I think we are a rare breed but glad to find others. I have had this feeling as a child also and tonight in my 33rd year as a man got one again for the first time for a decade at least.

It is not a panic attack (I've suffered from them nothing like it)

Why does it happen to us first as children?

If it is repressed memories/trauma? we all must have seen and felt something really disturbing as infants - I found my grandmother dead on her birthday when I was 5, and then my uncle died of aids, my grandfather then had an affair with my dead uncles wife, my mother became an alcoholic and my father became emotionally distant, my sister moved out.

I would also like to point out that I was told that I had worms and overdosed on sugar when i was a child.

So grateful to find this forum though.