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I’ve separated panic and terror from the fear chapter because these emotions bring us survival skills that help us do three very specific things.[11] We’re all aware of our “fight or flight” responses to danger; these two panic- and terror-based responses can protect us from harm, but there is another response that isn’t as well known—it’s called “freezing.” In many dangerous or traumatizing situations, fighting and fleeing aren’t our best survival options because we may not be strong enough or fast enough to avoid danger. If our healthy panic and terror can help us freeze and dissociate (or go into shock or numbness) in response to extreme danger, we can often survive the unsurvivable. Freezing is a brilliant option in many situations because it can dull our senses to excruciating pain, protect us from overwhelming stimuli, and present a corpselike demeanor to our attackers, who may become less interested in the attack when we exhibit no emotion and make no sound or movement (this is a possum’s lifesaving strategy, and it works!). However, in the aftermath of panic and terror, there’s so much activation that it’s hard to revisit, renegotiate, and integrate the situation, as all fears ask us to do. It’s especially difficult if your terror made you freeze, because people often equate freezing with cowardice.
If you’ve turned directly to this chapter and haven’t read through the chapter on fear, you should go back and read it before you proceed. Our distorted relationship with fear makes our lives difficult indeed, but it makes the lives (and the healing) of panic sufferers almost impossible. If you don’t understand fear, you won’t have access to your instincts, focus, or intuition, which means you won’t have the capacity to work constructively with the sudden actions panic and terror compel you to make. If you don’t understand the purpose of fear, you may scorn your own and other people’s freezing behaviors, which means you won’t be able to view panic and terror with any useful insight. Understanding the message of fear (and its relation to anger) is imperative; please take time to understand fear.
When I observe panic and terror empathically, I sense incredible brilliance that connects us back through time and underneath our cultural conditioning to our most ingenious survival instincts. However, I also know that people who suffer from panic attacks are dealing with a paralyzing and debilitating condition, and that antianxiety medications and beta-blockers can truly help them. Unrelieved panic and terror can destabilize your endocrine system, your sleep cycles, your appetite, and your equilibrium. If you’re a panic sufferer, certainly get thee to a doctor and calm your body and your mind. When you feel stable again, try the panic practice in this chapter and see if it helps you work with this rapids-level emotion.
Let me remind you again that panic-inducing traumas aren’t restricted to serious assaults, combat injuries, or criminal acts. Traumas routinely arise from such mundane events as witnessing accidents or violence, from standard medical or dental procedures, or even from being emotionally assaulted by the everyday name-calling, prejudice, overstimulation, or isolation we all endure. If you experience panic attacks but you cannot track them back to anything you’d call a trauma, please look again. Our society trains us to dishonor, ignore, and dissociate from our thoughts, our emotions, our dreams, and even our physical sensations. If you’re a sensitive soul and you’ve become dissociated in response to this unrelenting onslaught, your psyche will need to revisit each instance of dissociation in order to help you reintegrate yourself, add to your skill set, and come fully back to life. Don’t make the mistake of relegating trauma or panic responses to the territory of violent crime or gory car crashes. You’re a sensitive and unique organism, which means you’ll respond to startling and overwhelming input in your own unique way.
If your panic has helped you to freeze or “zone out” so that you could survive a terrorizing or dissociating situation, your psyche will need to replay stages one and two of that trauma in order to scrutinize and integrate the experience. Unfortunately, if you don’t understand panic and the brilliant survival skills of freezing and dissociation, you can easily plummet into an unhealthy relationship with freezing behaviors and experience panic attacks that can literally immobilize you. However, if you can understand that your sudden lack of movement and consciousness actually ensured your survival (you’re alive, aren’t you?), you can bring your full awareness to your panic cycles. If you can learn to see the act of freezing as the genius-level response it is, you can reenter that frozen state with vigor and courage, restore your flow, and move purposefully into the exquisite territory of the third and final stage of traumatic initiation.
If you need support in dealing with panic cycles that stem from trauma, please see Further Resources for the work of Peter Levine. He’s a psychologist and medical biophysicist who has studied trauma and stress for over three decades. His books walk you step-by-step through trauma-relieving processes that are empowering, integrating, and fun.
