How I Healed Myself From Panic Disorder

My first panic attack happened in 1999, when I was 17 years old, and it continued with ups and downs until mid-2005 or 2006, when it gradually started to decrease, until it practically ceased completely.

I intend here to report a kind of chronology of what I experienced during this period, even though I am aware of the risk of perhaps not being so faithful to the facts. First, for believing that memory is treacherous. Then, believing that a person in a panic attack gives much more weight to the facts than they actually would. Finally, because I was the protagonist. After all, someone who is sunk in the depths of the sea is not the best person to talk about the storm that erupts on the surface.

But I prefer to tell, even assuming the risks. And to say, first of all, that I was cured thanks to three things: an encounter with a shaman, advice from my brother, and Woody Allen.

The beginning

My first panic attack happened inside the classroom, in the middle of 1999. When that broke out, it was like a nightmare experience materializing in the real world.

If I hadn’t been so scared to connect the dots, I would have understood that the seizures were smoke hissing from a pressure cooker. Among the factors that boiled over, what tempered everything was a profound feeling of inadequacy – something very familiar to every teenager who has been unwillingly expelled from the childhood paradise, and then needs to enter, to a greater or lesser extent, the world of obligations and of the struggle for survival.

There was an emotional inadequacy, which got worse at school, an environment where I believed that my skills were underused, and buried by bureaucratic obligations and subjects with which I had no affinity. Parallel to this, there was a physical, hormonal inadequacy, in relation to pimples, hair, odors, to all this emergence of a new skin and a new body, rougher and less flexible than a few years ago.

Still on flexibility, only today do I understand that, even at that time, my back problem was already showing some signs. Spending long hours sitting uninterruptedly on the hard chairs at school certainly triggered the crises. The fact of being faced with a perennial physical discomfort and the obligation of not being able to make sudden movements or even get up was the yeast that made this desperate cake grow and burst.

These are some of the reasons, perhaps all, that I understand to be responsible. And, because of that or not, there I was, feeling goosebumps, butterflies in my stomach, palms sweating, as if I were facing a lion or some other predator on the savannah. The world’s colors seemed sharper and closer, and I soon found myself lost in irrelevant details, like the cracks in the wall, or the texture of a chair. It felt like my sanity was slipping through my fingers, like I was trying to hold water in my hands.

It is worth remembering that there were times when we did not have access to the information that we currently have, especially with the internet. So, in those first panic attacks, I had the aggravating factor of not even being aware of what was going on. It was completely and utterly desperate. I naively believed I was going crazy – without having the malice to understand that crazy people never believe they are crazy. That is, while there is the fear of going crazy, there is sanity. It would have been nice to read or hear something like that in those gray days.

In one of the worst crises, I strongly believed I was going to do something crazy in the middle of one of the classes – something like jumping out of a window, or screaming compulsively. When the break signal was given, I remember that a friend commented on how funny my posture at the desk was, it seemed that I was clinging to it, frightened.

About that, I must say that, in so many years that I suffered from these crises, I never took any drastic or precipitated action. No; I just suffered, in silence. And I can say that the same happened to friends of mine who went through this torment.

After all, the pain of a panic attack isn’t because of something that was done; but by the violent fear that something terrible is going to happen soon. It is a fear of the short-term future, which little by little eats away at your nervous system and your peace of mind. A deep fear, of failing, of being ridiculous, of doing something silly that you will regret for the rest of your life. Therefore, the problem almost always manifests itself in adolescence, a time when your self-esteem is, more than ever, dependent on what others think about you.

Only years later did I realize how much there is a chemical process that makes crises worse. It was something that I intuitively realized. When the first flash of a crisis broke out, it was easier to regain calm. However, by the time the fear sparks new lights, your body’s chemistry has already gained most of the veins, and your body is already damp with cortisone or something. It was a snowball growing down the cliff. Finally, only the end of class and going home could, after all, offer me peace of mind.

In one of the crises, one of the most desperate, I witnessed an impressive and beautiful phenomenon. It was there, at the bottom of the well, that I could feel one of the most beautiful human capacities to get back on top and recover. It was proof of how the human unconscious can use symbols and art to heal a tormented psyche, something I would only understand years later, after reading works like Man and His Symbols, by Carl Gustav Jung.

