One of the problems with panic attacks is there is nothing to consciously ‘see’.
Physically you feel as though you are being fried alive in Emotional Hell but there is no immediately identifiable ‘monster’ to run from; no sign of any real harm being done by the unseen attacker. So why do we continually recreate an Unconsciously driven, full-fear response, in regards to something not actually there?
The answer is your Unconscious is looking at something your Conscious fed down to it a while ago, but which your Conscious can now no longer easily identify.
We know from experience the answer to dealing with our less intense everyday anxiety-related problems is to find a good reason to overcome the fear then spend long enough in the feared experience for the fear to subside naturally as we see ourselves succeeding and become more confident.
What happens in these situations is our mind gradually maps the full structure of the alleged threat eventually realising the threat does not actually exist or, if a threat does exist, eventually learning how to produce a structured unemotional response to deal with it when the need arises.
During this adaptive period we release the emotional energy attached to our previous self-defence-based interpretations of ‘the monster’.
Finally. we name the various parts of it; file the information away as a mental construct and forget about it until the information is required at a later date. When relatively mild in terms of emotional intensity we call this process experiential learning .
A good few years ago I went to see the movie Alien at a local cinema with a friend. She would turn away from the screen every time she got the sense the dreaded monster – the alien - was about to appear on screen.
We saw the movie again together on television and she commented throughout on not being able to remember seeing large sections of the movie, even asking ‘have they added bits on?’.
For her it was like watching for the first time – she had no idea what the alien looked like until seeing the movie second time around.
Several years later we saw it again and this time she wanted to discuss the technical details of making the movie rather than watch the movie itself (most distracting – bring back the scary alien!).
The pattern my friend went through is the typical fear-removal process we all go through when removing a fear response attached to a triggering situation. Although the experience of a panic attack is much more intense and prolonged than watching a scary movie, exactly the same pattern applies:
- We do not wish to look at the fear-producing trigger
- we consciously decide to look at it in glimpses (usually because we want some kind of reward we believe can be achieved on the other side of the fear; even if it is just freedom from the fear response itself)
- our Unconscious gradually realises we are still alive, despite the looking, and wants to look deeper …
- we get real friendly with the ‘monster’; the ‘fogginess’ turns out to be structured – we just never examined it this closely before
- our Unconscious is forced to accept nothing bad has happened in reality as a result of connecting this deeply with the trigger and disconnects the link between the imagery and the fear-inducing response - we stop being afraid once we have to acknowledge we are still alive and unharmed despite the close contact
- the ‘monster’ turns into an emotion-free mental construct stored in our logical thinking memories; whenever we approach it in the future we get the choice of being afraid or not and usually choose not.
Even when the emotional intensity of our response is high, and the duration of healing takes longer, the process of experiential learning still applies.
Unlike watching a scary movie, however, and because of the greater intensity level, it is unlikely you could remove a panic attack reaction in a single ‘viewing session’. It usually requires us to break the overall adjustment process down into smaller steps.
We often call this more intense, stepped, emotional work ‘systematic exposure therapy’ or ‘desensitisation’; but we should remember it is no different from the discomfort involved in experiential learning – it just hurts more and involves a more intensely energetic release process.
In all cases, regardless of emotional intensity and even emotional type, it involves surrendering to the emotional adjustment process.
The process is helped greatly if you can actually see, in your ‘mind’s eye’, what it is you are surrendering to.
Your Unconscious Believes You are Being Eaten Alive by an Ever-Returning Predator
In panic attack you are experiencing, albeit imagined, the act of being eaten alive by a feared predator. An unconsciously held viewpoint is causing your Unconscious to react to it in a bid to protect you.
When talking with sufferers of various emotional disorders I sometimes ask them what they think they ‘see’ when they look at their condition and what they describe sounds distinctly like the approach of such a predator. Further down in this post I will tell you what I ask them next and why it usually puts a smile on their face.
One important thing to understand about your Unconscious is it cannot tell the difference between a current imagined threat and a current real threat – it relies on the Conscious to decide what reality is.
If your Conscious thinking has at some point conveyed pictures to it of being attacked by your own emotions, and of needing the emotions to be stopped in any way possible, it will simply take that interpretation as a fact and begin to fight on behalf of the Conscious, automatically reacting against your own feelings.
