Panic is an existential state. No matter how its attributes are squeezed into diagnostic criteria and medicalized, it remains an irreducible condition of being.
Our basic situation in this realm is profoundly terrifying. We simply appear here, helpless in bodies; we are given no instructions, no explanation; at our demise, we face extinction, or worse. The Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan Matus warned his disciple Carlos Castaneda that an insatiable eagle-like spirit awaits our deaths to pounce on, tear apart, and devour our souls. The Russian esoteric philosopher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff preached that, unless we transmute our essence into a higher compound during life, the moon will swallow us at our end, igniting our remains; our pyres will then light the universe as suns. Not comforting propositions.
Gurdjieff was saying, in effect, that anyone who wasn’t freaking out wasn’t aware of his or her predicament. He said that if any of us could be shown our actual situation, we would find existence intolerable.
Nonetheless, people do not panic (usually) because of a vulture spirit or lunar cauldron; they are haunted by more mundane fears, and sometimes they panic with no discernible cause.
Throughout my life, I have experienced two types of panics. One is concrete, has a clear focus, and is usually alleviated by withdrawal of the cause of fear. The other is cosmic, undifferentiated, and nihilistic, and it cannot be reassured. It feeds off a terror that the universe itself is essentially warped or malevolent, that existence is hopeless, and that there is nothing to be done and nowhere to hide. Death is no solace either, because it will land one in a hell realm among cruel, antipathetic monsters. The only imaginable remedy is to be totally expunged from existence, along with all my thoughts and memories, my past and my future — not just not to be, but never to have been.
My cosmic panics can be quite brief, but on a few occasions one has persisted for months. Five or ten years may also pass between occurrences. Though the sensations of my “big panic” have changed over time, its essential content has not. In early childhood I lay in bed and stared at a dark window overlooking a courtyard that reverberated with the sound of an opera singer practicing. I imagined diabolical creatures staring coldly at me from the vistas of deep space. I imagined a dungeon at the bottom of stone stairs into which prisoners were cast forever. I imagined that my brain could be stolen and put into an insect’s body.
As an adult, I have experienced this panic as an existential emptiness, the oppression of a demonic or spiritless universe. It permeates my dreams, and I wake terrified, often with a start, feeling as though I am in the wrong body, in the wrong universe. “Being” itself is agonizing. I dread going back to sleep because it will plunge me deeper into a heartless void.
My nightmares then are not classic nightmares; I am not chased, threatened, drowned, or pushed over a cliff. The dreams are of hauntingly ordinary events, yet I awaken from them more frightened than from any “real” nightmare. Getting up, I walk frantically through the house, looking for anywhere to alight. I stare out the window at lights and buildings, but they all seem flat and incapable of rescuing me. I am doomed to a barren existence.
The sensation is that time has stopped, that I have moved outside of time into a place where nothing can live. My intimation is that, if only I could get time moving again, I could arouse a flicker of hope. Yet monumental effort is required to push a single moment forward; each second takes forever to elapse, and then there is another, and another.
It takes an internal shift to end this kind of panic. Clouds traveling across a blue sky, a flock of geese, or some other simple natural event can suddenly reconnect me to the living world. For one reason or another, time starts moving again. The dark vision detaches itself and slides away. The panic is still there, but it is outside of me; I am allowed to live.
Because of my panics, and also my bed-wetting and general antisocial behavior, I was put into psychoanalysis on my eighth birthday, in the fall of 1952. I spent the next five years in therapy with renowned Freudian Abraham Fabian. (I would have remained with him longer, but he died when I was thirteen.)
In the neo-Freudian view, a panicking person has unknowingly regressed and is experiencing infantile crises and rages that could not be worked out at the time. The neo-Freudian treatment for anxiety and panic is to educate the person about the infantile cause of his or her terror and alienation, and then, with the therapist playing the role of parent or other formative figure, to reenact the primal event in a supportive way that leads to emotional clarity. Suffering and pain are not eliminated, but they are keyed to appropriate objects so that delusions igniting anxiety and panic do not roam free.
This method of treating panic is now antiquated to the point of appearing almost prescientific. In our post-Freudian, psychotropic era, panic has been redefined as a chemical defect or imbalance, often genetically inherited. Traumatic events, while not ignored altogether, are presumed not to cause panics so much as to push people with marginal biochemistry over the edge.
