Hypnosis Silver Spring

Panic

Helen called me on my office phone, about her next appointment – ostensibly.  I’m not sure how I knew – must have been something in her voice.

“Are you having a panic attack?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I thought so.

“Ok.  I know what that feels like – terrible.  Right?”  I do know.  I have never had an actual panic attack, but I have experienced those feelings – tightness in the chest, pulse racing, heat, sweating, nausea.  No one wants those feelings.

“Yes.”  She sounded fearful, tight, squeezing the words out.

“Would you like to know how to stop it?”

“Yes,” was her answer.  Of course she would!

“First of all, you’re not going to die.  No one has ever died from a panic attack.  Though it feels awful.”

“Ok,” I continued.  “Now this is going to sound counter-intuitive.  I want you to welcome it!”

“What?!”

“I know – you want it to stop.  But listen to me -- this is how.  Welcome it.  In fact, ask for more.  Just do it.”
“Dare it: ‘Is this all you’ve got?  Show me your worst.’  This thing is a three-year old, having a tantrum.”

I waited, maybe ten or fifteen seconds.  “Tell me what you’re feeling.”

“It’s getting less,” she said, sounding surprised.  “I think it’s going away.”

“Very good,” I said.  “The feelings may come back later.  If they do, do the same thing – welcome it, ask for more, dare it.  If you do this each time, the episodes will become less and less frequent, until they go away entirely, maybe over several weeks.  It’s like people teasing you, when you were a kid – your mom used to tell you, if you don’t react, it’s no longer fun for them, and they gradually stop.”

“Well, thank you so much.”

“I’m glad you’re feeling better.  Looking forward to seeing you Friday.”

*****
If you have ever experienced a panic attack, you know how terrifying it can be; you will probably go to great lengths to avoid having another one. 

The anticipation of panic attacks is often the basis of common phobias, such as fear of driving, fear of bridges, fear of flying, and agoraphobia – fear of “unsafe” places (which may be any place outside your house).  The individual fears and tries to avoid any place or situation in which they might have a panic attack.  It is this “anxiety about the anxiety” that actually constrains and limits the person’s life, not the panic attack itself.

I have worked successfully with a number of individuals for whom anxiety was a major obstacle to leading a comfortable life.  They have ranged from agoraphobics to people with fear of flying or driving.  NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) offers several ways of removing the emotion from the memory of a traumatic event, or substituting a positive image for a negative one that used to trigger distress and anxiety (for example, the image of disaster: crashing, bodies, blood, and fire that triggered a client’s phobia of flying, whenever he was about to get on a plane).  When people regularly practice “Finding the Zone”, the combination of self-hypnosis and meditation that I teach most of my clients, they notice positive changes in their ability to handle stress, often a general “mellowing-out”.  Connirae Andreas’ Core Transformation process is another powerful instrument of change.

With Thomas, a recent client, I went through a number of these as well as several hypnosis sessions.  Thomas kept saying, at the start of each session, that the anxiety was a lot better – but – there was something we were not addressing, which was continuing to make him miserable (“I just want it to stop”, he kept saying).

For a week or two I had been getting emails from a website called PanicAway, newsletters about various aspects of dealing with panic attacks.  You know, somehow you get on someone’s email list and they keep coming.  With most of these I finally end up unsubscribing.  But occasionally one of them seems interesting or even potentially useful.

So on a hunch and a hope, I forwarded one of these PanicAway newsletters to Thomas, asking him to “see what you think of this – do you find it useful?”  Well – bingo!  He wrote me back that very afternoon, saying “This is it!  This works for me.  This is the missing piece.”

*****

Barry Joe McDonagh, of Galway, Ireland, is the developer of Panic Away, which he calls “The most powerful method for eliminating panic attacks and general anxiety.”  The essentials of his method are what I described in the first part of this article: when you feel those symptoms, welcome it, observe it, ask for more.   In his 256-page ebook, Panic Away (part of a package you can purchase for $67), McDonagh explains what a panic attack is, how it develops, common phobias, what causes an anxiety disorder, and describes ways to cope successfully with all of these and more.  The book is thorough and well-written, with lots of real-life examples.  I highly recommend it.

I must also say that these techniques are not new, as I am sure Barry McDonagh would agree.  When I looked up “panic” in the index of Quantum Focus (1999), by Michael Ellner and Richard Jamison, there it is on page 150:

First Aid
If you suffer from panic attacks, here is a very simple method to minimize these attacks as you first feel them coming on.  Don’t fight the impending attack.  Instead, gently slip into a Quantum Focus [“The Zone”] state of relaxation and invite the attack.  This very act of invitation in a Quantum state dispels fear, while your Quantum relaxation breaks the physiological cycle the attack needs to intensify and sustain itself.