I’ll rephrase something I wrote in the chapter on trauma: danger is a fact of life. Trees fall, dentistry happens, stressors occur, cars veer, people yell and hit, and molesters prowl; danger is everywhere. The issue is not in the danger or in the dissociation we experience in response to it, but in the fact that we don’t have the resilience to reintegrate ourselves or regain our equilibrium once that danger has passed. Restoring our resilience is the key to reintegrating our psyches after traumatic incidents, but that task can seem daunting when rapids-level panic and terror are involved. Panic and terror can be debilitating, but they have something in common with every other emotion we have: they contain the precise amount of energy needed in the situation that called them forward—no more, and no less. Your emotions don’t fill you with enormous amounts of energy for no reason!
When your terror and panic are activated in response to trauma, they move forward to increase your adrenaline in case you have the chance to fight or flee at any time during your ordeal; to help you freeze; to release heightened amounts of painkilling endorphins so you’ll be more likely to survive any injury; and to help you dissociate if necessary. All this preparation takes a great deal of energy, which panic certainly contains. After the trauma has passed, your panic will retreat, but it won’t disappear completely. Like fear, panic will stay activated in order to give you the energy you need to reintegrate yourself, shake and tremble all over, and replay your trauma in any number of ways. If you don’t take advantage of this cooldown period, you’ll remain in a hyperactivated state, and your panic will have to remain activated because the trauma won’t truly be over. This hyperactivation often cycles you into panic attacks, which also contain a great deal of energy. This energy doesn’t exist to torment you, but to help you navigate through your flashbacks and reintegrate yourself. Panic attacks don’t occur without reason; they arise to help you confront your trauma (“What has been frozen in time?”), move through your replays any number of times, access new and different instincts and responses each time (“What healing action must be taken?”), and activate your body, your mind, your emotions, and your vision in service to your healing. It takes a great deal of energy to do this; panic and terror carry that much energy.
When panic attacks or flashbacks arise, your psyche is signaling very clearly that it’s time to move to stage three, to replay the situation that separated you from the everyday world, to explore the stimuli that brought your terror forward, and to move through your traumatic memories in instinctive and empowering ways. But it’s hard to move at all—let alone move to stage three—when your terror and panic compel you to freeze and dissociate. It’s like being on fire and being trapped in a block of ice at the very same time. This kind of panic fills you with heat and energy, yet it forces you into completely frozen immobility, which doesn’t make any sense intellectually. However, when you can bring your fully resourced awareness to the situation, you can use your skills to honor both sides of panic. You can honor the enforced stillness by focusing yourself and sitting quietly, and you can honor the hyperactivated state by brightening your boundary intensely, grounding yourself strongly, and channeling the panic out of your body and into your vibrant and protected personal space.
Panic and terror bring forward enough energy to help you reintegrate after trauma. If you can stay grounded and shoot the rapids with their assistance, panic and terror will help you renegotiate your trauma, restore your instincts, and come back to life. But make no mistake—it’s an intense process. Panic can feel boiling hot and freezing cold, pains can come and go, screams can bubble up, and you may need to kick and yell or run around the room. When you come back from a deathlike experience and reintegrate yourself, you’ll need to tremble, shake, jerk, swear, kick, and fight—just like the animals in my childhood practice did when they returned to their bodies after being hit by cars or mauled by dogs. But then, when you’re back in one piece, your panic and terror will subside naturally—as they’re meant to—and you’ll have your life back. When you’re reintegrated, you’ll once again be able to move, think, dream, sleep, feel, laugh, and love—not because you’re perfect and unblemished, nor because you’ve erased all traces of trauma from your soul, but because you’re fully resourced and whole again.
Here’s an important point: This practice can help you reintegrate and channel your panic and terror properly, but it won’t erase panic and terror from your soul. It can’t! You need panic and terror; life is hazardous, and there will continue to be times when your panic will need to come forward to help you to fight, flee, freeze, dissociate, faint, or go numb. Panic isn’t the problem. Problems only arise when this powerful emotion gets caught in a feedback loop, but those problems exist in all emotions—even joy! You’re not supposed to erase your powerful and unpleasant emotions; you’re supposed to become skilled at working with them. Your sacred tasks in the territory of panic and terror are to restore your flow so that panic can move through you when it needs to—during emergencies and traumas—and to restore your resilience after your panic has risen up to save your life. Panic is your ally.
