Escape Anxiety : 8 Steps to Freedom Through Meditative Therapies (eBook)

Freaking Out! Anatomy of a Panic Attack

I have come to believe that anxiety accompanies intellectual activity as its shadow, and that the more we know of the nature of anxiety, the more we will know of intellect.

—Howard Liddell, PhD

“The Role of Vigilance in the Development of Animal Neurosis”

The double doors looked like the doors of any other clinic. As I I paused on the top step, my reflection stared back at me from the glass, shadowy but familiar. Yet I knew that I was stepping into a place unlike any I’d ever been before, and I would not come out the same. I was about to check myself in to a psychiatric hospital.

That day in 1991 had begun like most other days at that point in my life: in a blind panic. As the dawn light penetrated my consciousness, so did the now-familiar sensation of desperation and despair that had been greeting me every morning for the past three months. I lay as if paralyzed, my body and nerves exposed and awash with a sense of inevitable, impending doom. Deep sadness and hopeless accompanied the fear. These feelings were now my constant companions. They persisted despite my attempts to pretend them away, drink them away, distract them away, and pray them away. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could relieve my ever-growing mental anguish. I had lost control of my emotions.

I was no stranger to mental illness. I’d watched my aunt descend into schizophrenia, and knew that a great-aunt who ironically shared my name and birth date had spent the better part of her life in mental institutions. This is it, I thought, as I lay in bed. This is my destiny. I am mentally ill. My fear spiraled into deepening panic. I am mentally ill. I will live the rest of my life in a mental institution, locked up like a caged animal, in a dim, grim, dark hell! I began to sweat. I wanted to throw up, but I was afraid that if I did I would never stop, that my body would just continue to retch until I would die. I wanted to run, to get away from my thoughts, my reality, my today, my tomorrow, my forever, my fear of me, my mind, and my life. But I couldn’t run, because there it would be. It was inside of me. It was in my head and I desperately wanted it to stop, to leave me alone.

I wanted to run somewhere, but I needed to rest. I couldn’t go anywhere, anyway, because I was afraid to go outside. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I wanted a hug but didn’t want anyone to touch me. Nobody could possibly understand what I was going through. The thought of someone comforting me made me feel even more hopeless because I knew that no one I knew could help me. Not even my mother, who always provided some comfort or words of wisdom to give me hope. I felt no hope. The walls were closing in on me. This was my worst nightmare and I was wide-awake. In fact, it felt like the moment you first wake up from a horrifying nightmare and every cell in your body is bursting with terror. That is what I was feeling, but it wasn’t a nightmare. It was my very real mental hell.

I leapt out of bed, as if my mind was chasing me, and ran into the kitchen. In a state of full-blown terror, I threw open the door of the nearest cupboard and grabbed a can of vegetables as if grabbing for a life raft in the midst of raging storm in a vast sea. Through the fog of panic, I began to read the labels, between my gasps for air and repressed tears. I knew that if I allowed myself to cry, I would never stop—that my cries would turn to screams and I would fall off the fragile raft of sanity to which I was desperately clinging. The letters blurred before my eyes, but I fought for focus. “If I can just focus on these words and know what they mean, then I can check to see if I still have some sanity,” I told myself.

“Green beans. They grow in fields. They’re green and long and have a seam with a string. We eat them for nutrition. I don’t like them but they are good for me.” Deep breath. “Salt. Salt makes green beans taste better, but too much is not good. I like the flavor of salt.” I grabbed another can. “Corn. Corn is yellow. It grows on a stalk.” I went on reading food can labels until finally my panic began to subside. Tomatoes. Peas. Black beans. Sitting on my kitchen floor, I thought about what they tasted like, felt like, looked like.

I knew, as I put the last can down, that I had lost the fight. I had to get help. The phone rang. It was my Dad, concern evident in his voice as he asked,

“Honey, are you okay?”

“No, Dad, I’m not okay.”

“Your mother and I think you may need to go to the hospital. Would you like for me to take you to the hospital?”

I said yes. “Yes, I would.”

Immediately, I felt some relief, married with the deepest sadness I had ever known. That’s how bad things had gotten—so bad that the idea of a psychiatric hospital felt like relief. And the only thing I knew about psychiatric hospitals was what I had seen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That’s right, that’s what I voluntarily signed up for. Straitjacket anyone? Yeah, me, please—I’ll take one of those.

I didn’t know what I would face and for how long, but I knew I was very sick and I couldn’t go on like this. I had an eighteen-month-old baby, I had just started a new job, and I was the primary earner in my household. What was going to happen to my baby, my home, my finances, my marriage, or my brand new job that was keeping us afloat? I couldn’t afford to be sick or take time off to get help. What would people say? What would I tell people? I couldn’t tell anyone that I’d literally lost my mind! I would never be able to go back to work and face my co-workers. A heavy coat of shame washed over me, which faded into truth. None of this mattered anymore. I couldn’t manage any of this. I was in a state of complete surrender.

As I stood outside those glass doors at Millwood Hospital in Arlington, Texas, I thought to myself, “God has really abandoned me now.” I looked at my reflection again. Where was she, the young woman who had had so much ambition, drive, and determination? The capable, responsible mother deeply in love with her two children? The professional with goals to move into management and maybe even training? All of these had been reduced to the skeletal figure looking back at me, her face furrowed with mental anguish and desperation, weighing barely 104 pounds. She was hardly recognizable as the woman I had been just three short months ago.

“Where was God?” I asked myself. “Why did he let this happen to me? I thought was going to have a life of purpose, and yet now I stand at the doorway of a psychiatric hospital. This is the darkest day of my life.” I opened the door and stepped inside.

A few days later, I was eagerly awaiting my first visit with my assigned psychiatrist. By this time I had settled in. The hospital was nice; the nurses were friendly. No one had offered me a straitjacket or proposed electric shock therapy. I hadn’t seen anyone in a hospital gown shuffling down the hallway drooling—only a group of chatty patients on their way to the gym for a game of volleyball. I was beginning to feel some hope, along with a healthy need to know what in the hell happened to me. I was anxious to see the doctor because I was sure he was going to give me an explanation and set me on the road to recovery.

Well, that didn’t turn out quite as planned. When I asked him what had happened to me—how I could have gone so quickly from being a high-functioning sales rep, mother, and wife to being a basket case who couldn’t get out of bed in the morning—he just gave me a blank stare. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking “You’re kidding me, right? I’m here to treat you, not educate you!” or “Do you really think I need to tell you all the reasons you ended up here?” or maybe just, “I don’t know how to tell you what happened to you because it has never happened to me.” Whatever his thoughts or reasons, he promptly proceeded to write me a prescription for the latest and greatest psychotropic medication, and that was the end of our consultation.

Understanding Anxiety

I left that doctor’s office frustrated, but still determined to come to a clear understanding as to how a normal person could descend into a debilitating mental illness in what appeared to be a matter of months. And if the doctor wasn’t going to or wasn’t able to give it to me, I would have to get it myself. For me, it was not enough just to start feeling better. I needed to know why I felt bad in the first place, and how I could prevent it happening again. I’ve always lived by the old adage that “knowledge is power,” and the doctor’s lack of explanations left me feeling helpless. I sensed intuitively that there was something I had missed along the road of life, some tool or skill or warning that could have prevented this from becoming such a catastrophe. And I was determined to find out what it was so it would never catch me by surprise again. This journey of understanding would take me the next twenty years of my life.

All I knew at that point was that I had an “anxiety disorder” and that my experience that morning with the vegetable cans was a fullblown panic attack. I quickly realized that this was not my first—I had already had several similar episodes. Thinking back over these events, it became clear that they were progressive...