Self Help for People Who
Panic
by
Michael
Graeme
Self help
for people who panic
Being a holistic approach to coping with a nervous
disability, a rejection of therapeutic druggery, and the
values of secular society that would have us believe it
alone possesses the key to the meaning of our lives.
In this essay I speak as someone who has suffered from a
troublesome psyche since I was a boy. My earliest
encounter with it was an inexplicable feeling of dread in
large social gatherings such as school assemblies or
church services, a dire panic at having to stand through
hymn singing because I had become irrationally convinced
I was going to faint.
The
medical profession call these episodes, panic attacks and
since the 1990s, have controlled them with a family of
drugs called SSRI's. Two of the most common of these are
known as Prozac and Seroxat. In fact they're prescribed
for a wide variety of emotional problems: anxiety,
depression, or indeed anything that prevents us,
emotionally, from somehow "fitting in" with the
world. They work by altering the way the brain handles
its serotonin and essentially alter what an individual
sees as stressful, like putting on dark glasses in bright
sunlight. My personal experience of SSRI's was brief and
unpleasant. It was also instrumental in pushing me into a
more holistic view of things.
I've never understood the cause of my own panic attacks,
which somehow added to the feeling of helplessness when I
was in the middle of one - but fortunately, their grip
has slackened in recent years, and though I hate to tempt
fate, I can't remember the last time I had one - though
the old defence mechanisms are still a part of my
routine: when entering a room of people, say at a lecture
or a music concert, I still naturally take up a position
at the sides, by the aisles, and in line of sight of the
exit, so I can leave with the minimum of fuss should I
begin to struggle with myself later on. Even in my
darkest days, I never actually had to make a desperate
bolt for the exit, but reminding myself of these facts
did not help struggling against the urge when the mood
was upon me.
The problem morphed and splintered over the years into a
number of other related manifestations. For example, at
concerts of classical music, where the listening
experience tends to be subtle and intense, I once
developed the peculiar habit of wanting to swallow in
order to ease a certain dryness of the throat which
threatened to erupt into a cough. Swallowing would then
become compulsive, and had to be repeated every few
seconds until I lost all sense of pleasure in the music.
Thus, concerts that should have lifted the spirit left me
feeling only jittery and ashamed of my weakness. I would
also sometimes suffer a peculiar sensation of imbalance
when walking into a room full of noisy people, say at a
party or in a crowded restaurant. Outside I would be
fine, or if the room were empty, but in a gathering of
people, my legs would become strangely tense and wobbly
and the floor would become like the swaying deck of a
ship. And again there was the situation of being cornered
by the consummate bore, the person who told you
everything about his life from birth to the present day
by way of answer to even the most succinct enquiry. How
often have I found myself trapped, not listening, for
what seemed like hours, afraid of breaking out into a
sweat, afraid of a dizzy spell coming on, and too polite,
too sensitive to the bore's feelings to break him off
abruptly, stick my finger in his eye and run screaming
for fresh air and freedom?
Yet another peculiar manifestation once concerned my
driving. Many years ago now, I suddenly discovered that
at certain key points of my daily commute I would
experience the very real sensation that my forward motion
had been arrested and that I was slipping backwards. This
last peculiar episode was perhaps the most frightening
because, unlike all the other "trigger
environments" driving was not something I could
easily avoid: it threatened my freedom to get about.
Somehow though, one muddles through, unable to explain to
others for fear of being labelled a nutter,... and the
medical profession unfortunately, I always found to be
less than helpful. For all the good intentions of the
British National Health system my personal experience of
it is an inability to deal with any illness that does not
show changes in blood and urine samples or cannot be
quickly fixed up by a few stitches, a plaster cast, or a
dose of antibiotics. There was a doctor, some twenty
years ago, who listened to me for all of five minutes. I
seemed barely to have begun explaining myself before the
man was confidently writing up a prescription for what
turned out to be the new cure-all wonder-drug: Prozac.
For a few days this was my one and only foray into the
chemically adjusted reality of the then modern age. My
experience of it was short lived and, though rather
distressing, I view it now with all the detachment of an
impartial observer, and with the magnanimity of one who
has learned his lesson.
For a time it was like putting on a warm straight jacket.
