between the two is so immense that I have stopped trying to explain my experience to people on the other side...

 

[oasis2003]

@FridayJones :hug: I have had several proper full blown anxiety attacks and they suck so :hug: to you if you had one for months it sounds like you had an unbelievably rough time I don't hate any one for that you cannot help what happened and the fact that you got through it all is amazing to me :)