Healing Anxiety, Panic Attacks, and OCD Symptoms
Anxiety can derail our lives. It makes everyday tasks that used to be easy seem impossible. Suddenly, the professional careers we've worked so hard to achieve may no longer appear sustainable. Our relationships suffer under the strain.
Life no longer has the sense of possibility that it used to. And we wonder if it will always be this way, and our goals and dreams with remain out of reach.
Symptoms of anxiety, panic attacks, and OCD are intense. They can make us feel like our body cannot be trusted. They impact our ability to feel at ease when out in public, at work, or connecting with people.
(OCD stands for "obsessive compulsive disorder," although I don't think it's a disorder. I think it's an understandable response from an overwhelmed nervous system that is trying as hard as it can to self-regulate.)
Anxiety, Panic Attacks, & Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as a Trauma Response
We experience trauma as nervous system activation that is either “stuck on” in symptoms of over-activation or “stuck off” in symptoms of under-activation.
An over-activated nervous system is prepared to respond to threat and danger at any moment. Emotionally, we feel restless, easily startled, and flooded by intense emotions, including terror, shame, and self-judgement.
We feel constantly on edge, hypervigilant, and unable to relax or enjoy the goodness of life. It’s normal to experience insomnia, restlessness, and flare-ups of hostility or rage. Chronic tension cause digestive issues in the stomach and gut, and even chest pain.
An under-activated nervous system has collapsed into shutdown. Emotional, physical, or sexual numbness is common. So is feeling like we have no emotions, not wanting to move, and feeling depressed.
Exhaustion and chronic fatigue are signs of nervous system under-activation. So is dissociation, or feeling cut off or separate from the body, and disorientation or not feeling like things are real. In the body, this shows up as low blood pressure, chronic pain, and poor digestion.
Those of us with unresolved trauma don’t just experience being “stuck on” (over-activated) or “stuck off” (under-activated). We bounce back and forth between these two states, unable to find balance.
We end up cycling between overwhelmed and frozen and as our symptoms get worse and we become more hopeless and exhausted.
We Can’t Reason Our Way Out of Survival Responses
No amount of logic can talk our nervous systems out of survival mode. Trying to shift our mindset or reason with ourselves only makes us feel more out of control.
This is why talk therapy doesn’t work for trauma healing. Therapy is great for skills building, communication issues, and helping us understand the past. But it cannot meet the body at the level required to heal the trauma held in the nervous system.
When anxiety, panic attacks, and obsessive compulsive disorder come from unresolved trauma (which is often the case), we need to meet our symptoms at the level of the body.
This can seem terrifying and uncomfortable, especially at first. The very place that is a source of self-betrayal must become the foundation of healing.
But when we do, we start to experience islands of relief in a sea of overwhelm and often despair. Bit by bit, we expand the territory of those islands into archipelagos of possibility.
We breathe a little easier. We sleep a little better. We feel more confident going to the places and events we used to enjoy.
Trauma Healing for the Body-Mind
The modalities I use with clients who are experiencing anxiety, panic attacks, and obsessive compulsive disorder are evidence-based and backed by leaders in the trauma healing field.
Internal Family Systems is a paradigm-shifting approach to trauma healing that helps us safely navigate intensity, overwhelm, dissociation, and shutdown. Rather than going to war inside, we learn to orient in our inner world and trust our self-leadership to provide care, connection, and healing to places that we’ve self-abandoned, shamed, or kept hidden inside.
Brainspotting, which emerged out of EMDR, uses locations in the visual field to resolve traumatic imprints held in the body and the subcortex (the parts of the brain responsible for consciousness, movement, emotions, and learning). It’s a rapid and effective modality that I layer in with somatic (body-based) approaches to nervous system healing.
The body and the mind are not separate, but rather part of a continuum of our human experience. Thinking and feeling are both ways of knowing that we can optimize for collaboration.
The modalities I use come from a foundation in somatic psychology, where we work with the body to create inner safety and self-regulation.
The body and mind work together towards the goal of wellbeing. Rather than being seen as problems, symptoms are welcome indicators of areas that require more care, attention, and support.
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