A bomb could have gone off and I would not have cared,
nor I suspect would I have moved, except perhaps to
glance up slowly and brush the dust from my clothes. I
was stoned, literally, it seemed, turned to stone.
Unfortunately it also stopped me from sleeping, for sleep
is a human thing and stones have no need of it. After
about a week of doing pushups into the small hours, in
order to wear myself out, in the vain hope of encouraging
a collapse into a fatigue induced stupor, I experienced
for the first and only time in my life a profound sense
of drug-induced despair. The whole experience of the
medication was far more emotionally disturbing than the
occasional fit of the jitters I was trying to cure, so
the Prozac went into the bin.
Nowadays I no longer trouble the medical profession with
any ailment that I cannot point to such as a sore thumb,
or a swollen eye. Of course, this probably means that if
I contract a fatal disease I shall probably die from it -
but the chances are I'll die from it anyway, so I'm
willing to take the risk.
My slow road to regaining control over my life began with
the memory of an experience from my first year as an
engineering apprentice, in the latter days of the 1970's.
While doing basic training in manufacturing processes, a
colleague injured his finger on a machine. This caused
him to swear and me to faint. I was seen by the work's
doctor as a precaution and he advised me to get back on
that machine as soon as possible, and to consider taking
up some form of transcendental meditation. The machine
part made sense, but the meditation did not. I possessed
a very rational mindset in those days and I rejected
anything that was not grounded in material
"fact".
But always, I wondered.
Later, following the Prozac episode, I overcame my
overwhelming prejudice and bought a book on Hatha Yoga. I
learned a few basic postures and some breathing
exercises, and much to my surprise, they seemed to work.
The jitters did not entirely pass, but they were suddenly
subdued, and the fact I had discovered at last some means
of holding them at bay was itself crucial in changing my
life. I turn to Yoga now, and other esoteric practices,
whenever I feel the jitters coming on and the jitters
duly pass. I'm afraid I'm not disciplined enough to
practise all the time and I've never attended a Yoga
class or anything, but even doing these exercises in a
half-assed way, succeeds where the medical profession
failed completely, either due to lack of time or
interest. To be clear, the jitters are still there, for
it seems it's a part of my nature to incubate them, but I
am no longer at their mercy, and I get by.
Perhaps after all of this I have given the impression of
my being a twitchy, jumpy neurotic, the sort of person
you'd easily pick out of a crowd, the one who leaps a
mile whenever anyone says "boo", but you'd be
wrong. People who know Michael Graeme's alter ego (or is
he mine? I forget these days!) describe him as "laid
back", to quote the vernacular, which always makes
me smile. Appearances can be deceptive you see? Next time
you look into the eyes of someone you think you know
remember this: you do not know them at all, though you
might like to think you do. What you see is a mask. The
reality lies somewhere beneath and that reality might
both surprise and disturb you.
I say I don't really understand the origins of my own
particular neuroses, and this is true, at least in any
detail, but in a broader sense I think I understand them
well enough. Psychologists tell us a neurosis is born as
the result of an event that we find uncomfortable,
frightening or embarrassing. We may no longer remember
what that event was because we've shoved it deep into our
unconscious mind and we're pretending it never happened.
We hide from these things, but the unconscious is very
good at remembering what we would otherwise choose to
forget, and so we are never truly rid of our skeletons.
They become suppressed, and therefore troublesome. Once
this happens we're stuck unless we can afford the time
and the money to have someone painstakingly analyse us
and expose our fears for what they are. Personally I've
not gone this far. I probably would if I could afford it,
but I'm just an ordinary Joe, and psychoanalysis is a
luxury for the wealthy, for the people whose mortgages
and pensions haven't been screwed by twenty years of
robber-barron economics. It's for the ten percent of the
population currently sitting at the top of the global
financial food chain, rather than the rest of us who are
sitting nearer to the bottom, and sliding ever closer
into ruin.
So, I live with it, and for most of the time, I'm as
happy as the next person. On the positive side, I have
sometimes found my neuroses useful, and looking back over
the years I see a definite pattern to their awakenings.
These patterns correspond to changes in my life, changes
of direction when I'm sailing close to the wind, when I'm
involved in situations or relationships that are likely
to do me harm. In a positive sense then, my neuroses can
be viewed as warnings to change course, now! Or else!
