Hey so I’ve noticed that with the past few therapists I’ve spoken with about my anxiety they always get confused. For one, they connect my anxiety with my panic attacks/paranoia. But they’re completely separate things and I keep trying to make that clear. My panic attacks aren’t related to my anxiety AT ALL. I become more vulnerable to them if I’m in an episode, yeah, but I don’t get panic attacks because say, I’m overwhelmed with life or because I have too much hw or anything like that. My panic attacks and night fear is directly related to the demons and awful things I see and experience at night time. I have never gotten a panic attack from anxiety, only because I feared for my life at night. And even then, I feel like I’ve only gotten legitimate panic attacks a few times in my life…the rest isn’t so much a panic attack as abject fear. Like I’m living in a horror movie. When I get an actual panic attack I feel like I’m dying and my heart is tearing out of my chest and I feel numb and weird. But mostly I just get very, very scared at night because I can TELL I’m not alone and I see crap and hear crap. It’s in a completely separate world from anxiety.
And then they always tell me to distract myself from my anxiety. But I CAN’T. Anxiety isn’t a mental state, it’s a pervasive underlying mood. I tried to explain it to my therapist as a stressor doing the equivalent of shoving a knife in my chest. I can do whatever I want to try to distract myself from the knife in my chest but that doesn’t remove the fact that there is a knife in my chest. And then they confuse anxiety for worry. Which is also two completely separate things for me. I worry about my friends and family. Worry for me is a sinking, sad feeling. Anxiety is a burning agony. Worry is “well what if this happens…” But anxiety is “I HAVE to do this but I don’t WANT to do this and I have NO CHOICE.” I don’t worry very often, I’m a laid back individual. I have anxiety a ton.
Am I just really weird? Am I the only one who experiences these things so distinctly from one another? Seriously, fear, panic, anxiety and worry are all worlds apart from me. The first is a mindset, the second a condition, the third a mood and the fourth is either a fleeting feeling or a mindset. Ugh. How do I make my therapist understand something so difficult to explain?