Dr. Fabian treated my panics in traditional Freudian fashion. He summed them up with a single epigraph: “You are afraid something terrible is going to happen to you.” He repeated this so often that it came to sound like the lyrics of a popular song or the proverb at the end of one of Aesop’s fables. By this yardstick he proceeded to explore, using symbolic connections, my stories, my dreams, my relationships with my family — all aspects of my life — trying to elicit some clue as to what had originally traumatized me. He gave me the impression that there was a single event which, if I could remember it, would break the spell, freeing me from fear forever.
My mother also panicked, and her sieges were chilling to me. She alternately cried hysterically, screamed that she was dying, attacked me, threw things, or lay semi-comatose in her bed with only a dim candle-shaped bulb lighting her room. Her panics dominated the mood of our household. But she would have nothing to do with psychoanalysis and even opposed my going. I was sent to therapy because my father, whom she had divorced, made her take me.
My mother eventually committed suicide. Though at times her suicide seems maudlin and narcissistic to me, when I am in a panic, I totally understand it.
I had been told so relentlessly throughout childhood that I was sick, damaged, and unable to take care of myself that, whether I accepted this prognosis or not, I behaved as though my being were intrinsically irreparable. It never occurred to me that everyone is broken and struggling in some way.
Through my time with Dr. Fabian, I came to associate my panics with not only my mother’s moods but also some lost event inside me. I believed him when he said that everything would be solved by his divination, but at heart I could not imagine being without my fears. After all, it was the universe I feared, and what was going to change the universe?
It is quite possible that I would not even use the word panic for my experiences had I not been granted it by Dr. Fabian in childhood, at the same time that I was initiated into reading and arithmetic. My subsequent behavior and experiences were colored both by his interpretation of what I was undergoing and by my extrapolations of his oracles. Once named, my experiences obeyed their definition, which also provided an acceptable terminology for discussing my “condition” with others. “Panic” gave me an identity, a reason for being terrified when others weren’t, and a way to communicate my difference to them. I could say, “I am having a panic attack,” and it would draw instant recognition, making my restless terror and wildness merely clinical. (It would also preclude me from exploring panic on its own terms.)
I began to valorize and appreciate panic. It made me special, like someone from another, perhaps better world. I had to be careful not to get sucked into this world so deeply that I forgot who I was. But panic was better than submission to authorities or norms. It kept the drama going. Panic became a self-fulfilling prophecy, a gift that was also a curse.
To a certain degree, I was inventing panic from the outside in, scaring myself in order to escape a vision quest for which I wasn’t ready. I replaced my quest with dialogues with Dr. Fabian. This unintentional plan then gathered its own momentum, making panics a requisite of intellectual curiosity, a birthright, an entitlement to act crazy, a way to squirm through life’s many ambushes and hazards.
I had my first significant panic attack as an adult in the spring of 1964, about eight years after my last childhood panic and shortly after I began going out with the woman who was to become my wife. I navigated this and ensuing panics mostly on my own for about eleven years, except for three occasions when I saw a psychiatrist or counselor on a short-term basis.
In the summer of 1975, two years after my last psychiatric session, I saw a bioenergetic therapist, and my work with him commenced an odyssey of engaging my panics somatically and energetically rather than psychotherapeutically. In other words, I looked for answers in the body, rather than in the mind. This journey came to include not only Reichian-based bioenergetics (1975–1978) but t’ai chi ch’uan (1975–1997); Lomi breathwork with Gestalt therapy and shiatsu (1977–1992); craniosacral therapy, visceral manipulation, somatoemotional release, and Feldenkrais Method (1990 on); Cheng Hsin martial-arts mindwork, boxing, and hsing-i (1991–1997); acupuncture and Chinese herbs (1992 on); rebirthing (1992–1994); and Rolfing (1994–2000); plus briefer stints of Breema, Polarity Therapy, alchemical hypnosis, chi gung, Alexander Technique, Bates Method, Body-Mind Centering, Continuum, Reiki, homeopathy, and Integrated Manual Therapy.
All of the above share the premise that deep-seated trauma or anxiety is lodged in neuromusculature, viscera, breath, eye movements, and behavioral patterns. Thus the trauma can be addressed on the spot, without psychological digging. It can literally be touched, eased, and unwound by palpation, breath, visualization, and yoga. And if the psychosomatic component of a trauma can be identified and released, then the habitual anxiety underlying it will also dissipate. The story underlying the trauma can be liberated too, although since it is part myth, part memory, what actually happened is not as important as how it is presently maintained and revalidated in the body.
My journey through these psychospiritual modalities deepened my experience of the universe immeasurably. I learned to transform anxiety and tension into positive energy and to accept these terrifying upsurges of thoughts and sensations as messages from the unconscious, sacred lessons from the dark spirits of the universe.
