Anyone Else Get Annoyed When People Completely Generalize Anxiety?
I have social anxiety so my anxiety is about being in big groups or around a ton of people I don’t know to the point of needing a table near the exit and breaks to deal with my panic attacks when I go to crowded restaurants. However, my anxiety does not keep me locked up in my house all day. I love to travel to remote places, go hiking, kayaking, etc because it is usually just me and nature. It helps treat my anxiety. I can handle small groups of people I don’t know especially if my husband is there, but I cannot handle big groups. I don’t travel with big groups though and I just stick to outdoor activities. My anxiety comes from a very violent rape that let my hospitalized and needing emergency surgery. So as you can imagine my anxiety also deals with doctors a bit too. Well, I am pregnant after trying for a year! I hate my OB. She needed my medical history which includes all of this. She completely generalizes anxiety and has said well how do you travel if you have anxiety? How do you leave the house? To be quite honest, I’m speechless that anyone who works in a medical setting could have so little knowledge of anxiety. Have any of you encountered people that just completely generalize it?
I believe that people who do not experience anxiety just have a mindset of "just relax" or "what's the big deal?" They don't understand it. They don't understand that you can have a conversation with someone and be freaking out inside. They don't understand that you can completely fall apart in the middle of a grocery store. They react differently to situations than people with anxiety.
My husband doesn't "get it" with anxiety. He just thinks I can stop it. That everyone can just stop it immediately. Many of my family members have anxiety issues, including me and my son. We all react differently/have different types of anxiety issues, but there is a lot of social anxiety involved.
It's frustrating. No one wants to feel anxious. No one wants to live like this. And to have people around us that just dismiss it with a "get over it" attitude makes it worse.
Thank you for sharing. It must be quite the challenge if your husband doesn’t quite understand your anxiety. I feel very defeated that this was going from someone in the medical community. I mean I know she doesn’t work in mental health, but still. I wish more people would understand that anxiety manifests itself in different ways.
My boyfriend is like that, he claims he has anxiety but if he really did he would know how I feel. Instead he says you need to just get stronger or to just get over it while not really offering any kind of emotional support. I think he adds to it as well, I find something that works for me and instead of trying to work with me on it everything has to be his way saying that not how its done, and we can't do this cause of something going on with him.
Yeah, I don’t get it. People need to be educated about different anxieties and how it can potentially manifest. I even see people on here say something along those lines sometimes and I’m like how do you have anxiety if your telling someone to just be stronger? You don’t think that I would love to never have anxiety again.