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Panic attacks

Rjat

Hi all,

I was diagnosed with ASD and ADHD last year in my 30s after having a mental breakdown. I have had ongoing struggles as long as I can remember and I had hope that I was traumatised and I could overcome this with discipline and constant personal development. Other people couldn’t see it and never understood what I meant when I said I was struggling. 

I was going through a career change and went from coping relatively well to having regular panic attacks. This left me in a fixed state of anxiety for a while and my usual coping strategies at the time stopped working. I stopped interacting with people and lost my spark for a while and was physically ill from the stress and worry. I’ve been rebuilding and have good days and bad days but doing much better currently. I was wondering has anyone else been through something similar and if so, what helped?

any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Parents

  • My solution to everything was to live on my own and do everything alone. Just eat, sleep, work with little energy for anything else, for 30 years. A somewhat extreme outcome.

    All my adjustments were not conscious. I now realise there are many things I have done which were not really in my best interests, including financially.

    It worked, in that I managed to keep going for 30 years, but it's not ideal. I should have failed, not pushed away my partner and got help, but I couldn't do that. Hyper independence.

    I took one holiday every 3 years, although that slipped a bit and I left it 10 years till a few weeks ago. I tried not to ease up.

    But the stress has had health impacts, although nothing visible. And then even this failed, you can only push so hard for so long.

    Diagnosis has helped to me to stop pushing so hard and expecting so much. I don't need to do 3 people's jobs, take no leave and cover for everyone. I don't have to live in circumstances I wouldn't expect others to. I still find it hard to believe I am good enough.

    I don't know what the answer is. I don't know how you live a normal life or have a partner. It's too much responsibility. It is hard enough looking after yourself.

Reply

  • My solution to everything was to live on my own and do everything alone. Just eat, sleep, work with little energy for anything else, for 30 years. A somewhat extreme outcome.

    All my adjustments were not conscious. I now realise there are many things I have done which were not really in my best interests, including financially.

    It worked, in that I managed to keep going for 30 years, but it's not ideal. I should have failed, not pushed away my partner and got help, but I couldn't do that. Hyper independence.

    I took one holiday every 3 years, although that slipped a bit and I left it 10 years till a few weeks ago. I tried not to ease up.

    But the stress has had health impacts, although nothing visible. And then even this failed, you can only push so hard for so long.

    Diagnosis has helped to me to stop pushing so hard and expecting so much. I don't need to do 3 people's jobs, take no leave and cover for everyone. I don't have to live in circumstances I wouldn't expect others to. I still find it hard to believe I am good enough.

    I don't know what the answer is. I don't know how you live a normal life or have a partner. It's too much responsibility. It is hard enough looking after yourself.

Children
  • in reply to Stuart333

    Hi  

    sorry to hear that you’ve gone through similar struggles. I can definitely empathise with the thought that’s it’s hard enough to look after myself let alone someone else.

    I am recently married and it is very stressful and annoying at times. Before meeting my wife, my plan was to live alone and go on dates every now and again. However, met my wife (also neurodivergent) and I didn’t get any social fatigue around her and it made it possible to live together. 

    I avoided any diagnosis or therapy for the same reason. I was conscious of stuff that’s happened in the past and didn’t want to put myself in a box but as you say, we are living in different times.

    It looks like we got diagnosed at a similar time and I just wanted to say well done. As my mum says, it’s only a disadvantage if you choose to see it that way. As my therapist said when I got diagnosed- well done for surviving this far without any help! It can’t have been easy! Take confidence from that because most people don’t see or understand the struggle