Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (23 page)

Because it was a first session, we’d booked extra time, during which
I worked my way back to my earliest days, recounting the places where fear began for me. “. . . So my father ordered my mother to close all the windows, and I knew then that I was really in for it, that he didn’t want the neighbors to hear. He picked me up by my ankles and began to whip me with the buckle of his belt. He was hitting me everywhere, and I was crying and screaming at first, but then I started to black out, and the next sound was my sister wailing. She was only three then, but she’d lunged at him to stop him, and the belt buckle accidentally split her lip open. That’s what stopped him. He’d never hit her, not once, and never would, and yet suddenly he had made her bleed.”

Norm looked aghast. “Why did he only hit you? Why never your sister?”

“Because when she was a baby, she almost died. I think he always felt guilty about that—that they hadn’t noticed how sick she was until it was almost too late. She was bleeding internally, though no one ever knew why.”

“It’s just all so sad.”

“And after he dropped me and the belt to the floor, I remember being so grateful to be alive, to be able to sit in the corner of our living room and gaze at a picture book of butterflies. Blue morpho was my favorite.” There was a lot to tell, and it would take years to tell it, but this was a start.

Norm grabbed a tissue and wiped his eyes. “It’s not your fault,” he said.

I wasn’t expecting those words. Easy as they were, no one had ever said them to me before, so simply.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling terrible for making him cry. “People have it a lot worse.”

“You had no one.” Norm blew his nose.

“I had myself,” I said.

“Yes, well, you have this extraordinary spirit. That’s how you survived. You got beaten, and then you looked at butterflies. You more than survived.”

“Do you think I’ll survive panic?”

Norm looked at me squarely. “You already are.”

That day Norm explained that when we panic, we revert to a childlike state. “Everyone does it,” he said. “Suddenly the world seems big and scary because we feel small and helpless. Different things can trigger the child state in people—for some it’s being in a hospital gown, for others it’s an unexpected life event, for me it’s the holidays—and some people are just naturally more sensitive to it than others. But when we’re in a child state, we all tend to go home. For you, home is a very scary place.”

“So do all people who panic have difficult childhoods?”

He shook his head. “Not at all. Some people really do panic without any obvious cause. Though there are studies that suggest that some people are more biologically prone to it.”

We kept talking, and the sound of Norm’s voice was like a calm sea. “Your first panic attack wasn’t a few months ago. It was when you were eleven and thought you were having a heart attack.”

“That was a
panic attack
?” I asked in disbelief. How had I never realized that?

“You betcha. But when you ran away and had to take care of yourself, there was no room for you to slip into that child state. You couldn’t afford to. But now you’ve moved to a new place and you’re isolated—just weak enough to find yourself in a child state.”

“But if I had my first panic attack so young, what if I’m one of those people who are biologically prone to it?”

“It doesn’t matter. The approach is the same for everyone who panics, regardless of the cause.”

“What’s the approach?” I asked.

“Number one, it’s compassion.”

“Compassion,” I repeated.

“We have to have compassion for that child place in ourselves. A lot of people tend to beat themselves up for panicking. They think,
What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I afraid of such silly things?
But when
a child is trembling from a nightmare or convinced there’s a monster in the closet, we don’t say, ‘What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you afraid of such silly things?’ Instead, we comfort the child. We have compassion. Then we open the closet door to show there’s nothing there. Of course, sometimes we have to be firm with kids—we can’t let them run the show. We have to step in as adults who are in control, but we have to do it with our hearts. That’s why CBT didn’t work for you—it’s a great system that helps many, but it’s got no heart.”

And when he said that, I knew I’d finally found someone I could talk to. “You have heart,” I said.

“So do you, kiddo.”

A
fraid, I had spent so much energy hoping for some magical mother or therapist or guru to appear and unfurl a scroll of answers into my hand—ones that would tell me which steps to take and how to feel better, less afraid—or for my own husband to sweep me up as if into the arms of God, as if in a single motion he could undo a lifetime of motion. I had no idea then that the voice that would come to me would be my own, or that what I really wanted, more than I wanted someone to give me answers, was for someone to listen.

I wrote about Claret to Meg:

In the night when I can’t sleep, I trespass into the stable. My trainer lives in the apartment next door, so I’m careful not to wake her. The door is roped, the lights off, but I want to feed Claret a purple carrot. I step through cautiously, the way you walk through the narrow hall of a haunted house, but soon my eyes adjust to the
darkness. The moon is big and frames the windows in blue light. There are quiet sounds: small snuffles, shifts, and sighs from the stalls. I find Claret in the back, already eating. Most of his body is swallowed by the darkness of his stall. A shaft of moonlight exposes the side of his face and makes his globe eye shine. Hay pokes out of his mouth like makeshift whiskers. I break the carrot in half and feed it to him through the bars. He takes it from my hand soft as a kiss. His chewing is the sound of walking through snow. It is the sound of taking, of contentment. After the carrot, he returns to his hay, disappearing entirely as he bends to take a bite. In between he pops back up to watch me. His eye is a night lake.