By deliberately going into and feeling your feelings for as long as it takes the Conscious forces the current Unconscious viewpoint to be raised back up into Conscious awareness.
Your Unconscious will at first start fighting your new decision to ‘go in’ by throwing arguments based on your current and unwanted viewpoint back at you (if you were an organisation it would be very much like a workforce arguing with the management as to why a new approach will not work).
Once the old viewpoint starts reappearing (usually in the form of such things as threats of death; social embarrassment or something else terrible happening) you will be more able to directly see yourself being ‘eaten alive’ by the alleged viewpoint while at the same time have the opportunity of delivering a new viewpoint down into your Unconscious so it slowly starts to react differently (eventually it will not react at all).
Although the pain of releasing the trapped emotional energy attached to the viewpoint from the body is tiring, and seems so unfair, the experience is, unfortunately, the most effective catalyst you can apply when it comes to teaching yourself not to think in ways that will cause you to have panic attacks and anxiety disorders in the first place!
When we think in a ‘way,’ what we actually choose is to think in one of two directions – away from a thing (non-acceptance) or towards the thing (acceptance). Our Unconscious reacts to the direction it sees our thinking repeatedly take.
In panic attacks we are taking the ‘away’ direction in regards to our own emotional responses and constantly training ourselves to automatically move away from our feelings when they arise. Such a direction includes self-criticisms and negative interpretations of ourselves as being ‘bad’ when we have these feelings.
Once you have finally learned that thinking ‘away’ leads to the re-creation and maintenance of painful, difficult to remove, emotional problems later while thinking ‘towards’, although temporarily unpleasant, eventually leads to the release and removal of negative feelings, are you going to choose the ‘towards’ or ‘away’ approach in the future when new emotions arise?
The lesson of life is that our emotional system is our spiritual guide in terms of who we are at our core, and what is actually happening to us in our environment – resistance to it and the information it provides is what actually turns temporary emotional release into ‘permanent’ emotional blocking (a repeating negative emotional response) commonly known as an anxiety disorder. This is the cause of all emotional disorders, fear-based or otherwise.
Taking Your Unconscious In and Showing It
The Unconscious is ‘show not tell’ - you cannot tell it verbally, using words, about the new viewpoint it should be operating with. You have to show it the new viewpoint by entering the centre of the old viewpoint, where the pain hurts most, repeatedly giving it pictures of the new viewpoint within that centre.
The language of the Unconscious is visual imagery, including movement, and sound tone (smell is also involved but the route the sense of smell takes is different in the brain from other senses).
If you avoid certain experiences it assumes they are dangerous by default. If you avoid communicating with your inner world for long enough when you decide to do so it will react as if you were going to go sit next to a lion.
To show it a different habitual viewpoint your Conscious thinking must drag your Unconscious where it fears to tread (it only fears the new direction because you have told it repeatedly to fear treading where you are now telling it to tread) and show it, visually and tonally, the place is now safe.
Repeatedly showing your Unconscious you are willingly going into the feared journey within enforces a new way of seeing; a new viewpoint that will eventually become fixed.
But what have you previously been telling it in order for the current unwanted viewpoint to develop?.
Viewpoints that Contribute to the Creation of Panic Attacks
Our thinking mind (our Left Neo-Cortex) uses words to create pictures in our imagination/picture-mind (our Right Neo-Cortex) and these pictures are then sent down into our Unconscious as if they were facts for acting on.
Examples of what we may have previously sent downwards in the form of self-talk, alongside the kinds of imagery they create, can include:
- I cannot stop it when it comes! (image of an overwhelming, uncontrollable predator approaching; although it does not kill us we sense it always lurking in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity to strike)
- I am powerless in the grip of it when it strikes (paints a picture of a predator grabbing you by the throat, throwing you round like a rag doll)
- Other people will see me collapse and think negative things about me – the gossips will be well pleased (imagery of long-term social rejection; permanently damaged relationships and careers; a psychiatrist locking a door to your cell then throwing away the key)
- My thinking and my memories are devoured by it (pictures of you being swallowed into a deep, dark hole and never coming out – you feel the strain of being dragged towards it against your will)
- I cannot cope with it; cannot cope with life; do not understand my own inner world; I am a failure (images of your failing in every area of your life; of your life being a waste of time; of no-one respecting you)
- Must get away; find distraction; anything but that! (imagery of yourself having a scattered mind and running away from yourself)
- My heart pounding could be a sign of my imminent death (imagery, including nightmares when asleep, of death; cancer; heart attack)
- these sensations hurt, I must fight them! (as though you were fighting with some kind of parasitic creature inside of you).
