I know I am in danger of repeating myself here but just thinking out loud as it were. No matter what I do it always comes back to this and just when I think I have come to a conclusion I am soon confused again. It is the internal battle that keeps raging and one that people with any anxiety problems, even without it being a disorder, know about.
I was reading something today about panic attacks and a proposed solution to overcoming them. The technique itself is quite familiar and nothing new. When panic begins to intensify we are to accept and become an observer. Where this technique varies from most is that at the point where we feel we are going to lose control we must ask for more. Here we do not take an aggressive stance but instead invite the sensations to intensify and befriend fear without making it a confrontation. In doing this apparently we defuse the intensity of the fear as it cannot give us more. We reveal that it was all a hoax and there is nothing to fear. In fact we learn that we are the ones who decide to have panic attacks. It is our reaction to the initial sensations which everyone experiences which causes a panic attack and with our reaction of fear we make the choice to panic. Simply put the difference between someone who has a panic (or anxiety) disorder and someone who does not is that the former fears the sensations and the latter does not.
All very interesting but not anything new if you have read most of the anxiety/panic literature around. What I did find interesting was the employment of this strategy. We are not to wait for panic to come but instead actively go looking for it every day. I can't help thinking of the biblical quote "seek and you shall find". But that is the point. In order to overcome panic we are too experience it as often as possible which we are told will give us a feeling of empowerment. Armed with the knowledge that a panic attack cannot harm us and as horrible as the sensations are we take this method with us and defuse the panic bomb each time we track it down. Repetition of this will ensure the habit of panic no longer longer mattering and so as a result occurring less frequently until not at all. Additionally when trying to find panic we will, it is said, find it hard to find.
So am I ready to go seeking? To be honest I am not at the moment. At the moment I am making slow progress but still skirting around panic and trying not to induce it. When it rears I fight and hope it will allow me to keep making little movements forward. This progress though is fragile, very fragile. It grows slowly but is made of paper thin glass and every time panic appears from nowhere and screams "boo" it feels like the glass will shatter. Everything hangs on that moment. Months of building confidence smashed in a single instance.
Doubt still clouds my mind. I have to balance what I must take as blind faith in the words of others over my own experience no matter how many others have arrived at the same conclusion. And I know people say life is passing me by but a life of mental suffering, which is my experience with panic, in constantly panicking is in my opinion a tad less appealing than slowly trying to build confidence without the panic. It is restricted living but livable. God its all so confusing. All the advice points to seeing panic and enduring it but experience, which our emotions are effected by, conflict with that advice. It is difficult to override the uncertainty. I mean what if I am different. What if I am not going to recover in this way and instead just make life hell for myself and go backwards until I am afraid to get out of bed again? They say it will work but why was it never worked in the past and all I have gotten out of it is pain and lost days?
What I have been looking for is peace. I have been reaching out for a place of comfort and relaxation free of angst and terror. Everywhere I look people are pointing to the same place and the only road passes through dear Hades which I've visited many times and have the mental scorch marks to prove it. I just don't know. My opinion on whether enduring a panic attack is for me is constantly banging in my head between right and wrong to the point where it is starting to agitate me. For now I continue to struggle with the choice between seeking solace which my mind demands or seeking the misery that I am told will lead to the other in the long term. Presently and continually I stay in the safety of the shadows sometimes getting closer to peer in and then running away quickly back in to the dark that has become my life.