Unfortunately though, we are all prisoners to a way of
life and to some extent also the life choices we have
made, and changes of direction are not always possible,
no matter what our unconscious is throwing at us.
Personally I've come to believe that our natural
inclination as human beings is not to live in the sort of
society that the secular west is becoming at all. I
believe we are meant to live a much freer, more open sort
of life, closer to nature perhaps, less regimented, less
structured, one where people are free to engage with
their spiritual or psychological sides without being
exploited, brainwashed or just plain hoodwinked by either
charismatic charlatans, or organised religions. Too much
conformity, too much of doing what we're told, rather
than what we please is bad for us. Bad for our psyche,
bad for our spirit. As Aleister Crowley once wrote [and I
paraphrase]: If it harms no one, (and presumably this
includes ourselves), then we should be able to do as we
like.
My first brush with the pain of compulsory conformity
were my school days, which I hated with a passion from
beginning to end. I was taken from the meadows and
woodlands around my home and placed in the stifling
confines of primary school. It was to be the first of
many yokes - each one telling me I could not be what I
wanted to be. I could not even have the time to think
about what I wanted to be. There is a system to life you
see? It imposes itself upon you. You do not shape it. It
shapes you. So we become, not really ourselves but a mask
in the form of what we believe, or what we are taught
will be acceptable to society. We measure our words, we
do not say what we feel, yet at the same time try to
convince ourselves that we do believe in what we say. The
illusion is complete: Individual and society engaging on
terms that are mutually delusional.
Then comes work and marriage and children, and mortgages
and pension provisions, so you will not starve when you
grow old. And all the time a part of you is thinking: I'm
really not meant for this. There's something else I was
supposed to do with my life, except there's no longer any
time to remember what it was. I do not care about money
or fine houses or fashionable cars - easy for me to say
perhaps: I have roof over my head, not a big house but a
nice one, and I drive a seven year old car, but - I think
I'm old enough now to understand the trap of our
possessions. All I have ever really wanted is to be free,
to think my own thoughts and simply "be",
without having to speak in a manner that I believe will
be pleasing to someone else, so that I won't get fired or
be thought of as strange. And I've long held the belief
that my own neuroses are the inevitable consequences of
being entangled in a world, in a system, and to a
lifetime of conformity that I was not designed for.
If this is
true, then there are an awful lot of people like me, and
I fear my own neuroses are as nothing compared to those
endured quietly by others. If you count yourself among
our number then this essay's for you. It may not bring
you much comfort beyond the reassurance that you are not
alone. But also I hope I can show you that far from
putting you on the outside of life, your differences
actually make you all the more a part of it than the
seemingly happy majority who have never experienced the
power or the horror of a sudden volcanic eruption from
their unconscious mind.
For a person to suffer under the pressures of our society
does not mean that person is in any way weaker than
others,... just more sensitive to the absurdities and, to
be quite frank the sometimes outrageous indignities we
have to endure. Are we the crazy ones or are we simply
the only ones left with eyes to see?
It is no measure of health to be to well
adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
J Krishnamurti
I'm too old to have any illusions about our way of life
in the west, which since about 1985 seems to have been
slipping into a sort of neo-conservative,
survival-of-the-fittest, free market, free for all, one
in which it's assumend we're all out to get whatever we
want regardless of the heads we must trample in order to
get it. But I refuse to join in such a cynical and
demeaning game, and am presently trying to see my way
through to retirement in as inoffensive and inconspicuous
a manner as possible. Then, I tell myself, I'll have a
couple of decades to savour my freedom and soak the
neuroses out of my system, that perhaps then, in the
brief decades remaining, I will finally remember what it
was I was supposed to have done with my life.
But the way of life that supports us has shown itself to
be founded on a philosophy that's no longer sustainable,
and it looks like the financial securities we took for
granted twenty years ago simply won't be there when we
finally come to rely upon them. Indeed, our politicians
are presently laying the groundwork for an argument
intent on convincing us that some of us may never retire
at all, and if we insist on doing so we will live in a
sort of grey poverty until the end of our days.
