Discharging “Unbearable” Distress
When I was eighteen, I had my first “panic attack.” When I was twenty-two, I started having debilitating panic attacks on a regular basis. The content was always that I was going to die or go “crazy” or both and that I had to get out of wherever I was immediately.
My parents sent me to a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist. The psychiatrist prescribed a psychiatric drug and the psychologist taught me relaxation techniques. Somehow, I knew that I didn’t want to be on the psychiatric drug (an anti-depressant) and got off within a month. I did, however, continue to self-medicate with alcohol and occasional Valium supplied by my father. Eventually the panic attacks went underground for a few years.
At twenty-five the panic attacks resurfaced. At that time, I found a therapist who encouraged me to feel them fully rather than try to make them go away and to write about them in detail and rate their intensity. Then they receded again for many years with only an isolated one here and there that barely disrupted my life.
WORKING ON IT IN RC
I started RC when I was thirty-four. I was eager to reclaim my mind and willing to do the work. I plunged in with little reserve and worked on heavy early material [distress] right from the start. At that time in my life I would have a panic attack only on rare occasions—even once in a session. But I had no idea how to go after [pursue] the early material. I would recount what had happened in my twenties and cry and cry about it but could not make the decision to actually feel the panic. About four years ago at the age of sixty the panic attacks returned with a vengeance. For about three months I felt like I was going to die almost without any relief. I fortunately have many close relationships with very smart Co-Counselors who know me well. I discharged as much as I could on the early terror, but it was next to impossible to hold on to any perspective. I continued to live my life fully, but the grip of the distress on my mind felt unbearable. Taking a shower was terrifying. I had to steel myself before going out the door and heading to work. It took enormous decision. I had to give myself a pep talk before each thing I had to do at work. Exercise, which had always been one of my favorite and most attention-out activities, became fraught with feelings of imminent danger. It was like torture, and although part of my mind knew it was early, the distress was so believable I could not hold on to perspective for long.
The panic attacks disappeared for a few months only to return again for another few-month stretch. This pattern happened a few more times over the next two and a half years, with alternating periods of what felt like constant assault by my distress and months of relief. It seemed that my brain was repeatedly presenting ways for the material to resurface—vertigo, ophthalmic migraines in which there was loss of vision replaced by geometric designs, unexplained pain in some part of my body, and sudden-onset high blood pressure. Each of these would cause a torrential resurfacing of the panic. It was next to impossible to work on the distress if the material was not constantly in my face. When it was latent, I was just relieved to not be under what felt like constant bombardment.
A CHANGE
The past year has been different. Something has changed, and I suspect it might be permanent. I have recently been trying to fight my way toward working on this material consistently. The more I go after it, the more I have a feel for what my life was like right after my birth and the more I can discharge from a point of contradiction [to distress].
I wanted to write this article—for myself, so that I could take stock of the progress I have made with determined hard work and lots of help, but more so for others to know that even the most protracted, heavy, chronic, unbearable distresses can eventually yield to discharge. The distress I have been battling is not completely discharged, but I am more and more able to hold on to perspective for longer and longer periods.
I think several things have contributed to this. One comes from Tim Jackins’s persistent, insistent urging of us to go after the early unbearable distress—the “torture”-filled isolation that it looks like every one of us humans experienced from not having another human mind in with our mind, not having another human choose us, and not being seen and treated as fully human right from the start—and then the “icing on the cake,” not being allowed to discharge the distress that this installed on our minds.
I think I can do this because of many, many years of discharge on the distresses that got installed a little later on. I have worked for many years on some heavy early sexual hurts that happened in early infancy but occurred after the hurts that were at the root of my earliest distresses. I suspect that the distress from the sexual hurts got attached to the earliest hurts, but I couldn’t look earlier until a huge chunk of the sexual hurts discharged (though I am not done with that either). For a long time, physical closeness in sessions only seemed possible with a very select few. Now I can have this with many more, and I need a lot of it to discharge the early lonely place where I thought I would not survive. This closeness is the biggest contradiction to the early hurt.
I think I can do this because over the years I developed close Co-Counseling relationships with many strong Co-Counselors. They offer different kinds of sessions, and this has enabled me to discharge on different aspects of the hurts that were installed.
I think that counseling many others over the years and fighting for them to completely reclaim their minds and holding out perspective for them provides me with ballast from which to go after my unbearable material. I can know for them what I often cannot know for myself—that looking at the material is not dangerous, won’t be the cause of their demise, won’t pull them into a black hole from which they will never emerge. As I know this more and more for many different people, it slowly seems possible that it might be true of me, too.
I don’t yet fully know the impact on my life of reclaiming more and more of my mind that I lost by not having thoughtful human connection in the very early moments of my life outside of my mother. As I unravel the inaccurate conclusions that I arrived at about me, other humans, and what it means to be part of this world, I am aware that I can enjoy people and life more fully. I am hopeful that my timidity will continue to lessen and that I will be able to make more contact with more people more of the time. I am hopeful that I will take ever bolder steps in the wide world to fight oppression. I am confident that I will get better and better at assisting others to fight with everything they have to reclaim their minds.
New York, New York, USA
(Present Time 199, April 2020)