Yet my many therapies have not affected the inner core of my panics. Despite interludes of remarkable insight and epiphany, the background level of anxiety I have known my whole life has been essentially unaltered. The emotional structure underlying my anxiety seems to be “me” in some fundamentally unchangeable way.
The best alternative treatments improve some visceral, neuromuscular, or psychospiritual condition, but they also tend to amplify the core neurosis. In part, this is because somatic therapies and Westernized shamans often propose unrealistic requirements of self-improvement. Healers who think they can cure anything are like corrupt gurus, seizing power for themselves at the expense of unresolved emotional conflicts in the patient. The energetic components applied by such healers become incorporated into voices of tyrannical authority in the mind of their recipient: an inner voice tells you that you are not improving because of some ancient malady, some inherent lack, or some inattention to the healer’s instructions, whereas you are not improving partly because of the voice itself. The voice allies with the pathology. It does not want you to improve, and it enlists and corrupts the external therapy for its own design.
Even if the goals are realistic, no amount of Feldenkrais work, rebirthing, deep-tissue Rolfing, or craniosacral/visceral release can affect primal patterns in a fundamental way, because none of the conventional processes of “going back” (or “going in” ) actually go back (or in). Instead they invent a drama or figment of going back; they spin a false past. They don’t take into account how strange the past or the unconscious would actually look if exposed by an unraveling of each of its disjunctions, twists, bends, and metamorphoses back to the drama of birth, or beyond. Compared to our adult mytho-inflation and embroidering of it, the domain of the subconscious might actually be numb, sterile, and flat. In fact, the very act of retrieving mythologized traumatic events may supply one’s inner voice with just the contemporary material it needs to build new baleful kingdoms.
Only years later did I realize that much of my occult and spiritual thinking provided an ideal framework for my neurosis to grow as large as the cosmos, to become an utterly terrifying destiny.
In 1994, after decades of dealing with panic somatically and archetypally, I began seeing a psychotherapist again. I chose Gene Abbot (not his real name) because I intuited from the beginning that he had a remarkable capacity to feel and talk to my states of panic.
Over the years Gene has provided a host of new insights into both the nature of panic and possible ways of handling it. As a rule, his analyses and methods turned out to be simpler and more straightforward than anything I had previously considered.
It took him about six months to get past my predilection for showing off my psychotherapeutic acumen while adding astute somatic observations. “You can spin circles around me intellectually, Richard,” he said, “but that’s not what this is about.”
He told me that Dr. Fabian, though he no doubt meant well, had taken the wrong approach. “What you needed,” he said, “was someone to put their arm around you and say, ‘You’re a great kid.’ Or, ‘Let’s go out and play catch.’ What you didn’t need was to have your panics made into mysteries to be solved. He trapped you in the labyrinths of your own fantasies and fears by making them so complicated and important. You also didn’t need your mother made into the guardian of your secret. Instead of making her less important, that elevated her to mythic heights. You became part of her story, which was already your problem.”
He considered the somatic and psychospiritual therapies in which I had participated to be similarly inflationary. While reducing certain aspects of anxiety, they increased others by making it seem as though either a therapist or I could take responsibility for changing my body — or even the universe. They became an extension of Dr. Fabian’s Freudian grail. What couldn’t be solved by the symbols of everyday life was now set at the altar of koans, conscious breaths, and palpations.
Only years later did I realize that much of my occult and spiritual thinking provided an ideal framework for my neurosis to grow as large as the cosmos, to become an utterly terrifying destiny.
Part of the problem with panics, Gene taught me, is the very sense that there is a problem. This creates a bogus responsibility for either oneself or someone else to solve it. If the patient can’t solve it, he is not only panicking; he is a failure. If he passes the responsibility to a clinician, he loses power and gives up the right to direct his own life.
I had been told so relentlessly throughout childhood that I was sick, damaged, and unable to take care of myself that, whether I accepted this prognosis or not, I behaved as though my being were intrinsically irreparable. It never occurred to me that everyone is broken and struggling in some way. I lost empathy for other people unless they were “sick” too, and I imagined their experiences to be fundamentally different from my own, their sanity greater. I gave my panic an almost supernatural power and inflated it to cosmic and demonic levels that would have overwhelmed and astonished not only Dr. Fabian, the person who taught me to inflate, but many advanced spiritual practitioners as well.
During the second year I saw Gene, I had a severe panic in between weekly visits. I called him (as he had recommended), and we talked twice on the phone for more than an hour combined.
By the time I arrived for my next session, the panic had subsided, but Gene told me that we had spent so much time talking he had to charge me for an additional session.
