When I was eight or nine years old, I would hide under the bed, hearing my parents scream at each other. Dad had come home late and drunk, again, and my mother began berating him about his inadequacies and failures as a husband and father. He responded by repeatedly yelling at her to shut up…or else. His threats only sharpened her tongue, when suddenly I heard a horrific crash and then screams from my mother. I would learn only later that the coffee table had just been thrown across the living room, but at the time I just trembled at the thought of what it could have meant: Will there be blood? I wondered. Is he hitting her? Are they killing each other?

The domestic violence in my parents’ household impacted me for many years and even decades later, when the suppressed anxiety would surface in the form of nasty panic attacks. First, it happened in a meeting of the psychology department faculty, but then it happened in a restaurant, and then again, and again, and again…while I was retreating more and more from life, in an effort to avoid this horrific feeling. It took three years of struggle before I discovered a different way of dealing with my anxiety, and for the last 43 years I’ve worked to find a way to understand this change and to produce it in the lives of others.

For the next decade I occasionally had severe anxiety attacks but except for one brief minute-long breach of trust in myself I never again threw that switch that turns anxiety into panic. I can honestly say “I no longer suffer from panic attacks” provided I could refine what I mean. That is what I’m doing in this post.

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