If unresolving panic-attack cycles have been an issue in your life (and you’re being treated effectively by your doctor), you should focus on your grounding skills so that you can release some of the activated energy that’s trapped in your body. It’s especially healing to increase your grounding from your solar plexus area, which is the home of your adrenal glands. It’s the area that often takes the biggest hit during trauma, which means it often needs the greatest connection to the earth. In order to calm and heal your overworked adrenals, it’s also important to limit or omit your use of stimulants—certainly the obvious ones: coffee, tea, soda, diet pills, herbal energy concoctions, cocaine, methamphetamines, and chocolate, but also the less obvious ones, such as sugar, gambling, overspending, and sex addictions. Stimulants, because they arouse your adrenals and separate your attention from your body, tend to drop you into cycles of unfocused worry and anxiety, and those are too close to panic and terror for your health and well-being. Chronic worries and anxieties are moderately disruptive to all of us, but they’re seriously unsettling to anyone struggling with unresolving panic-attack cycles.
If you use stimulants to jack yourself up and out of your panic, you’ll most likely need something to bring yourself down before bedtime. Please also look into your use of alcohol or the anesthetics (painkillers, cigarettes, heroin, antidepressants, marijuana, excessive reading or TV and movie viewing, and overeating), and reread the chapter on addictions (see chapter 6) to get a clearer view of the assistance your psyche is seeking in your addictions and distractions. Please be gentle with yourself and know this: If your soul is injured and dissociated, you’ll absolutely require distracting, alleviating, or energy-boosting substances and practices just to keep yourself going. There’s no shame in your movement toward relief; there are just better ways to find it.
If you’re prone to panic attacks, please don’t barrel into this practice unheedingly. You need help calming yourself and your body before you begin. You’ve also got to have all of your skills under you, and a strong sense for when you’re dissociated and when you’re not before you can work in this territory. You also have to be able to identify and channel all of your other emotions, because when panic gets trapped in a feedback loop, it creates a dam in your emotional realm—which means that any and all of your other emotions can get stuck behind it, so you’ll need to be quite agile. Also, because unresolving panic attacks can disrupt your adrenal glands and your chemistry, you may need to strengthen your body in a number of ways before you attempt to channel panic and terror. I strongly recommend that you seek medical and psychological help; unresolving panic is debilitating!
The practice for panic and terror follows the basic steps you learned in the practice for fear (see in chapter 16). You focus yourself and set your boundary strongly. Then you ground any part of you that feels tight or uncomfortable. A body dealing with panic needs a lot of soothing, and grounding can provide a relaxing sense of relief. This increased grounding will help you unfreeze yourself, while each of your other skills will prepare you to revisit and renegotiate the original traumatic situation in order to create any number of new outcomes.
When you’re in the territory of panic, you may find that you have enormous amounts of energy stored in your body. Good! Before you enter a flashback, it’s helpful to pour this energy into your boundaries and your personal space. This technique helps you calm your body and revitalize your boundary, but it also helps you maintain your connection to the power and force of panic, which you can use during your replays to run like the wind, duck and feint, kick your way to freedom, scream bloody murder, or cry like there’s no tomorrow. During your replays, you should treat your body as the survival expert it is and follow its wisdom. If you feel like curling into a ball, do it. If you feel like punching and kickboxing, do it. If you feel like trembling, howling, hiding in a closet, or shaking all over, do it. Every action you take will add to your survival skills and your resources.
However, there is a possible difficulty you may encounter: when you imaginatively revisit your original trauma, you may dissociate! Since panic can trigger dissociation (that’s one of its vital functions), replaying the separation of stage one and the ordeal of stage two may cause you to experience dissociation and numbing again. This is certainly disruptive, but it is not actually an impediment to healing when you have skills. If you can’t work through your replay in an integrated state—if you shoot out of your body like a grapefruit seed, or if you have no conscious memory of the incident—you can work with your traumatic material from an imaginative and dissociated position first.
Basically, you ground and focus yourself in the present moment—where you’re safe—and imagine or envision a trauma similar to yours. Then you can imagine going in as a rescuer—of yourself! I had to use this technique to access my own sexual assault memories, because I was very young when the first attacks occurred, and the atmosphere and situations were so awful that I couldn’t get near them in any useful way. Once I began to access and work with my traumatic experiences in this imaginal way, I was able to go in as my adult self and save my child self over and over again (there was a lot of yelling and shadowboxing going on in my house, I can tell you!). And it works just fine. Within a few days, my body began bringing forth its own stored pains (which I was able to work with and ground out), my mind became able to organize its fractured and disconnected memories (which allowed me to incinerate my contracts with the behaviors and beliefs I could now identify as trauma-based), and my emotions became more distinct and fluid (which gave me the information, courage, and resources I needed to go deeper into the replays).