How long does it take to feed these kinds of image-creating seeds straight into your Unconscious? Two seconds.
It can take months of self-work to extract these single sentences that drive our reactions. They reappear as little judgemental snippets called ‘insights’. Once these insights are regurgitated they must be challenged and changed so the imagery fed into the Unconscious becomes non-threatening.
You access your insights by following your feelings and, as patiently as possible, watching for them. You cannot superimpose an insight; you cannot guess what the insight may be in order to speed things along – an insight is usually a complete sentence, like the seeds at the core of an apple. You must eat the flesh of the apple, the emotional energy, before the insight seeds appear.
Once they re-appear we suddenly realise why we have the problem we do and we trash the seeds that do not make us happy.
Two seconds. So fast you create a negative, long-term argument for emotional blocking without realising you just did - and the trouble is once you start it can become a runaway habit because your self-criticisms lead to you becoming self-critical of your self-criticisms. You feel bad and then you feel bad about feeling bad and so on.
I once had a lady say to me straight, in a cold business-like way as though I were a bit of an idiot who should know better: ‘I cannot possibly feel my feelings, they will kill me’. I could not have portrayed the viewpoint of someone suffering with panic attacks and other emotional problems any better than that.
In panic attacks the overall picture portrayed to the Unconscious, and against which it now fights on your behalf, is of an approaching predator which takes over your Conscious Mind and body, threatening to suffocate you to death but then leaves you still alive with the threat of returning later to finish the job.
Your Unconscious Sees Things in Only Two Ways
Your Unconscious operates on the basis of two questions: ‘Is it going to eat me or am I going to eat it?’. It applies these two questions to every area of our lives.
The ‘eat me versus eat it’ argument has a long line of variations between the two extremes with ‘control’, ‘emotional neutrality’ and ‘feeling powerless’ sitting at different points along it.
When you send down pictures to your Unconscious telling it your own feelings are eating you alive, that is what it reacts to – being eaten alive by the physical sensations and mental effects of fear.
At the first sign of the tingle of fear you scream THE PREDATOR IS COMING! and, would you believe it, here it is. Doing exactly what you predicted it would with your Unconscious fighting to resist it.
So what is the answer? What viewpoint do we feed our Unconscious?
Changing the Viewpoint
After explaining to a sufferer how they have just described their ‘predator’ to me I next ask them ‘what if you were to start seeing yourself as eating the predator instead of it eating you?’. This usually produces a puzzled smile and I go on to explain:
‘Imagine what you are looking at is a pile of energy and you are going into the energy deliberately to digest it, rather than seeing the energy coming towards you. Instead of you feeling helpless, wondering when the next ‘attack’ is coming, how would your interpretation of the experience change if you deliberately went towards it, with the intention of ‘digesting’ it?
What you have here is a trapped fear response, nothing more than a store of emotional energy needing release and when you start to feel it coming what is actually happening is it is just reminding you it is still there, waiting for you’.
The job of an emotional response is to gain release from the body and it needs permission from the thinking mind to do this. If the thinking mind judges the experience too intense, and sees the response itself as dangerous for whatever reason, it will stop release.
Whether being released by an emotionally ‘well’ person or by an emotionally ‘ill’ person, the brain and body are flooded with chemicals causing a temporary shut-down of logical, realistic thinking and unusually intense physical reactions in the body.
During release we are designed to focus solely on the alleged ‘emergency issue’ until it is resolved (even if the issue exists just in the imagination) or until the energy produced to deal with the issue has passed through and out of us of its own accord.
Having discharged the energy we return to being our normal, happier, selves and the chemical flooding of mind and body comes to a stop.
For an emotionally ‘well’ person this process can take several hours to several days, but for an emotionally ‘ill’ person the process can take much longer because they find themselves unwilling to give the process even a few minutes of their attention.
Emotional illnesses such as panic attacks are caused by Unconscious resistance to the emotional release process because we hold a viewpoint telling us the process itself will kill us if we go through it.
You may have long forgotten what created the original fear response but the energy of it is trapped like a lump of festering, buzzing vibrancy inside of you and it wants to come out.
