A great example of this is the unwarranted fight/flight response. Even if there is nothing to fear, the body is telling the person they were right to be fearful of ...that feeling, that sensation or thought. The whole thing is a very clever bluff BUT, many people with panic disorder for instance, don't even realise that their body is actually healthy and only responding to 'thoughts'. Many sufferers actually believe it's the other way around. It's all about first fear and second fear. Without 'thought' the adrenaline response simply wouldn't kick in. We have to feel a fearful emotion first. This is why panic disorder can last for decades/lifelong. A sufferer's perception of why they feel like they do often interferes with progress to eliminate the disorder. They often believe it really is a physical disorder and they are merely reacting.
What you have given is the official, medical opinion of psychiatrists and IMO it is unreasonable. Note the psychiatrists are saying “no apparent cause” and not “no cause”. There is no objective evidence.
MY FINDINGS and what I was told by toxic people is the following:
Without any visible signs, a person carrying a concealed weapon,
who has done crime before,
who is trivially relationally entangled with the targeted person,
can pose a threat, by upholding the
intent to do a crime IF there is a triangle with a chief offender, i.e., someone strongly related to the targeted person.
The threat is simple. It is done by having made a prior arrangement that says “I’ll give you a call if I decide to give you the go ahead”.
In this way the criminal only needs to be in the vicinity of the targeted person, typically for 5-10 minutes to cause the person to feel intense fear. The idea of danger is not “just an idea”. It is a
perception of a threat, of real danger.
From my knowledge, my university training and from my own research, I have yet to find a human being who does no feel fear (ie mobilize their body ready for action, what you call “fight or flight response”) in the face of danger. Conversely I don’t know of any idea that can cause a biological response other than the perception of real danger. I would be very interested if you have found otherwise.
My late husband, who was toxic, and by his own admission was for years involved in these types of games, told me (late in our marriage) how the cheat is done. He gave me information that I was able to verify. The cheat that gives rise to panic attack he said, is done for a variety of reasons. According to him the main reasons is to gain power and influence over another person to manipulate and control them, to limit their movements, to hurt them as revenge or to hurt them for not agreeing with the chief offender.
My late husband also said the chief offender is commonly a spouse (male or female), a sibling or other relative, an employer or other employee, a toxic friend etc. They must be related to the victim and they must be capable of gaining information about the victim, i.e., the victim would confide in them and tell them of their movements.
You can see more detail here if you want:
http://kyrani99book2.wordpress.com/chapter-1/
Sorrry I gave the wrong link, it is still relevant though so I leave it in.
This is the link I meant to give:
http://kyrani99book1.wordpress.com/
The “smoking gun” is found in the physiology, when one asks the question:
Why does a person panic? It depends on how a person reacts somatically. Different people react differently.
The answer that I found in the physiology was because of a coping mechanism that’s habit and hence automatic physiological response.
I have discovered in the observation of hundreds of people, two mechanism or ways of coping that uses physiology, they manipulated their breathing. There are probably other ways too that I haven’t seen or are not so readily visible. By my own experiments I found that it is possible to affect awareness by manipulating breathing.
In my research, I found that shallow breathing leads to lethargy and deep breathing leads to distraction. The distraction is due to the brain being engaged in too many activities at once. I found from my experiments that if there is deep breathing then the metabolism is raised and the brain is involved in a lot of extra activities. In serious thinking the type necessary to solve a problem, or concentrated perception, as happens in the 10 or 20 seconds before a fear response, the body lowers metabolism or keeps the metabolism at rest conditions. My experiments
don’t include everyone.
Panic is not just fear. It is, as you have recognized in your reply, “escalating fear”. But it is IMO also mounting fear that a person doesn’t know how to handle, thus runs out of control.