Hi everyone. I am looking for advice. 

Some background

While I do deal with moments of anxiety I do not have an anxiety condition that could be diagnosed. 

I believe anxiety is a real mental health condition and deserves all of the support patience and kindness that any physical injury or alignment does and should get. 

The background:

I dated a guy for about nine months who has anxiety condition. He has never, to my knowledge had it formally diagnosed, until very recently so i do t want to speculate on what else may be going on. 

We broke up because i started to feel like a care taker and not a romantic partner. He would have these panic attacks every weekend and end up crying on my chest. And i was starting to resent having to take care of him. 

I pushed him to therapy and counseling and medical help but realized that if this motivation does not come From him it won’t stick. 

To my eye his anxiety and panic attacks tend to be triggered by past trauma and an inability to not have his coping mechanism go his way. For example: if he is playing video games and he loses this can set him off in a “all i wanted was this one thing” kind of way. Additionally a panic attack might trigger. Lot of anger fatalistic thinking. 

Here is my question

We have been hanging out virtually and playing video games. And i feel us starting to fall into this old pattern of him getting angry when things don’t go his way/having a panic attack because his coping mechanism of winning at video games is not working and me walking on egg shells trying to make things perfect so it doesn’t set him off. 

I want to break this. I want to start pushing back and saying things like “do you think this is something you should be getting upset over” or calling out things like “i don’t think you are actually mad at that other player but rather something larger. You should go talk to someone about it.” Or even when he is having a panic attack to say “what are something you are doing to try to calm down?” To my mind he does not have any strategies to get through an attack. Nor does he know his triggers

However as someone who does not suffer from this condition to the degree he is I don’t want to say something unhelpful or that might make his current mental state worse. Any advice helps.