I immediately bristled, so he changed it to “any future conversations.”
At the end of our hour, the matter of the money was still unresolved in my thoughts. “This isn’t quite true,” I offered, “but I feel sort of like you shouldn’t charge me at all. You should be honored to have the famous patient of the great Dr. Fabian. You’re the one who gets to solve the mystery where he failed.”
“That’s just the point,” he said. “You never wanted to be the famous patient of the great Dr. Fabian.”
So long had that seer been valorized in my mind, I had neglected to question his simple story, even this late in the game. Tears rolled from the corners of my eyes, and I understood that I had been just a kid then, and it had been all too much. A part of me was still just a kid, and it could finally give up the weight of the vast symbolic universe. It was sad; no more, no less.
Defenses are forged and set in place when a child is young enough to accept a parent’s irrational assurances. When a mother goes out for the day and the child says, “Will I see you later?” the mother doesn’t answer, “Maybe, if I don’t get hit by a car.” The mother says, “Of course.”
Gene commented that it was astonishing how, over a lifetime, I had battled such intense states of panic to a standstill. “No one handles that level of panic in this day and age,” he said, “without drugs or hospitalization.”
The fact is, I consider battling panic to a standstill the greatest accomplishment of my life. My relationship with my wife is second, my kids third, my writing fourth, my friends fifth, my spiritual practice sixth, my job seventh. Fighting panic without pills is number one. It is my way of declaring that my life is an existential condition, a karmic opportunity, not a clinical, remediable state. I sometimes forget the price I have paid for never permitting it to be any other way.
I have never let my panics deter me from basically living my life. Unlike some people who panic, I am generally cheerful (most of the time) and feel I can attempt and accomplish anything. I may carry a constant low-level anxiety, but real panics are relatively rare.
Yes, holding them at bay does consume a lot of time and energy. There are experiences I haven’t had, not so much because of the panics themselves as because of my fear of one striking without warning. I dread being in a situation where I might panic and not know what to do. (Gene assures me I probably would know what to do.) I haven’t traveled on my own to countries where I would otherwise have gone. That is a big concession.
Without panic as a reminder, other people move unaware through many situations of potential danger. They do not plan in terms of them; they do not experience their own vulnerability to dangers that are simultaneously within and without and beyond their capacity to neutralize. Sometimes their optimism and bravado lead them into jams — physical and emotional. Yet, in most ways, theirs is a happier lot because they live life more naturally and deal with unpleasant surprises when they occur.
Anxiety doesn’t give me that option. I generally choose not to take chances because panic has made me appreciate the risks. Being cautious tends to take precedent over any pleasure that might also engender peril.
Gene proposed that some of the ways in which I defined and dealt with my panics increased my fears. For instance, he experienced terrors equivalent to mine, but they were brief, and he always recovered. Once, while camping with his son, he had felt an incapacitating fear of the dark. Another time, while in his car, he’d had an inexplicable premonition that something horrible had happened to his son. When he told me about these episodes, I understood that my experience wasn’t separate from that of the rest of humanity. His act of “therapy” substituted for assurances not given in my childhood.
The difference between Gene’s panics and mine was that, instead of going away, my panics fed off themselves. So why did Gene not stay scared? How could he be so sure that something terrible wouldn’t happen?
“I have good defenses,” he said. “I just know things will work out.”
But, I pointed out, his internal defenses hardly afforded protection against disasters from without.
“Defenses aren’t rational,” he explained. “In fact, a rational defense is not a defense at all. Defenses must be irrational if they are to work. Rationality as a defense would be neurosis or madness.”
Defenses are forged and set in place when a child is young enough to accept a parent’s irrational assurances. When a mother goes out for the day and the child says, “Will I see you later?” the mother doesn’t answer, “Maybe, if I don’t get hit by a car.” The mother says, “Of course.”
And the person with a good defense mechanism keeps saying, “Of course,” to himself at a subliminal level forever, even through times of worry and grief.
In my case, a voice was ever warning me that disastrous things would happen if I did not immediately get afraid in a big way. So I did. On the surface, my panic may be caused by a fear of loss (of my life, of a loved one), but it is also a belief that loss can be prevented only by fear — in part since previous fears never came to fruition, as though dread itself were a charm against catastrophe.
Compulsion is a strange beast. It tells you, superstitiously, that if you think something, it will happen. So you try very hard not to think it, which is impossible. It also tells you that if you don’t think it (if you fail to be vigilant), it will happen, so you try to think it without letting your thoughts blaze out of control. You end up fleeing your own prophecies, afraid of the psychic capacity of your own mind to cause harm. But it is just as dangerous not to think “it” (not to prepare yourself), because then it could come unannounced from anywhere and everywhere.
