Panic attacks are always accompanied by intense fear. Intense fear is appropriate if you come upon a cougar on your jogging route. But if your heart pounds with fear with no obvious explanation, it is most likely a panic attack.
Where does such an unexplained fear come from? For those who have experienced trauma, it comes from some past experience that involved both a loss of control and the feeling of intense fear in your body.
Essentially, a panic attack is being out of sync with your here and now bodily reality. Grounding is the best way to redirect your body to reconnect to the reality of the here and now. For example, if you are sitting in the quiet environment of my office, in a temperature and humidity controlled building, when all is peaceful in the city, then why are you responding as if you are facing a life threatening cougar?
This response to past trauma does not mean you are crazy. You are simply re-experiencing a physiological memory of past traumas that have not been processed and healed. It is important to realize re-traumatizing triggers generate panic that engenders a self-perpetuating feedback loop that sustains, reinforces, and maintains itself. Efforts made to calm down often make it worse. “Try to relax” is the most ineffective instruction one can make to a person in a panic! Yet I am sure we all have heard that, from friends as well as therapists with good intentions. Fighting to calm down is a contradiction. One cannot calm down through struggle.
One heals by practicing how to step beyond the panic by learning to redirect and return yourself to the reality of the here and now. Redirect your attention by focusing on what you see, hear, taste, smell and touch rather than struggling within yourself to relax.
In past posts, I have focused on physical techniques to step beyond the panic. They are based on using your own body to reclaim the present.
At https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30VMIEmA114, there is a guided approach to grounding. It is similar to what I often used with patients in my office psychiatric practice. It is not something I was always confident that my DID patients could do on their own at home – hence the physical exercises I recommended to them and included in earlier posts.
Nevertheless, for many people, this additional grounding approach may be of benefit. It uses attention to the five senses. Name out loud:
1. What you see—a wall, a lamp, a few pictures, a vase of flowers…
2. What you hear—-the humming of the traffic outside the building, the clock tickling…
3. What you taste—-the sweetness of your iced tea or the aftertaste of your coffee…
4. What you smell— whether it is unpleasant or pleasant…
5. What you feel through touch—-The gentle pressure of your bottom on the chair seat or the weight of your hands resting on the arm rest…
With this exercise, you establish your capacity to return yourself to the experience of the here and now. This grounding is accomplished by reconnecting with each of your sense perceptions at this very moment.
This sequence does not include a question of emotion, like “What do you feel?” Why? You already know that you are feeling panic. Panic is an emotion, not a sense perception. It is not a sensation your body experiences directly when you interact with the physical world. Make sure to ground yourself through the power of to your bodily experience of seeing, hearing smelling, tasting and touching.
What is most precious about this is that you are doing it all by yourself. It is a foundation for establishing the confidence that you already have the capacity to move beyond the panic. You have the power to do this without relying on hypnosis by a therapist, a medication, or any other external source. The only input is your own sense perception, one by one.
This is empowerment — the best therapy.