For all my dislike of our way of life, I always had a
faith in its reliability. I may not like it I thought,
but the system seems to work, well not any more. In ten
years time the mortgage on my house will mature, and
after paying my dues to the building society every month
for the past twenty five years, it looks like I will
still owe as much as when I started. The financial
mechanism that was to provide the money needed to pay it
off has simply collapsed. As an example of the
utilitarian depths to which our financial institutions
have now stooped, I contacted my mortgage company, trying
to find the best way of sorting things out, the way that
was going to be least financially crucifying, but they
refused to advise me, claiming it was no longer their
policy to do so. They could sell me a "product"
that was of benefit to them, on their terms, but their
responsibility went no further than that. I suppose I was
naive for even asking. My mortgage payments have now
trebled.
Also, the same financial system that was to provide a
pension in old age, I discover can no longer do so
unless, again, I treble the contributions I make. So it
seems all the promises that were made have now been
broken by the small print that basically absolves the
financial vendors of any responsibility. In the 1980's we
dared to harbour dreams of retirement in our fifties in
order to pursue the things we all wanted to pursue,
outside of the world, but twenty years later we are
waking up to the reality of a life spent in debt and
servitude, for the term of our natural lives.
My apologies for the rant, but generally what I'm trying
to illustrate is that, these past years, and especially
since the turn of the century, society has shown itself
to be in state of undisguised crisis. There is a climate
of uncertainty, and fear. Indeed we find ourselves
subjected to an apocalyptic vision, in which we dare not
move or even breathe for fear of armageddon - either from
a terrorist outrage, or a climatic upheaval of Old
Testament proportions. Both government and increasingly
influential fundamentalist religions seem united in
encouraging this belief.
Now, in a sense all of this comes as a relief to me
because it suggests I was not wrong to have spent my
whole life viewing the world with an attitude similar to
one of politely enduring the irritations of an obnoxious
relative. The truth is out; it wasn't just my
imagination: he was obnoxious after all!
Life goes on, but there is an appalling sense that the
future will be radically different from the one we
imagined. And I'm not talking about the threat from
global terrorism. In spite of the terrible outrages
perpetrated in recent years, you're still about as likely
to die at the hands of a terrorist as you are from being
struck by lightning, and far more likely to die as a
result of a drug related gun crime, or a stupid car
accident. What I'm talking about here is the death of
hope, the death of meaning, and the loss of any dreams of
comfort by way of compensation as we enter the latter
part of our lives. What need have we to sit and think, to
while away our latter years in idle pleasure,... when we
could be earning our keep and paying our taxes until the
day we drop?
Depressing, isn't it?
If you suffer from your own neuroses, take comfort from
the fact that your sufferings are not your fault. They
are perhaps the result of a society imposing something
upon you, asking you to accept something as being normal
that your natural self, perhaps your unconscious self
finds simply too outrageous to bear, but is too polite to
say - so you've swallowed it and it's been giving you
indigestion ever since.
Now, there's not much I can do about the slow demise of
western society, the breakdown of the family, the flood
tide of drugs that lay waste to entire communities, the
philosophy of slash and burn economics, or the rise of
meaningless terrorism against which there appears to be
little defence other than a knee-jerk leap into the
Orwellian nightmare of a techno-totalitarian state. The
social exterminations wrought by the utilitarian swings
of the global economy are equally quite beyond my
influence. I'm just an ordinary man tapping words into a
computer. I cannot save your mortgages, nor your
pensions, and if the retirement age is jacked up to
seventy five, or even abandoned altogether, there's not
much I can do about that either.
What I can do however is reassure you that it's not your
fault, that the jitters you feel are the natural
consequences of enduring something that is alien to the
nature God gave you. What you can do, however, is accept
yourself for what you are. The jitters, the neuroses,...
these are differences in you that serve only to affirm
your humanity. They do not separate you from anything
other than the false idea of conformity to some rosy
image of what a normal human being is supposed to be
like.
My own neuroses over the years have carried messages for
me that I was too deaf to heed at the time. You're going
the wrong way, Mike, they said. Pull back, stop, turn the
car around! Meanwhile poor Mike couldn't imagine what was
going on. He didn't have a stressful lifestyle, he wasn't
some ruthless, corporate go-getter, and his marriage
wasn't on the rocks.
So what was it that got under his skin so much that at
times he wanted to scream?
