Panic Attacks Therapy
When your body thinks you're dying
Your heart pounds. You can't breathe. The world tilts. You're absolutely certain you're having a heart attack, that you're going to die right here, right now. Then it passes and you're left shaking, exhausted, terrified it will happen again.
You've been to A&E. They ran tests. Your heart is fine. But the panic attacks keep coming. Now you're afraid to go places, do things, be anywhere you can't escape from if it happens again.
Most panic attack treatment focuses on symptom management: breathing exercises, exposure therapy, medication to blunt the response. These can help in the moment, but they don't address why your nervous system is firing the panic alarm in the first place.
Panic attacks aren't random. They're your body's emergency response kicking in when there's no visible danger. But there is danger - just not the kind you can see. Often it's psychological danger: feelings you can't tolerate, situations that unconsciously remind you of past trauma, needs or truths about yourself that feel catastrophic.
The panic is what happens when something unbearable is trying to surface and your system desperately wants to keep it down. Your body floods with adrenaline to mobilise you for fight or flight, but there's nothing external to fight or flee from. So you're left with all that terror and nowhere to put it.
Psychodynamic therapy asks what your panic attacks are protecting you from. What feeling or thought or truth is so overwhelming that your body would rather have you believe you're dying than let you feel it?
We meet weekly or twice-weekly and work with what the panic is trying to communicate. Not by triggering attacks deliberately, but by paying attention to what's happening in your life when they occur.
Often panic attacks cluster around specific situations: before conflict, after intimacy, when you're alone, when you're trapped. These patterns are clues. They point to what your system is trying to protect you from.
We'll also work with what happens in the room. The moments your breathing changes, when you dissociate slightly, when anxiety spikes even though we're just talking. Your body is always communicating - we just need to learn its language.
Over time, as you develop more tolerance for the feelings underneath the panic, the attacks often become less frequent, less intense, less terrifying. Not because you've learned better coping skills, but because your system doesn't need to sound the alarm as loudly.