More often than not people I have this kind of conversation with will tell me they are not ready to face the possibility of doing this kind of self-healing yet. Now and again though I get someone who wants to know more, particularly once I have told them I suffered with panic attacks for over 20 years and used Exposure Therapy to cure them.
For those who want to know more I go on to give them the following tips to practice in a closed-off room, without distraction, on their own:
- Build Mental Frames
- Create a Goal or Reward Beyond the Frame
- Change the Tone.
The overall intention of exposure therapy is to face the ‘monster’ as it currently is; experience the symptoms as fully as possible and re-train the Unconscious in how it sees the ‘monster’. To do this you must repeatedly go into the trapped emotional experience for as long as possible and then come out and go in again when ready.
Build Mental Frames
The purpose of framing is to establish a sense of control and safety. It is the difference between standing two feet from a caged lion in a zoo and standing two feet from a lion in the wild.
By building mental frames around your intense emotional experiences you cage them and induce the same sense of mental control and safety.
External Framing
The first frame you create is around yourself; closing off from the two-way access to external demands.
An enclosed room or any other place you feel safe and secure in, and in which you are not having to worry about how you will interact with external interruptions, or how they will interrupt your self-work, will allow your Conscious to turn full attention inwards.
Without that first frame in place you will be unable to fully face your inner world. This ‘external frame’ is sometimes enhanced by the presence of a trusted ‘Guardian’; such as a counsellor or shaman or other trusted person. The Guardian acts as your replacement external monitoring system while you go in. They can also act occasionally as your Guide and Guardian as you travel inwards.
An empty room with you in it, being kind to yourself, fulfils a similar purpose.
With your external framing taken care of you now need to start framing the emotional ‘monsters within’.
Internal Framing
The illusion we suffer from with blocked emotional responses such as panic attacks is that they exist forever and have no beginning, middle or end. This illusion persists until we decide to frame the response deliberately and begin to work on it.
When the block has been in place for a long time we forget what it was like not having the block – we even start to think the block is us. We identify with it.
The main reason we cause ourselves to block an emotional response is because we believe going into and feeling the emotional energy somehow causes us or others harm – but the opposite is true. A blocked emotional response causes continual stress and demands the attention of our thinking against our Conscious will.
Framing an emotional response in a visual way gives it a shape. Giving it a shape makes it look like a ‘thing’ to our brain. When we look at a ‘thing’ we are able to see it as a separate entity from ourselves. It is no longer ‘us’.
What we know about emotional responses is they have a point at which they are most intense.
Imagine the overall emotional response as a ball of energy at the centre of which lies a meeting point; both your mental focus and physical feelings are most intense when they meet at this central point.
This ball of energy is now ‘located’ somewhere but it is still a ‘ball’ and balls roll about – to establish a better frame we need a beginning and an end to hold it in place.
There is a beginning, a middle and an end phase to all emotional responses. As you move towards a panic attack you feel ‘anticipatory fear’ – fear based on an Unconscious concern you may not survive the approaching intense experience. This reaction gets more intense as you approach the centre of the ball of emotional energy (full panic).
Can you see this as a rising hillside?
After a panic attack there is an ‘aftershock’ phase following on from which we assess and evaluate the outcomes of the experience. Are we still alive? This feels horrible too but the sensations subside as we then re-engage with the external world. Can you see this as a descending hillside?
Congratulations – you have fully framed your emotional response. Now you can work on it.
Create a Goal or Reward Beyond the Frame
We are naturally designed to only go into ‘dangerous territory’ if we can identify a worthwhile reward beyond the feared territory. This is why animals approaching waterholes are willing to take the risk of meeting their natural predators along the way. They perceive the risks of ‘moving away’ as being greater than ‘moving towards’.
I once had a phobia of speaking in public, which was a career-blocking problem as I wanted to be a part-time adult education teacher. I also wanted to be able to talk to large groups of people in my administrative day-job. I did not know I had a phobia in this area until half-way through my first teacher-training course. I started a presentation and completely clammed up – I could not speak. A second attempt the following year saw the same thing happen.
I realised overcoming this fear was going to be a long-term job (it actually took me a further 4 years as my opportunities to speak publicly were few and I started looking for a regular ‘training’ method).
