TRANSCRIPT
Somebody recently asked if I could make a video on panic attacks. The psychology of panic attacks. What is the deal with panic attacks?
Well, long ago when I was a therapist, I worked with quite a few people who had panic attacks. I came up with a metaphor that to me represented what a panic attack is. The metaphor was I was working in a New York City apartment that had a very old, probably 80-year-old radiator. It was in the winter, a radiator where the water comes up through and it boils on the inside and it radiates out heat into the apartment.
But when it gets too full, when there’s too much pressure inside, rather than crack the radiator, it has a little tiny valve on the edge that releases steam. And the steam goes, and then it goes, and then it even can start whistling. To me, that’s what a panic attack is. When there’s too much emotion on the inside, too much pressure on the inside, too many feelings on the inside, too much historical stuff coming up, too many thoughts, too many this, too many that, and there is no open, healthy escape from it. There’s no room for real grieving, perhaps it’s completely disallowed by one’s society, one’s friends, one’s partnerships, one’s family system.
Instead, all that emotion comes out through that tiny little pressure valve rather than the person cracking and having a breakdown and losing their mind or just dying, perhaps. Instead, all that emotion comes out as steam through that tiny little pinhole of a valve as a panic attack. And it’s like absolutely overwhelming, and it’s incredibly concentrated, and it’s awful. I’ve had a few panic attacks like that myself, and it’s terrible. You can even almost pass out from it. It’s so absolutely overwhelming, and the feelings are so rotten. It’s actually completely terrifying.
So when I think about people I’ve worked with and talked to since I stopped being a therapist, and even I was a therapist, you know, people said, “Should I go on medication?” Or some people were on medication for panic attacks. And I still talk to people who are on medication, anxiolytics, anti-anxiety drugs, benzodiazepines, even for panic attacks. They said, “Should I take these pills? What’s the pros and cons of the pills?”
Well, I’d say one thing is if you want a panic attack to go away, often pretty quickly, yeah, the benzodiazepines can work. Even the research shows it short term, they can help quell panic attacks. Often, that is in the short term, but not in the long term. And the consequences can be terrible in the long term. Often the pills work less and less and less as people develop a physiological dependency on these medications, and often the panic attacks come back, sometimes even worse.
And the other thing is then people are now taking this really heavy medication on which they are physiologically dependent, and they’re having panic attacks. And the worst thing that happens if they try to get off the medication, now they go through withdrawal, and they get more panic attacks and more anxiety, and it’s terrible.
So I’d say if you can avoid going on psychiatric drugs to deal with your panic attacks, great. If at all possible, avoid drugs to deal with it. Instead, I look at panic attacks as an inside problem, an historical problem, an historical emotional problem related to one’s own history. And therein lies the answer: figuring out how to solve those emotions, often very ancient emotions that get triggered by modern things, modern stressful things in one’s life.
And often what I’ve heard is people have panic attacks, “I don’t even know what stressing me out.” They come out of nowhere. It’s like, how do I connect it to what’s going on in the inside when it doesn’t really even seem to be connected with anything? Just, it happens sometimes randomly.
To me, what I’ve observed and what I say to people is this is an invitation to look within more because there are answers within. There are external things often that you are unaware of that are triggering you and that are triggering other things from your further, further past and your deeper past that you’re also unaware of. And when you start exploring your external life and your feelings more in the here and now, and simultaneously are exploring your feelings from your childhood, your feelings in relation to your parents when you were a little child, often you can find a connection.
What I see a panic attack as, and this is the healthy perspective, my healthy idea of what a panic attack is, is a panic attack is an invitation to go within, an invitation to look on the inside, an invitation to begin to sort out the confined, stressful inner world that we were once forced to live in. And to some degree or other, we still live in.
One thing that really can help also is if panic attacks are coming out through a tiny little pinhole, we have to open up that pinhole more. Meaning we have to find other ways to express our buried emotions, our hidden emotions, our denied emotions, and often our very hidden and buried and denied emotions in a safer way. Now, find safer people, a safer world to talk about those feelings, to let them out. Have someone who loves you and respects you, who can listen to this, who won’t judge you and reject you.
And then I hear people say sometimes, “Oh, but I don’t have anybody who can do this for me. I don’t have anybody in my life who can love me like that, who can listen to me.” And then I say, “Well, I hear you because often I didn’t have anyone either for a long, long time. The only person I had for the longest time was me. I had to do it for myself: journaling and talking about it and writing about it and talking about it out loud with nobody listening and meditating on it and thinking about it, crying about it, learning how to nurture myself. Also getting a lot of exercise that helped me get out some of those emotions, exercise in a healthy way, getting a better night of sleep, spending a lot of time alone, really a lot of time with myself in a nurturing way, doing healthy activities, being creative, trying to find more meaning in my life.
But also through it all, trying to be around healthier people. And part and parcel of being around healthier people for me, and I see this for a lot of others, means getting away from unhealthier people. And sometimes those unhealthier people are the very people who modeled for us how we’re supposed to be psychologically as people. They helped form our psychology. We often are mirrors of their psychology, and that means our parents. Get away from the people who didn’t allow us to fully be able to feel our feelings and express them.
And what I’ve seen is that when people who have panic attacks are able to embark on this journey to the self, to acknowledge the self, to acknowledge the feelings of the self, to be able to express the feelings of the self in a safe and healthy way, to grieve, to grieve the horrible losses and violations and traumas and abandonments of childhood, when people embark on that journey and continue on that journey, when people open up, they don’t have such a need for panic attacks anymore.