What If You Just Can't? | By Anna Lee

By Anna Lee

Art by Lauren Drinkwater

If you want to be successful; you have to trust yourself. You have to put faith in yourself. You must stop procrastinating and get off the ground. Envision your future in bright sparkling colours and imagine what you are going to do; how it will feel when you are getting there.

“You tried hard to grab every negative feeling and let it go.”

So you sit there. You want it. You want to change everything. You are prepared; you’ve read every motivation and self-help book in your reach. You learned to breathe. You sat for hours watching yourself from the inside out. You tried hard to grab every negative feeling and let it go. You connected with source, spirit and unconditional love. Finally, you imagine your dream future. You start to feel the abundance of your life. Maybe you see yourself flying a helicopter. You are so good that you hear yourself saying: “This is 675 Bravo Charlie Charlie Alfa. We’re ready to take off.”

The helicopter takes off. You fly over the mountains. You see the snow tops; you feel the heat of the sun on your face. Your body reacts to the rumbling of the flying vessel. You are there, and then the engine stops, and you hit the mountains. You crash!

You open your eyes. Panic grabs you by the throat and strangles every positive aspect of your meditation attempt. If this scenario feels familiar – welcome to the club! You are not alone.

For years I was unable to use affirmations. Positive thinking? A nightmare! All I could envision was a bright future hit by the next catastrophe. The first catastrophe that happened to me, of course, was my family. Like so many of us, I had to face some nasty turning points which smashed my innocent, lighthearted character forever — if it had ever existed.

Being prepared has always been my number one cure for uncertain circumstances. The first year in school, I was the kid who carried every book in my bag in case a class got changed. The indication that every kid in school wouldn’t have had a book in that scenario either didn’t carry much weight for me. All that mattered was that I didn’t want to be the kid with no book and this was not negotiable. Over the many years from my teenage years to my twenties into my thirties this childhood pattern developed into a very sticky life and fun-hindering unconscious behaviour.

And it worked like that: My mind used to wander a lot to think about the future. Occasionally it came up with horror scenarios fed by school, gossip, the media, movies, studying, talks with Dad, the normal life and its stories. Basically, it could hit from everywhere.  

Newsflash:
A woman got attacked in X by a stranger this morning.
Police said it was the second assault in less than a month.
If I had read this as an article or heard it on the radio, it would have started a thought loop. Somehow I thought pondering over events which frightened me could avoid them or at least prepare me for them. My panic attacks were a result of my cataclysmic thoughts which were a result of me trying to protect myself from future pain and suffering. The cataclysmic thoughts created fear of the future, fear of the unknown, fear of the uncontrollable and created panic attacks as a result — which I tried to stop with reasoning what would have brought up more horror scenarios to deal with. An endless jigsaw puzzle I could never win because there is no reasoning with fear.

“Fear needs to be felt and acknowledged like any other emotion.”

Remember that! If you ever have to witness someone having a panic attack and this someone starts to talk about his current fears, stop reasoning with the panic attacked person. Fear needs to be felt and acknowledged like any other emotion. And then this feeling has to run through your body until it’s over. Do yourself, and the poor chap with the panic attack, a favour and stop rationalizing.

It never helped that it was “unlikely or statistically impossible” that my horror scenario could have happened. That didn’t change what I felt. These were just words which didn’t change my feelings. But fear is a feeling. And it cannot be addressed with a mental concept. I tried it one million times.
It. Never. Worked.

And what’s the big deal anyway? Someone has a panic attack. Someone cries and shivers. So what? I came to the conclusion that most people are absolutely helpless when it comes to edgy human emotions. That’s why they constantly broadcast that we, aka the uncomfortable ones with panic attacks, crying attacks, anger or any other moving feeling, are not okay the way we act. But, in fact, we are all just helpless when it comes to our extensive range of emotions.

In the end emotions are just what they are: uncomfortable when you have to work, uncomfortable when you have to raise kids, uncomfortable when you have to be the nice partner, kid, daughter, father, mother or who else or what else you have to be so that someone else can feel undisturbed. Emotions are not bad, they are sometimes exhausting, tiring, frightening, yes, but they can’t go on forever. They move your body for a certain time, and then they stop. At least that’s what I experienced after I stopped resisting and avoiding them. So my differentiation goes like this: fear is a feeling and an emotion. But emotion is what you can feel in your body. It’s a sensation that moves through your body for a certain time. The biggest problem for me was never the emotions; it was the whole concept I had created around them. The wish to be prepared was the attempt of a child to gain safety over an insecure environment.

This attempt stayed with me until adulthood and made me a control junkie. The panic attacks were only a symptom of the real problem that I didn’t feel safe. Fear creates tension. Try to be relaxed and have a panic attack; impossible if you ask me. And tension was my second name as a control freak. If you feel cornered in your life, if you feel you have no choice, then you, like every other animal, have three instruments: fight, flight or play dead. If you learned to suppress your anger like me, then you won’t fight. If you still feel something you won’t play dead, which means you choose flight. Now, try to flee from work, from your relationship, your family celebrations or a plane you just mounted for holidays. We are all trained and educated to behave in a certain way, and if we would rather flee but can’t, it is likely we have a panic attack because the emotions have to go somewhere.

So the panic attack is not the real problem — it’s a symptom for all the things we won’t allow ourselves to see, to feel, to say, to realize or to do. So what if you just can’t? Well, yeah! What if…?