My mother had her own dramatic fear rituals, but they could not hold a candle to mine after I projected my infantile and magical belief system onto them. Add the Freudian grail quest imposed by Dr. Fabian, and I was facing an opponent of cosmic proportions. Then, as an adolescent and adult, I fused this terrifying enigma with other esoteric belief systems. Eventually I found myself in a realm where only warrior lamas and Yaqui sorcerers belong.
Panic became my sacrament and guide, the profane equivalent of individuation. It not only linked me back to my mother but also to the original lama-sorcerer in my life, Fabian himself. In a way, panic became a means of gaining access to higher levels of enlightenment and power for which I was not ready: enlightenment without enlightenment. But at least it got me there; at least I had a moment with the ascended lamas and primal forces of creation, dire and horrific as it was.
Perhaps infantile crises, over time in the unconscious, come to feel like ethereal darkness. Panic becomes a way to make the world mythical, dramatic, fresh, childlike, and euphoric. What operates as panic and suffering at one level sponsors a kind of proxy vision quest at another.
With Gene’s help I began to perceive that, though the original sources of my panics were arguably real, ineffable terrors, their secondary aspect was an infantile performance to which I had become addicted in a child’s futile effort to connect with a remote, punishing mother who escaped her own panic by insisting her children carry it for her. My early panics belonged to her or were appropriated by her, but later they became ambitious and self-glorious forays: initially an effort to meet Dr. Fabian on his own hallowed ground — to prove that I could play his game — but later to join other poets and magicians.
I acted my part so well that I forgot how to do anything else, how to be brave and honorable in simple ways, how to be me. I lost my real gumption even as I tried to be everyone else’s hero — eventually making it to a podium with Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan, two of the great poet-magicians of my time, at Kent State University a year after the 1970 shootings, reading my work to thousands. I knew I was a fraud, but I didn’t tell anyone except Duncan, not even myself. “We’re all frauds” was his immediate answer.
Later, misguided loyalty to the old law was a way of keeping some version of my mother alive, maintaining her as my alter ego. But it was not my mother I was keeping alive; it was my own ancient warrior existence that had battled with her, mirrored her, and framed my identity as both her adversary and her confidant in panic. As long as I honored that internal echo, there was hope of return and reconciliation, something that could not happen in reality.
This is how a panic attack might not be a panic but an obsessive compulsion made up of loyalty, guilt, protection, and habit, and containing the seeds of primal tantrums and orthodoxies that simply will not let go until their impossible needs are met.
Even if my panics did eventually take on some conventional psychological guise, their core deviancy could not be solved simply by straightening it out, for it always adjusted back to its crooked axis. If my kids were late from school and I wasn’t immediately scared, I felt a flutter of both worry and guilt. I had to get scared, for I was risking their fate by the arrogance of my confidence, by being me instead of looking out for them according to the old law (which was the truest one). Ultimately I was not so much intrinsically susceptible to terror as desperately protecting some long-ago taboo, perverse yet precious.
Panic became a means of gaining access to higher levels of enlightenment and power for which I was not ready: enlightenment without enlightenment. But at least it got me there; at least I had a moment with the ascended lamas and primal forces of creation, dire and horrific as it was.
My problem wasn’t real danger. It was thought itself that sabotaged me. A near miss on the highway or physical confrontation didn’t faze me, but I was helpless before superstition and prophecy. Someone’s claim that the planets were lining up to cause an earthquake on a given day or a rumor that terrorists were poised to strike would elicit frantic, irrational behavior.
I had long conducted dialogues in my mind without realizing they were unconsciously staged. I thought there was just one voice — my own — and that “being afraid” was just being afraid. Likewise, I assumed that when I behaved (to my mind) badly, it was a character flaw. I never stopped to think that self-accusation might itself originate within the dynamics of compulsion, ensuring that I continued to behave badly and thus never developed my full complement of courage and compassion, having rigidified long ago into thinking I was incapable of them.
I began to hear whose voice was speaking to me, and it wasn’t my voice. Of course, it was no one else’s voice either.
Gene next explored with me the possibility that my panics might reenact the original state of separation from human contact that I experienced in my family. Because my mother made intimacy with other people too dangerous, I trusted no one (while imagining myself both affable and receptive), thus engendering a proxy world in which I alone was responsible for my safety. By internal fiat, I could not risk deep connection with others.
