Ed has been experiencing some panic recently. (Name and identifying details are changed to preserve confidentiality.) For him, it mostly happens in big public places such as large stores like Home Depot. In places like that he seemingly, out of the blue, begins to feel twinges of fear. The fear gets “bigger and bigger” and eventually becomes so overwhelming he has to leave the store in a hurry. And like many people who experience feelings of panic like Ed does, every time he goes through this, he is convinced that there is, essentially, something wrong with him.
Ed told me he’s been an “emotion stuffer” since he was a teenager. He said that when traumatic events happened in his family as a kid, he took the role of “responsible one” to hold the family together. As he said, “falling apart was not an option” for him.
When he was 12 years old, a close relative of his committed suicide. The entire family was thrown into turmoil. During the next two years, as well as having to face regular teenage difficulties, his father, a cousin and a close friend of Ed’s also died. Ed’s only alternative to ‘falling apart” in the eye of so much death in such a short time seemed to be to avoid his emotions entirely.
“Where did all these emotions go when you did that?”, I asked Ed.
“In storage.” he answered. He said he really didn’t know how he’d handled all the trauma but said that he felt he hadn’t.
The image of a storage closet filled with lots and lots of boxes came to mind: An emotional storage closet. A place where we keep all the emotions and feelings we don’t want to deal with. If we continue to store painful feelings, instead of feeling them, the closet becomes so full, we can’t fit anything more inside it; not even “something small”. Now even the littlest amount of stress becomes overwhelming.
I told Ed about the image and it resonated with him. It seemed to both of us that he had no more storage space and that the small amount of stress he experienced in public places triggered a chain of emotions leading to paralyzing fear.
We needed to find a way to remove boxes from Ed’s closet and give him some room to work with. And like most of us, avoiding Home Depot for the rest of his life wasn’t a viable option!
The first key step we had to take was to redefine this situation. Rather than just to continue to avoid emotions, we decided to look at this closet clearing as an experiment. The primary task for Ed was to become as curious about the process as possible. I suggested to him to notice the following:
Where in your body do you feel the panic? What thoughts are connected to the feeling? And also to ask himself , “What is happening to me?… not what is my story is concerning what’s happening, but what is actually happening?”
When we change our approach to fear from avoidance to interest (or even excitement) something unexpected begins to happen. After a short increase in intensity the fear begins to subside. The reason for this is that our mind can’t be in fear and in curiosity at the same time. When we’re not afraid of fear, fear does not remain. When we finally turn to face fear, we begin to see the grip our story has had on us…and the illusion we’ve created. It’s like the old story of seeing the snake in the dimly lit basement and being horrified…only until we turn the light on and see that it’s actually a rope on the ground.
Just talking about this with Ed, I could feel him shift from dread to interest. He began to see his experience as changeable rather than stuck. Ed decided to go to Home Depot. Rather than hoping the panic wouldn’t happen, as he’d been doing for a long time, he told me now that he was “sort hoping it would happen”. (Whow!…)
I spoke to him the following week. He told me that he’d gone to another large store where panic had gripped him in the past. He said that he was waiting for it to happen, but with a different attitude…not waiting with fear, but waiting with anticipation and curiosity to track his experience. To his amazement, no panic. No fear! Ed was surprised. Ed had shifted from the “fear of fear” to simply experiencing what was actually happening to him, which was mostly physical and mental. He hadn’t shied away from feeling an uncomfortable emotion. On the contrary, he now was interested in just seeing it. When we cease to fear fear, it becomes a non-issue surprisingly quickly.
For his next round of homework, Ed agreed to journal about his emotional storage closet and answer questions such as, “What are the boxes full of? Emotions? Incidents? Monsters? What is it like to stand in the middle of this closet? What thoughts come to mind standing there? What emotions arise?” He agreed to do this and told me he was actually strangely looking forward to this experiment also.
In our next session the following week he told me how he’d put off doing the exercise for days. He said he was too scared to do it. The day before our appointment he finally ventured into it.
ED went into the closet in his imagination and as expected, a fear arose immediately. He began to see how many thoughts were connected to his fear: This is too much for me. I can’t handle this. This feeling is going to kill me. There’s something wrong with me for feeling this. Normal people don’t feel this.” The tension in his solar plexus increased and began taking over his whole body… but he didn’t budge. He put his attention on his breathing (we’d practiced this in session together) and told himself that he was going look at this as if he was watching a “movie.” He began to look around the closet and saw that all the boxes had a stamp on them: “Dangerous goods. Do not handle!” Despite this warning, he courageously he opened one.
He found the death of his cousin when he was 12 years old. Immediately he was gripped with sadness and grief. He also noticed the fear arise that something was wrong with him for feeling this way. Again he reminded himself that this was an experiment and to just watch it like a movie without believing it. The sadness that he’d run away from for almost 20 years came up like never before. He began to cry. He cried for his cousin, he cried for his father, he cried for his friends. He thought, with this depth of emotion, he would have to cry for days, but that wasn’t the case. The tears subsided after a few intense minutes.
He felt exhausted, but relieved….and encouraged by this experience. He had the sense he could handle anything in the closet the same way. And he was surprised to see that his closet wasn’t actually as full as he thought it was. (Beautiful!)
I have noticed for myself, and with many of my clients, that as we take care of one “box” in our storage closet, we actually take care of many that are similar in energy and vibration.
Ed knows that he’s still in the middle of this experiment. He knows that the panic/fear might come up again, but he knows that he can handle it because he has. And this experience has changed his relationship with fear, with his emotional storage closet and with himself.
Well done, Ed.
I hope this is helpful to you and everyone reading.
Dave