My level of anguish in the middle of one of the classes was such that I started to cry. I silently said a prayer in my head, asking something beyond myself – the cosmos, God, the universe, any higher entity that could hear me – why this was happening to me. Then, a song popped into my head. That intrigued me, because I hadn’t heard that specific song in days; that is, there was no reason for me to think about that melody. It was pretty clear to me, even in my despair, that I hadn’t consciously triggered that song in my head.

I paid attention to the letter. It was Beautiful Boy, by former Beatle John Lennon. The first stanzas say:

Close your eyes (close your eyes)
have no fear (don’t be afraid)
The monster’s gone
He’s on the run (he left)
And your daddy’s here (and your father is here)
Beautiful beautiful beautiful, beautiful boy

When I realized the lyrics, which had suddenly landed on me, I started to cry a lot, I had to make a huge effort so that no one would notice. And, looking back on that day, I can’t say if they noticed or not, because I didn’t care anymore. I only remember the immense feeling that there was a God, or a greater force, who communicated with me, who said in his own way – with the language of chance – that I should not surrender to fear.

This episode gave me the strength to steadfastly endure the crises to come. Because they kept showing up. I was not cured.

I only had a respite when I decided to change schools. It was something I did reluctantly. In 1999, I studied at a private school, repeating the first year. And given my report card, it looked like I would repeat again. It would be – amazingly – my fourth bomb (that is, my inadequacy with school was not only qualitative, but also quantitative). My intense dispersion did not go unnoticed by the teachers, who began to pick on me frequently.

So I left that school and went to a state school. It was something that made me feel really good. There was a sense of strangeness at first, starting with the building, with the prison appearance given off by the cold cement and exposed bricks. Also, I studied in private schools for years, starting in the fifth grade, and they were environments where I knew most of the students. At State (which is what we called the school, using the masculine article “the”), I found myself in front of many strange faces. And not only did I not know these new colleagues, but there was also the shock of being around people from more humble backgrounds.

But despite the sudden change, I was happy at State, and the panic attacks practically ceased in almost a year and a half there. First of all, the affections were more authentic, true. I identified with the boyish sense of humor and spontaneity of the new colleagues. It was less cruel humor than at private school. That did me good too, because it was a relief from a feeling of guilt that gnawed at my insides.

I believed that panic attacks could be a kind of karma, stemming from the fact that I practiced, alone or in a group, what nowadays is called bullying. Making fun of schoolmates was almost a childish reaction to my own feelings of inadequacy. Like a barbaric antidote, where you scream about the other’s supposed inability so they don’t see your own inability. I must say that fate was quick to take the price of my actions from me.

At state school, I was suddenly faced with classmates who, in other times, would have been the butt of snobbish and disparaging jokes. There were many people there who were supposedly inadequate – if you consider that the “appropriate” would be to be within a current beauty standard. To begin with, most people were black, in different shades, shades, levels, but all united by common working-class backgrounds. When I arrived at State, the girls in my class noticed me not because of my physical gifts, but because of characteristics associated with a white body. For example, I remember girls ostentatiously complimenting my hair, which I wore long at the time. Most of them had curly or frizzy hair.

Back then, we didn’t hear so much talk about notions of being politically correct. And, for younger people – especially if they belonged to the middle class – racist attitudes were almost natural, even if there was an awareness that it was something wrong. In my circle of friends before State, black people were made fun of in the same way as fat people, women, older people and everything else. The level of jokes varied from person to person, some were more cruel than others. We weren’t accountable to any code of conduct, and we preferred to treat moral rules like a toy where you stretch and pull, testing your limits, without compromise.

As I assimilated on some level the narrow perspectives made available to middle-class teenagers, I developed an instinct to be snobbish around people who deviated from society’s standards of success. And, suddenly, all of that collapsed, either because I no longer had the company of my old friends by my side, or because I was emotionally fragile, and, at that moment, fragility served me as a kind of mirror of the soul, opening wide to me how cruel and presumptuous I had been until then.

Besides, there was little rigor at State, and that made me more comfortable. We could get up and leave the room whenever we wanted, without even having to ask for permission. Even though the rooms there looked like prison cells, I paradoxically felt…