Gene thought that our goal should be not to try to get rid of my anxiety-vigilance, which had pretty much alloyed itself with my personality, but to establish a new trust of human contact so that the interpersonal effects of panic would be minimized. To get rid of only the symptomatic aspects of panic — presuming that was even possible — would (after all) still leave me in a state of separation from other people.
Panic is essentially humanizing, a neurotic’s foolproof means of rescuing him- or herself from what otherwise would be a vapid, lonely existence. A person running from a lion will accept any help he can get, even love.
Contact with another person has often mitigated a panic attack or taken me out of one. Panic itself is dry, sterile, tight. Real empathy with someone during its spell feels like rain on a desert.
Like most things in the mind, panic works in opposite ways. While its state is intrinsically antisocial and isolating, its terror also undermines aloofness and a stance of impenetrability. I was receptive to company because I longed for relief from anxiety. Panicking impelled me to seek help, to be candid and open, to trust people. Panic is essentially humanizing, a neurotic’s foolproof means of rescuing him- or herself from what otherwise would be a vapid, lonely existence. A person running from a lion will accept any help he can get, even love.
While intimacy relieves terror, it makes one more vulnerable to the unconscious conflicts that underlie it. That is why, Gene thought, I had my first big adult panic after finding someone I could love. He surmised that whenever I allowed other people into my feelings, the jagged edge of my panic evaporated. On the other hand, love provoked fresh anxiety about betrayal and loss.
One afternoon I climbed the stairs to Gene’s office in a state of full-blown panic and despair. Having suffered silently for five excruciating days and nights, I announced theatrically, “I’m defective. They should throw me out and get another model.”
“You’re not defective,” he said; “you’re not even weak — in fact, you’re my hero. I can’t imagine anyone else standing up to this kind of onslaught as honorably and courageously as you have for so long. You’re one of the strongest people I know.”
He didn’t have to tell me that if someone had said those words to me during childhood instead of telling me all the time that I was sick, or searching for the great trauma, I might not have created this monster.
There are irrational moments in childhood, such as when one is taught to swim. It shouldn’t work, but it does. If it is done right, the child finds himself magically endowed with courage, capable of everything. If it is done wrong or not done, the child seeks it his whole life and wavers before the demons in his own mind.
Both children live in the same world. Both children, like the rest of us, are occasionally afraid. But one child knows he will be OK and the other knows he won’t. Both are right; both are wrong; but one gets to pretend to be invulnerable; the other suffers every imagined vulnerability for both of them.
When I was a child, my stepfather provided no protection from my mother’s torments. He usually fled her rages. After I went to college, she convinced him I was an enemy of the family, so he and I were estranged for more than thirty years. I always liked him, though, so I persisted in attempts at reconciliation. Just months before his fatal stroke, we met for lunch on consecutive days.
At the end of the last lunch, I finally got around to talking about the family “spook,” as he called it: mental illness. He had never embraced this diagnosis, even when his wife jumped out the window and his son was sleeping in Central Park. When he resisted now, I told him that it was in me the same as in my brother and sister and mother.
“Not in you,” he protested. “All I see is a capable man with a family. I see someone who’s giving me more pleasure yesterday and today than I could have imagined. Richard, I hope these meetings mean as much to you as they do to me.”
Tears surged up in me. We had reached the climax of everything. “They do,” I said. “They definitely do.”
Now both the pitch and volume of his voice rose. “If I were you, I’d say, ‘Why don’t you get the hell off me, you son-of-a-bitch spook! Get the hell off me!’ ” He waved his right hand in such a striking gesture that the tables around us grew momentarily silent.
His words struck at my heart because he alone was the father and could speak such a thing, could threaten the profane spirit, could give the reassurance. Only now I didn’t need it anymore. I needed it back then, when his voice would echo throughout our tiny flat, “Old man river, / That old man river . . .” Still, by hearing his voice again, I felt released, if only for a moment. He stood between me and my oppressor, and, though it was too late to rescue the haunted child, it was not too late to meet in the world as men.
“The spook is me,” I said.
“The spook isn’t you. Kick the bastard out and be done with it.”
In 1998, on Gene’s advice, I made an appointment with a psychiatrist in San Francisco whom I will call Roger Houseman. As an M.D., Houseman could prescribe drugs that Gene could not. I had been experiencing a month-long panic at the time, with only momentary refuges. Gene’s recommendation was that I try a psychotropic drug for six months to break the momentum and establish a new chemical-neurological base. With that as a frame of reference, I might not need to keep taking the drug.
The first time I tried to see Houseman, I was so dismayed by the other patients in his waiting room, many of whom had bandages on their heads, that I nearly left. It looked like a mental hospital. I had spent my whole life not being one of them.
