My Anxiety Rescue
By Kathryn Tristan

Fear is an unseen enemy that can emotionally cripple and turn your life into a nightmare unless you learn, as I did, how to stage your own “anxiety rescue.” That’s what I called my journey out of fear and the title of a book I wrote about it.

I suffered from anxiety, panic, and fear for most of my adult life. It started in college when during marathon studying, I suffered a panic attack. I had been smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and stressing over final exams. I felt incredibly afraid and my heart burned. I thought I was losing my mind. I darted downstairs to join my family and sat with them. I told my mother I didn’t feel well. I sat on the couch holding an empty bottle. I thought, if I start running around and going crazy, I’d hit myself over the head to knock myself out. Somehow that was a comforting thought because it meant I might be able to stop these awful feelings. Eventually, the scary attack subsided and left me drained, frightened, and feeling bewildered. Even more concerning, I wondered if it would happen again.

I spent the next 20 years trying to avoid another panic attack. Unfortunately, avoiding fear also meant reinforcing fear. I eventually became too afraid to leave my home city for more than 20 years, trembled when having to cross a bridge, and began to avoid more and more things.

I tried to get help. A physician gave me sedatives, but I was too afraid to take pills because maybe they would make me feel odd, which would be upsetting, too. Eventually I found a wonderful cognitive-behavior therapist. She helped me understand how to restructure my perceptions, label my discomfort, and take steps to challenge my fears. But I was a time- and financially strapped single parent, so I had to quit therapy.

I gave up for awhile and just lived the best life I could, but I also avoided things that might trigger those upsetting feelings.

As my kids grew up, and I had time to work on myself, I began to understand how my own thinking was working against me. I also learned to better hear my inner chatterbox that was incessant and negative; it fed me dialogues filled with fear. “This might be frightening, don’t do it…that could be a problem, tense up!”

I finally realized that to heal, I needed to disengage those automatic thinking and reacting gears. Becoming more aware, I identified two “characters” who directed most of my life. I called them EARL and PEARL.

EARL is “Easy Angered, Rigid and Limiting.” EARL isn’t evil; it remembers anything that ever hurt or scared me and doesn’t want that to happen again. EARL is my voice of “protection,” like my own personal police force whose motto is to “serve and protect.” EARL blares loudly. I mostly heeded those thoughts and automatic reactions.

But I also identified a quieter more peaceful energy that I called PEARL, which stands for “Peaceful, Earnest, Adventurous, Resilient, and Loving.” PEARL is the quiet feeling I have when I see a newborn baby or a beautiful sunset, or when I look into the eyes of someone I love. PEARL whispers while EARL shouts. I found that both voices were valid and necessary aspects of my life. Yet when I only paid attention to the voice of fear, my world began to shrink.

Learning to hear EARL, while choosing reactions other than anxiety and fear was my largest step forward. It let me know that all is well and that I’ll be able to handle whatever comes along. As I began to challenge my fears and do the things I felt I could not, I overcame my crippling fears.

I have just returned from the Bahamas, where I flew by myself to visit my sister. A few years ago, I couldn’t even get 45 minutes beyond St. Louis. Now I can go anywhere and know that I will be safe and that I can handle whatever comes along. My fears taught me that you can do the things you thought you could not do, and you begin by doing them one small step at a time!

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