In this sense, my neuroses seem to have had the same
intent as bad dreams, not just the expression of an
anxiety, but a clue also regarding their cause, and cure.
The agoraphobic is perhaps the most illustrative of the
meaningful malaise. I've known a fewl agoraphobics over
the years, and this condition for the sufferer, and their
loved ones is no joke. A normal, attractive, healthy
person becomes by degrees less confident in dealing with
the world until a state is reached where the whole world
is viewed with such anxiety that the person withdraws
completely, feeling safe nowhere outside the bounds of
their own home. They get by, day to day, but survive in a
sort of prison of their own making. It is a total
disengagement from a reality that they have come to
abhor. In order to be cured the agoraphobic has to lose
their dread of society, or at least become more accepting
of it.
But what if it's society that's at fault?
What if it really is better to withdraw than to sup with
the devil himself?
For me, it was the school assembly and the church
service, a lack of comprehension and a total reluctance
to be away from the things that meant most to me in my
childhood. Conformance was demanded, but as a result I
have always been stubbornly elusive when it comes to
committing myself to anything I do not wholeheartedly
believe in. The trouble is, there seems to be so little
worth believing in, so I slip through life unconnected
and uncommitted to anyone or anything outside of my own
close family. The only exception seem to be my writings
which bear witness to life through these, my own eyes.
I did not rationalise it this way at the time. I only
knew I was afraid of something, afraid of the
inexplicable physical manifestations, the tension, the
dizziness, the increased pulse. So the physical symptom,
the sense of strangeness, became the thing to be feared,
and for many years the root cause was overlooked.
The medical books tell us that our flesh and blood bodies
have developed a physical response to things that
frightens us. Our heart-rate goes up, we become tense,
poised ready either to fight for our lives or run like
hell. But how can you run from a reluctance to conform?
How can we run from the demands of our society, from the
responsibilities we all have and which inevitably involve
facing up to things we'd really rather not do? Indeed
we're conditioned to accept this as a normal part of our
lives. But equally we hate it.
It's easy to stand up and begin whining on behalf of
everyone who's experience of life has left them jaded and
jittery, but that's not really my aim here. My aim is
more to look at society and ask the question, what is it
that we are afraid of? We have no control over the life
we are born into and therefore it seems cruel that we
should come up against circumstances over which we have
no control but which nevertheless are sure to drive us
mad - not all of us perhaps - just those unable to adapt
or to cope well enough with the reality of the world as
we see it.
In my own case, it has always been a fear of emptiness,
that our lives mean nothing. It has always been my desire
to explore life in a way that was most meaningful to me.
This seems to be a thing that gains the approval of my
unconscious because time spent in focussed introspection
is time rewarded with a sense of calm, while time spent
dealing with the day to day chaotic scatter of a workaday
life is punishable by tiresome neurosis - at least it was
until I came to believe that there was indeed nothing
more to society than a chaotic scattering of
half-bakedness.
To be sure, it's a closely guarded secret that
"society" is not actually the purpose of our
lives at all. It's more the stage on which we play our
life out. It's when we come to believe that somewhere in
society might lie the secret of our purpose that the
problems begin. Society itself holds no meaning
whatsoever. If we want to experience any sort of genuine
fulfilment, then we have to provide that meaning for
ourselves as individuals. True purpose is the indefinable
belief in something "other", something outside
of society, like the guiding hand of a beloved parent.
When we let go of our parent's hand as children, we
suffer the bewildering crowds as they swirl around us,
careless and oblivious to our need. We fear the loss of
ourselves, the inability ever again to feel the warmth
and the sure guidance of those we love. We fear losing
our centre, losing our self.
Now and then, when I'm feeling particularly tired and
jittery I will experience a moment of complete
disengagement. It can be anywhere, in a meeting at work,
in a restaurant, or when chatting with others. It comes
suddenly - a sense of shifting outside of myself and of
leaving behind only a disorientated shell, a shell
momentarily paralysed and fearful for its existence,
alone in these strange surroundings without a guiding
psyche. It is unlike a daydream, for in daydreaming the
action always takes place inside one's head. What I call
the disengagement of my soul is quite different. In
disengagement of the soul,... the soul seems to
momentarily slip out of the host.
