Anxiety Attack: A Very Real Crisis

In most cases, the symptoms of a person who is having an anxiety attack are poorly understood by their family or friends.

By not perceiving a physical cause that is causing them, many tend to downplay it and others may even tell you that you are exaggerating or even pretending.

Since the person does physically feel the impression that he or she is going to die (rapid pulse, shortness of breath, racing heart, etc.), expressions such as “it is not so bad” or “you are not dying” do not help them at all. at those moments.

Misunderstanding makes the problem worse

Every time they have an anxiety attack, what is really happening to the person is that they are reliving, concentrated in a few minutes, other traumatic situations in their life. Since this intense suffering cannot be physically seen by others, many interpret it as fabrications or exaggerations.

These negative reactions to their pain, not only do not help the person suffering from anxiety at all, but they can also give rise to other problems.

In many cases, this lack of understanding can cause conflict, estrangement, or even family or couple separations.

Is An Anxiety Attack Real?

In order to get under the skin of these people and imagine how they feel, it is essential to carry out an exercise in empathy. An exercise that many people who have never suffered anxiety are not willing to carry out and do not know the degree of suffering that can be reached.

This same misunderstanding is what Arantxa received from her family and husband every time she suffered an anxiety attack.

When Arantxa came to my office, she told me that, over the last few years, she had suffered several anxiety attacks.

The fear of it happening again limited his life.

She tried to avoid places or situations that reminded her, in some way, of her previous crises, and as time went by, she felt more and more confined. She had reached the point of not wanting to leave the house alone and always depended on others for any little activity she needed to do.

Her relatives and, above all, her husband, Paco, accompanied her, but, in addition to downplaying her concerns, they continually pressured her to force herself to go out alone.

Although they never told her openly, Arantxa’s feeling was that others thought she was exaggerating her fears and that, if she wanted to, she could go out alone without any problem.

Her husband, Paco, was of the same opinion as her family, until the day he himself went through an experience that showed him how devastating an anxiety attack can be.

To understand it we need empathy

One weekend Paco’s family rented a rural house in the mountains and invited them to spend a few days with them. The last kilometers of ascent passed by a narrow road that climbed bordering the mountain.

In some sections the pass was very narrow and forced to bring the car to the edge of the road, from where you could glimpse a beautiful view of the valley, but also the huge cliff that was a few inches from the car.

The moment Paco saw the wheels of the car so close to the abyss, his breath hitched, he began to sweat profusely, and his heart raced.

The feeling of anguish that he noticed was so intense that he had to stop the car at a small viewpoint to go down for a breath.

The situation had connected him directly to a traumatic event from his childhood that he had almost forgotten. At the age of 5 or 6, the car with which he was traveling with his family, in a mountain setting very similar to the one they were traveling at that time, went off the road.

A huge stone prevented the car from falling into the void, but little Paco, until they were rescued, spent several hours observing, terribly anguished, the cliff from the window.

During all the time that he was looking at the ravine, he did not stop thinking that, at any moment, they were going to fall into the abyss and die.

The experience of the present connected him with that memory and was inducing him to relive the same fear that he felt then. Luckily, he was able to stop the car to breathe and relax, but he confessed to Arantxa that, had his anxiety continued to increase, it would have been almost impossible for him to control his symptoms, despite knowing that the past situation had nothing to do with the Present.

Why Anxiety Attacks Happen

What happens to those who suffer from anxiety is that their negative learning has been reinforced for much longer and on many more occasions than Paco’s, therefore, it is much more difficult for them to pause to understand that there is no real danger in the present.

Paco did not have that long history of anxiety and was able to control the reactions of his body, but even so, he was aware that, had he not made the effort to focus on the current situation, the anxiety could have overcome him in a matter of very few minutes .