A
fter I’d had a few more sessions with Norm, he introduced me to a type of therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Because he’d diagnosed me not only with panic disorder but also with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), he thought this approach would be especially useful. Many people who suffer from panic disorder without any prior trauma can suffer from PTSD, because panic attacks themselves are a type of trauma. EMDR addresses that trauma by helping patients reprocess the scary residue of panic—or any event—until it’s no longer scary. Here’s essentially how it works: the patient is asked to recall a traumatic memory. While she is doing so, the therapist moves a pencil or other object back and forth in front of the patient’s eyes, and the patient follows the movement while recalling the memory, and continues to do this until the memory stops being frightening. Though the science isn’t conclusive regarding
how
EMDR actually works, many people believe that it works via
synchronization between the two hemispheres of the brain, while other people attribute its success to relaxation or distraction.

In my case, we started by focusing on the core negative belief:
I’m not safe
. The first memory I chose was my first panic attack.

Norm was holding a pencil in his hand. “Okay, now I want you to remember that first panic attack and tell me what feelings or words come up for you. Just follow my hand with your eyes.”

As Norm waved the pencil back and forth, I found myself unable to concentrate on the memory. The eye movements made me uncomfortable, and I started getting anxious. “I don’t like moving my eyes like that,” I told him.

“Good. That’s good you told me. I have something else for you then. We can do this another way.” Norm opened a drawer and pulled out a pair of earphones. “Try this,” he said. “You’ll hear alternating beeps on each side.”

I put on the earphones and the beeps began. They reminded me of those hearing tests that make you raise your left and right hands. I closed my eyes and started with the memory of my first panic attack, but my mind quickly took me elsewhere. It took me to a dream. I opened my eyes. “I switched memories.”

“That’s okay. What did you remember?”

“It was a dream I used to have as a kid.”

“Tell me.”

“My parents are taking me to this place, and I don’t know why. All I know is that something is very wrong with me. When we walk into the building, they’re holding my hands, but not in a sweet way—in a way that says
you can’t escape
. The room is steely, steeped in blue light, and is full of people. It’s some kind of hospital, but worse. And they’re all looking at me—they’ve been waiting for me—because they’ve never seen anything like this before—anything so wrong with a person. Some of them are even crying because of it. And I’m really scared. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Okay, let’s go back to the same memory and see what comes up for you. Just follow your mind where it wants to take you.”

This time when the beeping started and I closed my eyes, I could see the dream more vividly, as if I were dreaming it again. I watched my parents leading me and could feel the light on my face, cold and metallic, like their hands. I saw the people crying, all of them gathering around, and I was tiny compared to them. My wrists poked out from my old blue coat, bony and pale, and the faux fur around the hood was matted and dirty. But then the dream changed, started happening in real time: I enter the dream as my adult self. I see the girl; I see her parents; I see all of the people. And I run to her. She looks up at me, and her face is pale, and I say, “C’mon, you’re going with me. I’m getting you the hell out of here.” And I wrestle her away from them. Then I hold a sign up to everyone in the room:
WE’RE OKAY.
And I carry her into the sunlight, and we start walking down the sidewalk together, holding hands, free.

When I told Norm, my eyes teared up. “I just carried her right out.”

“That’s amazing,” said Norm. “It’s exactly how you have to approach yourself when you panic, by separating the child from the adult. Then you can have compassion for little Rita, and you can help her feel safe.”

On my way home, I stopped at Walden Pond. I’d been passing it for weeks before and after my sessions with Norm, and each time I had the urge to walk down to it. Everything was thawing: the ice in the pond had been melting, breaking apart into small white islands. I was aware of how fast life is—how one minute we’re children with all our strange dreams, and the next minute we’re reaching back, like a person pulled out to sea by a tide. You never expect all that distance. You never expect to get so far so fast.

I’d learned a lot in the past months—about panic and about
myself
—but I’d also lost a lot. I’d lost the summer, fall, and winter. I’d lost months of work. I’d lost my confidence. But every day was a chance to reclaim my footing in the world. Thoreau writes,
There is no ill which
may not be dissipated like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.
I could either be someone who kept driving past Walden Pond, or I could be someone who actually stopped and walked down the big hill to the water.

When I got there, the pond’s melting ice was making a gentle hissing sound. I dipped my hands into the water, a cold bite, then started to walk. Snow and ice still lined large portions of the path, so I had to be careful not to slip, and as I ventured farther in, I felt a moment of unease over being alone. Only weeks earlier I had been anxious about walking to the edge of the azalea bushes in our yard; now I was going to walk almost two miles, on ice, in the middle of the woods, by myself. But I could hear the words of Emerson, as if he were right there speaking them to me:
Trust thyself: Every heart vibrates to that iron string.
So I walked, and the lake whispered, and my feet crunched through the snow, and everything around me seemed perfectly impermanent, and I realized how all we ever get—the only guarantee we really have—is this moment. So I surrendered to it. I kept walking.

When I arrived home that afternoon, I began cleaning. I put new sheets on the bed and fluffed the pillows mightily, then misted them with rose water. I scrubbed the floors and polished every faucet. I swept the front steps and the walk. I threw away old magazines and placed a cobalt bowl filled with lemons on the kitchen counter. I burned sage, winding the smoke through each room in the house. Then I walked into my office with purpose and stopped at my desk. There, beside a notebook with a lotus flower on the cover, lay my panic button, its chain streaming out beside it like a wavy flag. I scooped it up and took it back to the drawer where I found it. “Thank you,” I said.