Hello everyone, I wanted to ask Reddit about childhood anxiety experiences I had growing up that were incredibly difficult for me to understand as a child. I'll do as best i can to describe them.

(To preface myself, I did suffer quite a lot of frequent physical and emotional abuse as a child-- part of why I never received treatment for these episodes)

I started experiencing these symptoms around the age of 7-8 if I recall correctly. Looking back, I believe they would frequently be triggered by incrementally increasing sources of anxiety in my life (childhood fears).

I would always experience 2 very distinct symptoms. My vision would be skewered, where everything would look small, as if you were using a pair of binoculars backwards-- and I would hear sounds that weren't there. The sounds would be incredibly hard to even comprehend. They would be extremely ethereal and otherworldly, with pulsating and pounding effects simultaneously. They would be of sounds or voices I knew or didn't know.

In my limited vocabulary as a small child, I described the sounds as "loud and quiet at the same time."

I also remember referring to the entire group of symptoms as "seeing small things and hearing loud things."

Needless to say, both of these symptoms would serve to escalate my anxiety, and panic me further.

They would sometimes progress gradually, or I would sometimes wake up with the symptoms randomly.

It wasn't until I was about 13 that I figured out the issues went away when I distracted myself. If I ever felt them coming I would get out of my bed in the middle of the night to watch a TV show. By the time the show was over, the symptoms had faded.

These problems haven't resurfaced since I was about 14. However, I do suffer from general anxiety today, alongside "conventional" panic attacks from time to time.

Can any of you explain to me what at all I experienced as a kid? It has always been a ridiculously mystifying anomaly in my life that I have never been able to really understand. Thanks so much.