The choice was made for me. Due to a misunderstanding, I wasn’t on his schedule. After all it had taken me to get there — the hour drive, the additional time looking for a parking space, the effort to keep from bolting — I doggedly retraced my steps, feeling more reprieve than regret. I didn’t try again for a year.
The second time, my wife came along. The brunt of my panics had been falling on her over the years, and she felt I needed to take more responsibility for my behavior. It wasn’t fair, she said, to reject a possibly elegant solution out of hand.
Houseman began our meeting by stating his fee: more than twice what I paid to see Gene, who at least had an emotional grasp of what I was undergoing. Houseman was concerned only with sets of diagnostic criteria for prescribing different drugs. I had experiences that, by his reckoning, were not panic but something else — maybe obsessive-compulsive disorder, maybe phobic reactions, maybe manic depression. He was not interested in delving into their infrastructure; he wanted to identify the right drug to treat them. I tried to help him. After all, that’s what I was there for. At the same time, however, I had been panicking (or doing something I called panic) for so many years, with so many layers of paradox and shifting meanings, that a part of me was unwilling to have the whole series of events reduced to a set of diagnostic criteria.
According to Houseman, I lacked many of the key physiological symptoms of panic: irregular heartbeat, nausea, hot flashes, dry mouth, sweat, shortness of breath, urinary urgency, weakness of knees. My red-letter symptoms included “chilly creeps” (pangs originating around my atlas bone and spreading viscerally through my gut), an irrational sense of impending doom, and vigilance to the point of exhaustion.
Primarily on the basis of those symptoms and my mother’s suicide, Houseman recommended a selection of medications, most of them for depression. He succinctly yet thoroughly described their uses and their side effects. I thanked him, wrote him a check, and left.
Once we were out of his office, my wife declared that his lists of side effects were so scary and his conviction so lacking that she did not want me to take any of the drugs. I didn’t.
Several years later, heading home from the Oakland airport, I made a wrong turn that took me right into rush-hour traffic crossing the Bay Bridge to San Francisco — a place I had no intention of going.
I had a busy morning planned and was in a hurry to get home. Now I faced at least a two-hour delay, probably longer. Plus, the only way out was to creep along in traffic, reach the tollbooth, pay two dollars, cross half the bridge, exit at Treasure Island, turn around, and come back. Movement was almost undetectable. The exhaust fumes made me nauseous. I was not supposed to be there, but I had no way to turn around.
Then, one by one, I realized I was experiencing Houseman’s key symptoms: heart pounding, dry mouth, difficulty breathing, hyperventilation, trouble focusing my vision, cold sweats, hot flashes, a terrible need to pee. I had been thrown into a state of garden-variety panic — for the first time, as far as I could recall.
I started a rebirthing breathing cycle in which I initially increased the hyperventilation while accepting it as a positive sensation. Rebirthing is a technique for encountering trauma and pain through deep breathing. From breath to breath, one embraces each unpleasant bodily sensation and mood as a gift of the universe and considers oneself fortunate for being able to live and experience it. One transforms waves of anxiety into waves of healing.
After modified rebirthing, I used Zen breathing and clear-mind meditation to slow my heart rate and become an observer rather than a victim. The traffic jam was merely another bardo, and it required acceptance, respect.
The physical symptoms were suddenly gone. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the exhaust fumes gave me a splitting headache, I would have been triumphant. Panic itself was a piece of cake.
Another time, when my wife was away traveling, I awoke in the middle of the night to terror, my pajamas soaked with sweat. Desperate, I soon became convinced that there was no way out of this state, that it was the base condition that defined everything else.
I had embarrassingly maudlin fantasies of self-immolation, vindication through destruction. I blamed my wife for not being there (as though she were always supposed to be at my side because I was defective). I could not slow down. I could not settle. I could not find myself.
I knew I had to handle this. Sliding across the bed to the cold pillow on the other side, I asked myself, Why can’t I just drop this and be OK?
Instantly I was back in childhood, where the answer was obvious: Being OK was not allowed. It wasn’t an option for me as my mother’s son, for it would have removed me from my role in her crisis. “Panic” was my assigned role in our play. Only by panicking could I have an impact, could I feel real to myself. In fact, it was my panics that had brought my father back into my life, when he forced my mother to take me to Dr. Fabian.
All through childhood I was goaded by her to be eccentric, abnormal, incapable, in need of protection, and not to be me or to believe in my own clarity and goodness . . . and here I was goading myself, fifty years later.
