In addition to chronic pain sufferers, people often come to me facing challenges having to do with fear, panic, and de-stabilizing life changes.
Anxiety
This is an inner experience of lack of ease, often with worry about the future, to the point of doom. The mind can flit about from scary idea to scary idea, and the body feels shaky, empty, and disconnected. Sometimes anxiety is very precise, about particular situations, and sometimes anxiety sits in the background, coloring everything with its rather exhausting whine.
Re-connecting to sources of safety in the body and to others is key, as is finding a way to think about the world that isn’t so scary.
Panic attacks
Occur when thoughts and feelings spiral upward in a so-called positive feedback loop—like when a microphone is placed in front of a speaker. The loop is called “positive” because it adds to itself, but anyone who has experienced one knows that a panic loop is definitively negative! Panic attacks can be terrifying and can seem to come out of nowhere. But close attention reveals that they begin with an unsettling thought or a feeling; they’re the body’s own alarm system alarming itself, about itself. They occur especially during periods in life when we are already overwhelmed, and our alarm system is over-burdened.
We need to find ways to take the load off and free up some space.
One key to working with both anxiety and panic is to de-mystify the experience … to come to understand, through witnessing how it happens in your own body … how anxiety is created, and what you can do to (1) allow it to disappear and (2) prevent it from arising in the first place.
I know anxiety and panic very well, they are old friends, and I would love to work on them with you.