I might be fearful for my sanity, prone as I am to such
episodes, but I've experienced them since childhood and
they seem to have done me no harm. They are not, then, a
symptom of advancing madness, but more perhaps a
looseness of grip. The feeling is one of bearing witness
to a dream, a feeling things are not real and that I need
to wake up and find my true self, my true reality, except
of course the self that is dreaming protests that it is
the real self and I'd better hang on to the dream because
it's all there is!
Well,... such are the storms that periodically sweep this
particular mind. The worst thing is the suspicion that I
am alone in these experiences, that only the inmates of
an asylum can experience anything worse, but of course I
am far from alone, and my storms are as nothing compared
to some - rendered sluggish perhaps by the chemical
quagmire of Prozac or Seroxat, but there all the same.
Now, it might seem a little childish, harking back to
pre-school days as being the happiest of my life, or
later, the temporary freedom of those delicious six week
summer holidays when the time stretched out each morning,
an infinity of choice, and when each day was a pleasure
sipped like fine wine. But you can't live like that, can
you? You have to make a living. You have to contribute to
your society by paying your way, and paying your taxes.
Of course you do, but what you must not do is look to
society, nor even to the people around you, to provide
the meaning in your own life.
As Margaret Thatcher once famously said: "there is
no such thing as society". Now, I'm not sure in what
context this was meant to be taken, but from one
particular angle at least, I find myself in agreement
with the Iron Lady. Society is an abstract concept of
varying parameters that are entirely dependent upon an
individual's perception. Society does not feel anything.
It does not look down upon individuals with either
compassion or contempt. It owes us nothing, as we owe it
nothing beyond our legal dues. It is simply an
organisational structure, and I'm afraid to say that in
modern secular terms this boils down to people who are
either customers or salesmen. How many times a day does
your telephone ring with someone trying to sell you
something? In short, there is no meaning to the secular
society beyond a system of financial transactions.
The only practical advice I can offer, if you don't do it
already, is to do as that old medical officer told me,
mysteriously, so long ago, and that's meditate, which is
really no more than sitting quietly and alone from time
to time. Some people buy books and tapes and learn to do
it in the way of the great meditative traditions, while
some go to classes, and this is fine if you can make the
time, because the deeper you go the better. Do it every
day if you can. If not, if like me the kids burst in, or
start to whine every time you sit down, then just do it
whenever you can, even if it's only for a moment. And
when you've done it, remember that the way we live our
lives does not provide the meaning to our lives. Meaning
is what we carry in our hearts. It is personal,
meaningful in a way specific only to ourselves. Others
need not share our vision, or indeed know anything about
it at all. Our vision, our sense of meaning is ours
alone.
In meditating, we cut back to the centre of ourselves, we
reach out for the hand we let go of at the moment of our
birth, the only thing connecting us to something safe and
sure in a world that is otherwise completely bewildering.
That hand is there for each of us and it has nothing to
do with this world at all,... it is completely beyond it.
We have only to touch it in our minds, for a kind of
enlightenment to ensue.
And it goes something like this:
If contemporary society truly possessed the meaning of
our lives, it would not offer it back to us for free. We
would have to pay for it, and the price would be so high
that only a few elite individuals would ever be able to
possess it. Or, it would be owned by a mega-corporation
that might allow us to pay for it in instalments over a
lifetime, with the promise that, like our homes, it would
eventually be ours. However, there would probably be
something in the small print that absolved the mega-corp
from any responsibility when at the end of our term it
presented us with a dog eared piece of paper with the
number 42 written upon it.
[if unsure Google 42 "meaning of life"]
But the meaning of life is not a thing, not a number, not
an equation, nor is it an explanation of any kind, for
there is not a question that can be adequately framed to
solicit anything approaching a satisfactory answer. It is
much simpler than all of that. It is a state of being, a
state of grace, and I'm sorry but that costs nothing at
all, and it is the birthright of every one of us. What is
it? You know what it is. Just sit still for a moment,
close your eyes and listen to the sound of it coming from
that space between your ears, and no, I don't mean the
tinnitus! Maybe you can even see it with your mind's eye,
but rest assured, if you sit there often enough, pretty
soon,...
.... you'll begin to feel it.
Michael Graeme
April 2007
Index
Copyright
© M Graeme ????
m_graeme@yahoo.co.uk
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