The moment I saw this, the panic evaporated. I was normal. The night breeze turned pleasant; the stars outside the window were a wonder again. This is the way it’s supposed to happen, I thought. This is therapeutic insight.
But that thought was dangerous too, because it would mean I had to live a different life. It would force me out of my drama into the awesome responsibility of being myself.
I awoke again three hours later, just before dawn, with a different version of the same terror — less rage and more a sense of nonexistence and abandonment. I thought, She will never come back. After pacing for about a minute, I sat down and began meditating. At three breaths, the fear began to dissolve. After an hour, I was deeply and totally normal and committed to staying that way.
All through childhood I was goaded by her to be eccentric, abnormal, incapable, in need of protection, and not to be me or to believe in my own clarity and goodness . . . and here I was goading myself, fifty years later.
It is not my intention to adopt the doctrinaire position that my panic is existential and phenomenological rather than medical and clinical, that it is cultural more than biological. In fact, it is all these. Panic is heavily influenced by cultural context. It also entails a biochemical event, even though that event — like all other lived events — is experienced, interpreted, and given meaning by the psyche.
The biochemical component of panic cannot be overlooked, yet it also cannot be valorized as the sole cause, meaning, and vector of cure. When panic is seen only as a biological and/or genetic defect, without social and phenomenological components, people are encouraged to invalidate the experience as sickness, and thus to interpret their altered state of reality as an aberration or intrusion. They lose the shamanic and archetypal benefits of strange energy, the opportunity to draw meaning from it.
When panic is overmedicalized and cultural factors are also minimized, the various injustices of society that induce panic-like states are vindicated without a trial. Conversely, when an otherwise devoted mother drowns her five children in the bathtub because of postpartum depression, or when an adopted son (unknown to his parents to be the product of rape between two patients in a mental hospital) develops violent paranoid schizophrenia and commits suicide in late adolescence after a happy, normal childhood, we appreciate the implacability of biological/genetic destiny. There is no option but to regard these examples as diseases and attempt to cure them by drugs. This is both humane and a necessary precaution to protect others in society.
The goal should be not to confuse such biologically damaged individuals with those undergoing extraordinary experiences, perhaps with a biochemical vector, that can be assimilated and used for psychospiritual growth.
In recent years I have had some success applying Dzogchen Buddhist practices to panic states. Meditating directly on thought processes during panics, I open myself to the profound questions they pose about existence. At moments of deep clarity, panic states can seem laughable. From a Buddhist viewpoint, all states are imaginary and passing. Since everything is conditional, temporary, and uncontrollable, and decay and death are inexorable, we might as well enjoy the unlikely gift of our lives. It’s a free ride; we are risking nothing except the temporary illusion of being real.
The goal of existence should be simply to observe, to experience, and not to react. A person developing a practice of meditation cultivates the capacity to watch neutrally all desires, anxieties, emotions, and fears as they pass through states of being and dissolution. This process leads to a reduction of anxiety, not in spite of our social and cosmic situation, but because of our full appreciation of its larger context.
We might then accomplish through meditation what psychotropic drugs attempt through chemical change. The difference seems to be whether the control is internal (active) or external (passive), whether it is rooted in a person’s essential being or must be derived from the cultural storehouse of goods being tendered to us all. Learning to modulate our unconscious delusions through understanding our bodies and minds is far preferable to medications, for it allows us to develop as individuals. It is also cheaper and more efficient than having to pay for a pill or therapist. It attempts to get to the source of the problem rather than merely treat its symptoms. Whether a person with intense unconscious conflicts, urges, and anxiety can relieve them through meditation is uncertain, but it would at least be a useful alternate course in a society addicted to chemical solutions and quick fixes.
It is not, however, a matter of inflatedly applying enlightenment principles to pathologies, for all mind states have both pathological and liberating elements. One moves not toward an epiphany but toward thoughts themselves, their components and transitory meanings. The beginning point — panic or calm, misery or joy — matters little as long as one sticks to the process. The high energy of panic may actually serve to sharpen our attention.
As I mentioned at the start, Gurdjieff’s assessment of our situation was that if any one of us could experience the universe as it is, he or she would be unable to bear it. But Gurdijeff felt that our stupor, while reassuring on a temporary basis, left us in danger of spiritual annihilation upon death. He developed rituals to allow people safely to build an awareness of their actual situation. In confronting panic, he said, we also confront our destiny.
“A Phenomenology of Panic” is an abridged version of a longer essay of the same title that appeared in Panic: Origins, Insight, and Treatment, edited by Leonard J. Schmidt, M.D., and Brooke Warner. It appears here by permission of North Atlantic Books, www.northatlanticbooks.com.
