Panic Attacks, Phobias, and Feelings

``You may feel dizzy or you may be aware of nausea. But it's more than just feeling sick. You have a sense that reality is slipping away from you...the feeling is that you're going to die. That you're going to lose your mind....Your heart is beating out of your chest....You can't catch your breath.''

Another top specialist, Dr. David Sheehan, author of The Anxiety Disease, has made agoraphobia and panic attacks his province. During a recent lecture (Fall of 1993) in Baton Rouge, he mentioned that he has been treating these maladies with anti-depressant drugs such as tricyclics and MAO inhibitors and with tranquilizers (benzodiazepines) such as Xanax.

The article stated that clinical psychologists had been successfully treating the condition by using desensitization (behavioral therapy) techniques which are helpful after medication has suppressed the attacks. The article's author mentioned that research was seeking biochemical causes such as metabolic imbalances. Dr. Sheehan believes such imbalances are the culprit in this sickness and feels certain that anxiety attacks are an inherited vulnerability.

In that earlier-mentioned article, Dr. Sheehan stated that this problem strikes only a very small percentage of the population and seems to concentrate its fury on women rather than men. Seventy-five percent of its victims are young women, although all intelligence levels, racial groups and socio-economic levels are affected. Sheehan is hopeful that soon a diagnostic blood test will be developed along with new and more effective drugs. ``We're still at the early stages,'' said Sheehan, ``but it's only a matter of time before the big breakthrough.''

Well, twelve years after that first article was printed, we're still waiting for that big breakthrough. However, Dr. Sheehan is still hopeful. At a seminar in Baton Rouge in the fall of 1993, he was quoted as saying that there will soon exist ''... a predictive blood test to identify carriers before they develop the disease. He still believes that anxiety attacks are ''. . . a biological illness with a genetic predisposition -- like diabetes or asthma'' and that ``female sex hormones facilitate the expression of the disease.'' He implied that this is one reason why anxiety attacks are ``largely a disease of women during their childbearing years...'' At his seminar he also stressed that brain scans of those who suffer from anxiety attacks are very different from those of normal people.

CRITIQUE

It is not surprising that people who are susceptible to anxiety attacks may have a different brain scan from ``normal people.'' Nor is it surprising that their blood might contain substances which would identify them as people on the verge of having anxiety attacks. Those of us who believe in the effects of early trauma would expect that persons who have suffered severe traumas would be physiologically different from the ``normal'' population. The repressed trauma is not a benign burden and a way it is revealed is in one's body chemistry.

Suspecting genetic or inherited vulnerability also hawks down the wrong trail, since vulnerability plays a role in all diseases, whether genetic or not. Usually one does not fall prey to a disease caused by a pathogen without having some degree of vulnerability. It's a fact that a person cannot develop tuberculosis without being exposed to the TB bacteria. However, many in a population with the bacilli in their system do not develop the disease. There are other variables present, which determine whether a person actually contacts the disease, such as the status of the immune system, proper nutrition, and naturally enough, inherited genetic vulnerability.

For many, vulnerability may be a sufficient but not a complete explanation as to why a person gets sick. For some who show a susceptible response to stress, the real pathogen is primal pain. It is unfortunate that modern concepts of psychosomatic illness sometimes lean more to the study of the biochemical results of the repressed trauma to one's system than to the repressed trauma itself. Perhaps this is due to the frustration which many in the field feel because of their inability to help patients using psychological techniques alone. To those of us knowledgeable about primal theory, anxiety is easily understood. We also know that these panic and anxiety attacks are readily curable. What happens to the genetic predisposition when the psychosomatic illness yields to re-experiencing or feeling the stored up trauma? The origins of anxiety attacks are actually no more puzzling than the origins of functional headaches, drug addiction, or depression. All originate in unfelt infantile and early childhood experiences.

MY STORY

Being young is when pretty girls don't smile at you so as not to encourage you.
Being old is when pretty girls smile at you to be nice to you.
-- John A. Speyrer

And, seemingly contradictory, the acceptance of me by such a woman and entering into a relationship with her would also trigger the attacks. In such cases, the symptoms would intensify after I was accepted by her. So I suffered from the attacks when I would be rejected in my pursuits and suffered as much or even more when I was able to have that relationship!

Between the attacks, as I entered my thirties and then my early forties, I became plagued by increasingly chronic anxiety and almost daily, unbearable stomach pains. Seeking relief from my sufferings, I tried every approach to better health I could find, including orthodox medicine, acupuncture, hypnosis, insight therapy and gestalt therapy/transactional analysis. Hypnosis had helped for awhile. But then I began dating again and all the benefits of hypnotherapy were erased!

In the last therapy in which I participated, during gestalt feeling exercises, evidence began to accumulate that somehow my mother had rejected me, but I had only conscious memories of love from her, so I could not and did not accept this conclusion. But, after six months of gestalt therapy, I had reached a point where the feeling exercises had opened me up enough so that primaling began spontaneously one day at home.

With the primals, the origin of my anxiety attacks became clear. I found out that the desirable women had always been symbolic mothers. Wishing to have a relationship with those women triggered the original painful need which I had experienced in infancy of wanting my mother's love and not feeling that I had received it. If I had been able to connect to those repressed feelings later in life, I would have experienced the primals instead of the symptoms.

Accompanying the primal feelings were insights. In a few weeks after I began the primal process, I began having deep insights. My fear of marriage became clear to me. As an infant, that first most desirable woman had been my mother. By not getting her love I had been devastated with resultant feelings of rejection. Thus close relationships later in life with other desirable women triggered my early repressed feelings.

As these feelings became closer to consciousness, anxiety and nervous tension were the result. Even the casual contemplation of marriage could cause stomach pains to begin. Thus, sometimes, even considering the remote possibility of receiving love from a particular desirable woman triggered the repressed unconscious feelings of my needing my mother to like me.

In re-living those traumas of my infancy, I felt my mother's indifference and rejection and whenever I felt rejected by women in my adult relationships, those early feelings were brought closer to consciousness and were experienced as anxiety attacks.

I no longer experience panic attacks. After six months of feeling those repressed early hurts, my daily stomach pains were no longer a bothersome symptom and I was able to reduce my intake of valium from 10 mgs. per day to a very small fraction of that amount. Even though stomach pains are no longer a symptom, tension and puffiness in that area are a signal to me that it's primal-time again. After I have connected with the feeling, the stomach symptoms leave completely. A new option appeared. When I was discouraged by a desirable woman from pursuing the relationship I wanted, I experienced not anxiety attacks but primals instead!

Though those early feelings of maternal rejection did give shape and substance to my neurosis, its origins lay elsewhere. After eight months of feeling the early pain of such rejection, I began the inexorable re-living of my most difficult birth which I consider to be the actual source of my neurosis. The birth primals continue to this day, almost two decades after they began! But that's another story and perhaps another article.