Ashley, Health Educator
Thanks for your post. I to see that the triggers for my attack are words or events, that when I say or do them, I worry that an attack is going to happen. I have proven every one of them wrong (my triggers do not always cause an attack). My only conclusion is that it is how I perceive my worrying or triggers. Worrying is what gives the words power and how I perceive the trigger words or thoughts. Is this Meta cognitive thinking where they try to discover what you think about what you thinking? In other words, you can worry but it is your perception about how you see the worrying that counts. I took your thread last night and concluded that this is most of my problem with attacks. The problem I see hear for me is, it is like Google illness you look up justifications for what you think you have, or like first year med student who comes down with every illness that they read about. I wonder about this in cognitive behaviour therapy or psychology where I look for the answers to my panic attack and everything I read about cognitive therapy I think is the solution to my problem. Not everything in your toll box rings true for me, but is the reason that identify with so much of what you say and post is that we all have the same underlying problem anxiety and panic attacks, and that people with the same mental problem are very much alike underneath, although our individual experiences are unique. In other words, what you posted rang true for me because it explained how a mere worry (trigger words) could have strength to cause an attack. So I did some exposure to it last night and this morning when I said the trigger worry words I said “crap I should not have said them “, which then caused me to try to find something positive to say to counteract the worry. I believe that both these reaction gave further power to the worry trigger words. I think the answer for me to taking away the power of worrying is, ambivalence. I have read some other people techniques about attack and they say the way to get out of one is to not worry about having another or in another case they said to get rid of attack is to want to have one. In both these cases the thing there trying to accomplish is not to worry about having another attack or not to treat as you said worrying as a danger and to just let it pass. Can you tell that I think excessively much about things?
Dizzy