Because overcoming a fear is hard work you need a goal you really want to achieve on the other side of the fear otherwise when your mind asks ‘why?’ all you get back is an empty echo.
I was not passionate enough about the subject I had initially chosen to teach (shorthand). To pull me through the fear I needed a subject I REALLY wanted to teach – so I chose administrative management and pictured myself helping colleagues reach their higher goals after receiving the information I would give them (believe it or not there are a lot of people passionate about administrative management).
At this point I created a visual picture of something more desirable on the other side of the phobia, with an acceptance I was going to have to go through the phobia to move towards the desired goal.
By framing the original feared experience in this way my Unconscious was able to work as though this was a more controllable situation – it was structured with a series of future benefits rather than dead-end. I was now more willing to go through the fear-removal process because there was something I wanted on the other side.
When developing a ‘goal on the other side’ for overcoming panic attacks the bigger the goal visualised the better. Some might just say to themselves ‘I want to be at peace’ and this is a good thing to aim for – but the problem with ‘peace’ is it is an ‘absence of something’ goal.
If you say to your Unconscious ‘I want to go through this really painful experience for as long as it takes; even if it could kill me!’ and finish off with the statement ‘because I want the absence of this thing waiting on the other side’, your Unconscious comes back thinking ‘Eh? You want to risk your life for nothing?’.
Instead picture yourself as having gone through the whole experience successfully and, having found the route out of panic attacks, now helping others suffering with the same problem to heal. It gives you a different result. See yourself helping thousands of people, not just a couple, and the goal looks ‘big’.
This can be an ‘operating goal’ – a goal where, once you are through the other side, you can change or drop it. Just do not tell your Unconscious about it until afterwards.
Changing the ‘Tone’
Adding a touch of humour provides the Unconscious with seeds for growing pleasant associations from within a horrible experience. This is a powerful solution which I applied whenever I could as I overcame my fear of speaking in large groups – it works on our internal world in exactly the same way.
If I got smiles from my audience it made me feel better while presenting. If you can create a ‘funny’ looking frame around your negative emotional experience it starts to have similar affects.
I would look at the serious faces looking back at me and start worrying about ‘torturing people to the point of boredom’ (those were the kinds of thoughts going through my head as I started to freeze up).
Smiling and laughter meant this was not happening. I was a member of a local social club and took the job of ‘host’ when the position came up. This involved chatting to between 80 and 100 people using a microphone in a large hall. I would do some strange things to get a laugh – one night I had a pocket full of change and announced ‘and now, a commercial jingle’ and put the microphone to my pocket and shook the change. They found it hysterical. You had to be there.
I took this a step further by joining a ‘pantomime team’ at work and found myself playing ‘dames’ and other comedy characters in front of around 100-150 people at work, several times a year.
My favourite moments were when things went wrong on stage – I seemed to produce adlibs that got better laughs than the original lines (what kind of messages does that send to the Unconscious, I wonder?). Shortly afterwards I was teaching and no longer needed the humour to get through it – I no longer cared if I was torturing people with boredom or not!
When overcoming my own panic attacks I had got to the point of seeing the experience ‘framed’ and started seeing it as what I now call ‘the hill technique’. I then started to play with the contextual tone of the experience so I could add a touch of humour. One day I just thought ‘sherbet dab’.
I continued to think ‘sherbet dab’ when going into the most intense point and started to see myself as ‘releasing sherbet dab energy’. The physical sensations of emotional release were no longer ‘painful’, now they were ‘sweet and sour with a bit of a tangy sting’.
I pictured myself releasing flowing ‘sherbet dab vapour’ into the air around me and saw the ‘hill of sherbet dab energy’ as something I wanted more of and watched the ‘hill of energy’ reducing in height the more I went into it.
One day the panic attacks completely stopped and I could no longer have them even if I wanted to. Someone had eaten all the sherbet dab.
You could try the ‘Sherbet Dab’ approach yourself if you like or, if there is any other way of adding humour to the experience, do that and tell me what your technique is.
By framing your panic attacks, creating a desirable goal beyond them and adding humour in some form to change the Unconscious interpretation of the context of the intense experience of emotional release you induce:
- a sense of control
- a sense of direction and a
- change in perception of the ‘attack’ – your internal predator is slowly turned into a pet.
Eventually your panic attack monster simply refuses to come out to play.
Regards – Carl