After a few weeks of working from this dissociated position, I was able to get into my body, place myself in a few of the positions I remembered from childhood, and fight, scream, and kick my way out of the replays—always completing every flashback in a position of triumph. It was wonderful! My body reawakened, my mind became resourced, my emotions became my allies (instead of my tormentors), and my attention nestled itself firmly inside my body—because it didn’t want to be anywhere else. Now I can stay in my body when traumatic memories come forward because I know I’m safe, agile, and resourceful enough to deal with them. For decades, I ran from those dreadful memories in order to be “happy.” Who knew that jumping into them would bring forth strength, healing, laughter, and joy?
Each time you work through a panic cycle (whether you’re dissociated or integrated), it’s important to rejuvenate yourself (see in chapter 8). The channeling of panic and terror moves amazing amounts of energy through you and creates massive changes in every part of your psyche. These changes will alert your stasis tendencies, which will want to refill you in whatever way they can. It’s vital to refill yourself consciously so that your movements into stasis are as conscious as your movements into change. It’s also a very good idea to eat or drink something after you’ve channeled panic, because your body will need some soothing and grounding. If you can immerse yourself in water (in a pool, a lake, the ocean, a bath, or even a shower) you can help your body calm itself. Hugging and massage are also excellent grounding activities, but please wait a few hours or perhaps a day before you engage in sexual activities. Sex brings your partner right into your body, and your body will need some private time in order to reorganize itself. You don’t need to swear off sex for an extended period, but you do need to respect your body’s newness and sensitivity. You’ll also need some time to heal from your adrenal fatigue, so it’s important to give your body plenty of rest, relaxation, healing food, and time in nature (especially near bodies of water). It’s also a good idea to see a therapist to get ideas about how to keep from falling backward into old panicky behaviors.
As you’re working through your panic cycles, bodily movement will help you heal and reintegrate yourself. Yoga, qigong, and tai chi can help you restore your flexibility, while dancing, swimming, and sports can restore your flow, your strength, and your playfulness. Martial arts and self-defense classes are also wonderfully supportive because they teach you the honorable rules of engagement for physical conflicts. Model mugging workshops (where a heavily padded instructor teaches you to defend yourself as he or she attempts to mug you) are also an excellent idea, but be sure to tell the instructor you’re working your way through panic and trauma. The model mugger needs to know that when you fight back, your panic may give you superhuman strength! Model muggers are heavily padded and expertly trained, but a word to the wise is never wasted.
Remember that this practice won’t erase panic from your soul; it will simply restore your flow so that panic won’t dam up your emotional realm. When your flow is restored, you’ll be able to connect healthfully to all of your fears, and if necessary, to flee, fight, freeze, or dissociate in the future if that’s your best survival option. Then when the trauma or emergency has passed, you’ll be able to use the intensity in your panic to work through your replays with the support of the fully resourced village inside you.
If, after you’ve read through this chapter or tried to channel your panic, its cycling intensifies, it’s time to seek professional help (which may involve medication) from a therapist or doctor. There is no shame in this at all. Panic-attack cycles can be extremely destabilizing, and you may require a great deal of support, therapy, healing, intervention, and time before you can restore your equilibrium. Reach out. Help is available.
This is not a job for friends and acquaintances! If someone you know is dealing with panic-attack cycles, please help that person find expert intervention and therapy. Also, let him or her know about Peter Levine’s books (see Further Resources). Dr. Levine offers grounded and immediate healing techniques that remove the taint of pathology from the panic sufferer’s ordeal.
I learned a vital lesson about the healing aspects of physical movement from two of my beloved stray cats, Rufus and Jax. Both cats came to us through some sort of radar, because we didn’t plan on having animals. Rufus was a muscular gray tabby who approached us by crouching in the manzanita grove beyond our driveway and crying pitifully whenever any of us appeared in the yard. My husband, Tino, began meowing back at Rufus, and over a period of weeks, got him to come near enough to eat regular meals. Rufus was absolutely traumatized and would run and jump at any noise or movement, but he always showed up for meals and meow sessions with Tino. Eventually, he allowed us both to touch him, and soon he demanded petting before every meal. He remained skittish, and he didn’t like any stranger, but he became safe, well-fed, and willing to be loved.
