The end of the story

admin — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:15:10 +0000

After a while, even that seemed too risky, because there were so many places from which she couldn’t see the exit, so she restricted herself to convenience stores. As her list of places to avoid grew, she saw less and less of her friends, becoming isolated and making excuses not to go outside of her home. For about four months she didn’t leave her home at all. She grew depressed about the way her life had been disrupted, especially during this housebound time.
Before she came to me, Audrey saw therapists who wanted to review her childhood memories for clues to her fears, and others who suggested that her panic was an excuse to avoid activities for some unknown reason. Some sternly refused to discuss her panic attacks, insisting instead that she focus on the “underlying reasons” for them, although it was never clear what these reasons were. She saw psychiatrists who put her on medications and physicians who ran numerous tests seeking a physical cause for her trouble. She got little relief from any of them.
Audrey carried a water bottle wherever she went, thinking that a drink of water would somehow interrupt her panic attack. Most of the year, she kept the air conditioning on in the car, believing that the cool air would help. She avoided commitments to be anywhere at a fixed time with the words “I’ll see how I feel,” or “let’s talk again when the time gets closer.”
Audrey became caught up in the classic “fear of fear itself.” She feared that anxiety would lead to a panic attack, which she thought would kill her or make her crazy. She tried desperately to prevent herself from becoming nervous-and, of course, that made her more anxious than ever.
After working hard with the cognitive behavioral methods I describe in this book, Audrey made an excellent recovery. The first time Audrey drove far enough out of the city that she saw, for the first time in her life, a cow in a pasture, she was so excited you’d think she had seen a dinosaur. With her excitement came a powerful pride that she was finally winning back her freedom. She now drives anywhere she wants, including lengthy cross country trips. She goes to her job outside the home every day. She no longer feels ashamed of her troubles. Once in a while she feels a twinge of anxiety, remembering her past panic attacks, but then she simply tells herself, “I don’t do that anymore.” It’s hard to appreciate what a powerful experience it is for a person like Audrey to get over this problem. She was literally enslaved by panic, and now she’s free. To became free too, buy zoloft right now!

Experience Of Panic Attacks

admin — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:07:39 +0000

Everyone who experiences panic attacks has their own distinct story to tell, and often thinks that they suffer from a bizarre problem which is all their own. Yet they all share some major aspects. To use them in a proper way, you’d better start to use Zoloft.
Audrey is a fairly typical example of a person experiencing panic disorder. She was in her mid-40s when she first came to see me. She had lived in Chicago all her life, and had scarcely been outside the city in all that time. She had been completely housebound during the worst of it and was still extremely limited in what she could do when she came to me for treatment. She had the brains, the energy, the enthusiasm and the ambition to succeed in a variety of professions, but worked part-time as a gardener because that enabled her to avoid the situations she feared. Those situations included highway driving, being more than a few minutes from the “safety” of home, riding in buses, trains, or airplanes, and shopping in crowded stores or malls.
Audrey’s first panic attack occurred at age 32, while she was driving alone on one of the highways that span Chicago. She suddenly felt warm and flushed. Although she tried not to pay much attention to it, she found herself wondering if she was going to pass out. She told herself that was “crazy” but it didn’t help. She started to sweat, felt like she couldn’t catch her breath, and felt her heart race. She wondered if she were still in her body, or floating outside of it somehow. Fearing that she was losing her mind, she turned the car around and raced home.
She didn’t tell anybody at first. She didn’t know what to say, and she feared sounding foolish. But from that day forward, fearing a repetition of the experience, she avoided driving outside of a small “safety zone” around her home if at all possible.
Over time, she became apprehensive about any situation from which a quick exit might be difficult in the event of a panic attack. She started shopping at the 24-hour supermarket late at night, when there were no lines at the cash register.

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The end of the story

Experience Of Panic Attacks