Anxiety & Panic Attack Causes – Triggered By a Repressed Memory
Sometimes, something triggers long-term repression of these feelings. Kara, a dancer, was surprised to discover that when her father, whom she had adored, died, she felt not grief but hate for him.
A few months following his death, Kara was hired to dance in her first Broadway show, her dream. Rather than experiencing joy, she felt increasingly edgy and anxious. What if she couldn’t dance up to their standards? What if they fired her? Suddenly, a memory hit her. When she was eight, she was given the star role of the princess in her dance school performance. Her father received the news with indifference. In fact, he undermined her confidence, saying, “Are you sure you dance well enough to be the star?”
Being offered a role in a Broadway chorus jiggled her memories of all the times her father failed to support her talents and desires, how he had greeted her accomplishments with apathy and doubt of her abilities.
Filled with rage, she collapsed in sobs on the floor, ripping to shreds a photo of her father and shouting how he never appreciated her. Afterwards, she felt drained but relieved and her anxiety abated.
Freud himself saw the limitations of traditional psychotherapy when treating agoraphobia and other phobias, stating that “one can hardly master a phobia if one waits till the patient lets the analyst influence him to give it up.”
Freudian Doubts
In spite of the relief of gaining insight into your behavior, thereby forgiving yourself all your imaginable crimes, psychodynamic treatment has shortcomings in treating anxiety disorders:
- Gaining insight into your behavior does not alone guarantee freedom from phobias or anxiety.
- Psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy is a long, complex mode of treatment.
- Emphasizing thoughts or feelings prior to a panic attack, psychodynamic therapists often ignore the physical causes of panic attacks and phobias. This not only perpetuates the mind-body split, but limits the efficacy of treatment.
- Psychodynamic therapy has a poor success rate for eliminating panic attacks and phobias.
Nevertheless, once anxiety is brought under control with employing other forms of therapy, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, research has found psychodynamic therapy useful for those who want a greater understanding of what fuels anxiety and allows it to thrive.
A small percentage, generally those highly verbal, introspective, educated, and with financial means to do so, will seek out long-term psychoanalysis. The intense relationship developed with the analyst allows for much re-parenting, that is, the person comes to feel more nurtured, valued, understood, and accepted. Many report profound behavioral transformations and deepened self-identity and self-worth.
Today, many psychodynamic therapists are eclectic and use a variety of interventions, some beginning with cognitive-behavioral treatments and then switching over to in-depth psychodynamic therapy when the patient’s symptoms abate.
Humanistic therapy is a type of psychological treatment that emphasizes people’s inherent potential for self-fulfillment and helps them grow in self-awareness and self-acceptance. It utilizes the technique, developed largely by Carl Rogers, of active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment that facilitates the client’s growth.
Humanistic Therapy
Like the Freudians, the humanistic therapists assume that anxiety arises from intrapsychic conflicts. Unlike the Freudians, however, the battle is not between the conscious and the unconscious mind, but between our ideal self, who we would like to be, and our actual self, who we view ourselves as being. Their emphasis is on the here and now, rather than past causes, and they encourage the client to take responsibility for their behavior.
Treatment consists of empathetically listening to and accepting the person unconditionally, without judgment. This is based on the premise that feeling validated and accepted for who they are helps the person narrow the gap between their actual and ideal self.
As with psychoanalytic treatment, humanistic therapy also ignores physiological symptoms, which are a major component of panic attacks and require intervention beyond just talking about them—relaxation exercises, for instance, as well as constructive self-talk for keeping the panic attacks in perspective.
Thus, though warmly embraced by many people seeking psychic healing, who often feel better understood than in other therapies, it has been largely ineffective in controlling panic attacks.
Modern day psychoanalysis, as pioneered by the theories of people such as Heinz Kohut, combines much of humanistic therapy—it emphasizes empathic responding and a focus on development of the self more than on intrapsychic conflict.
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