Jax was a sleek black-haired adolescent whose mother (another stray) dropped him off at our house before she moved on. Though Jax had been raised as a stray, he had been protected by a very good mother and he was able to bond with us immediately. We were fascinated to observe the different ways Jax and Rufus responded to the world. Jax was always curious, while Rufus was always suspicious and often terrified. Jax enjoyed roughhousing and would often take a swipe at us in the middle of a play session (as if to teach us how to play fair), while Rufus needed to be touched in very specific ways or not at all. If we touched forbidden areas or moved in forbidden ways, Rufus would smack us very hard and end all contact by running away, often not reappearing for hours.
Jax and Rufus also responded to novel stimuli in nearly opposite ways. If Jax came upon a new smell, sight, or sensation, he’d react viscerally, pull back, shake off as if he had water on him, and then reengage with the novel thing until he understood it. Rufus, on the other hand, rarely allowed novel stimuli to come anywhere near him. If he was forced into contact with something new, he wouldn’t shake off as Jax did; instead, he’d freeze and then run as if from a gunshot. The differences between them fascinated me, and they translated directly to human behaviors. Unhealed trauma survivors often hold their bodies rigidly and respond in very limited and stress-filled ways to their environments, while healthier people generally move more often, more easily, and in more and varied ways.
I experimented on my own traumatized body by changing my exercise from my usual regimented routines that only exacerbated my rigidity; I began dancing, stretching, and moving in unaccustomed and previously avoided ways. Many old memories moved into my consciousness, many buried pains came forward, and many unusual thoughts began to cycle. I used my empathic skills to support the unraveling of my traumatic postures, and soon, freer movement returned to my spine and my psyche, simply because I chose to move more like Jax than like Rufus. I saw that holding myself rigidly and protecting injured parts of my body were ways to hermetically seal my injuries and my traumatic memories. This was an excellent coping skill when I was little, but it created its own pain as I grew up. Restoring unstructured movement helped me release many physical remnants of my traumas, and it restored my flow.
We were able to apply a simplified form of this healing method to Rufus. Obviously, we couldn’t teach him to dance or do tai chi, but we found ways to help him ease some of his body armoring by introducing different petting rhythms and by touching him in “forbidden” ways and then in “Rufus-approved” ways, over and over again while we soothed him. Sure enough, he became more fluid in his movements and more able to respond resourcefully to stimuli. He became much more able to deal with sudden noises, and he began to ask for petting whenever he saw us, instead of just at mealtimes. I don’t know if Rufus will ever be the rollicking ball of fun Jax is, but he has made real progress.
If you’ve survived trauma, be aware of your own movement patterns and of frozen or numbed areas in your body. Do not pathologize them (freezing and numbing are excellent survival skills) or blame yourself for holding on to them. Sealing off painful or damaged areas is a very good coping mechanism, because until you have skills, the pains you carry can seem overwhelming. Restoring flow and movement to your traumatized body is an intense experience because memories begin to move, pains begin to appear, and thoughts and emotions begin to awaken. This is not an easy transition to make when you’re undefined, ungrounded, and dissociated—and your psyche knows this, which is why the armoring remains in place. You need all your skills under you before you can restore authentic movement and allow your trauma to present itself for healing. When you have your skills, though, you can move through this healing process as a grounded and resourced survival expert.
Please remember that you may have armored yourself or dissociated in response to just about any painful occurrence, because you can almost never control when or how such painful events unfold. You were most likely not allowed to back away and shake yourself off when you were frightened (as Jax and all healthy animals do), nor were you likely allowed to gather your resources when overwhelming stimuli bore down upon you, just as you probably weren’t allowed to tremble, cry, or cool down after the danger had passed. Most of us were told to hold still, stop crying, stop whining, stop backing away, stop fighting, and stop wriggling! Consequently, our natural instincts, responses, movements, and emotions were repressed and short-circuited. When you can reenter your traumas consciously and revive your instincts and your free movement again, you’ll be able to shake off your traumatic residues and restore your Jax-like strength and agility. When you can restore flow to all parts of your psyche, everything inside you will become awakened, resourced, and able to respond to any hazard or opportunity you can imagine. Flow is the key.
Remember to welcome your panic and terror in all its forms: when it makes you flee, when it makes you fight, and when it makes you freeze. It knows what it’s doing! Honor it for helping you survive, and use its intensity to revisit and renegotiate the dangers and traumas that brought it forward. Welcome and thank your panic.