Panic Attacks are more felt inside of us than anyone on the outside can see also. My panic attacks started when I ended up in a position in my career that I hated & couldn't get myself to go back to work after the first of the year in 1994 & then the Northridge earthquake hit & collapsed the freeway between where I lived & where I worked & work didn't care that it took me 6 hours to drive there & 6 hours home on top of forcing me to stay at work 9 hours because I had to take a lunch hour......geezzzz I had always been an engineer with flexible hours & this just flipped me out because it wasn't doing the technical work that I loved doing in the first place.......well anyway.......not sure which winter it was, but I decided to pack up my jeep with my ski equipment & drive from my southern California home to my time share condo in Jackson Hole Wyo. for some reason, my husband was working & couldn't get the time off for the vacation we always took & I needed to get away.......well, I didn't even get to the California/Nevada border when a panic attack hit. I pulled my car over to the side of the highway & couldn't breath. I had my valium, but didn't want to take as much as it would take to calm down my attack.......so I kept sitting there. A highway partolman drove up to see if I was ok.....said I wasn't but was hoping I could get it under control. He said that he would stop back by on his next round if I was still there......yep.....I was still there. Ended up moving my car to the off ramp & he drove me to the hotel on the border & had to call my husband to come get me on the weekend (it was Friday night when I had the attack). He wasn't too happy about that, but ended up loading his ski equipment & we drove to his parents house in Las Vegas & ended up going to a local ski area there for the weekend.....it helped getting out in nature. I realized it was such an overwhelming drive that I had taken on by myself & then all the work of dealing with the ski equipment & going skiing.......that I overloaded my brain before I ever got out of California.

Many times I get panic attacks when I have things to do that I don't know how to do or that are overwhelming to me to do.....but I also had a very strange panic attack when I met a friend at a political rally here in KY. We had a pot luck dinner & when I was sitting there listening, all of a sudden, the whole room started closing in on me & I felt like running away to escape the walls. I excused myself & walked outdoors. I ended up standing in the outside doorway listening to the rest of the speakers.....couldn't get myself to go back in without the panic attack taking me completely over.

Hopefully you & your son will be able to enjoy the fair together without your husband.....maybe the more you find yourself away from your husband, the less you will experience panic attacks (even though you said they started at the age of 8.....that wasn't from your husband). You have gone through a lot of things in your life & in your married life to him. It seems like maybe these things are adding up & creating more & more of the panic attacks & sometimes can be the person you are associating those stressful things with.....triggering worse panic attacks & seems like they are related to being around him even though it may be all the other things that have come altogether that are causing them. That one person can trigger the whole panic of other emotions that are going on. I know by the end of my living with my husband the his being the trigger became almost instant even though he wasn't the whole cause of the anxiety attacks.

It is sad when a relationship turns into a competition of illness in one mind rather than being able to accept that mental illness is just as much an illness as all the other illnesses & there are treatments that work & can make a difference.

Sometimes we have to stand up & draw the line......I did & that was when I ended up leaving because my husband had no intention of stepping over the line by making the necessary changes in his attitudes & his ways that had never been compatible. I was very glad that he didn't in many ways because I was so angry & sick of him, I don't think that any changes he made at that point would have been enough.

Ah, relationships......the challenge of life. Just hope you can start being able to live your life. Sounds like your son really needs some good support. Maybe before his panic attacks get bad, it might be a good thing for him to get some therapy to help him know that panic can be controlled when we are able to stop & think about our thoughts or at least know why we are feeling that way.

It's definitely NOT in your head, but it everything that is surrounding you at this point in time.