On Dying and Death

Why not deal with death in this blog? I have but I will add a bit. I have seen patients who have an inordinate fear of death; not the normal kind but the kind that says, "I am going to die right now!". That's what happens in anxiety attacks; that feeling of gloom and doom. Why? Because it was true but not true now. You were going to die before the defenses stepped in and blocked the feeling. It was imprinted and is now a permanent memory. That is what an anxiety attack is: I will die now! If you have leaky gates that feeling is close up to the top awareness all of the time, which accounts for frequent anxiety attacks and that sensation of immediate death. It was immediate and is now in our imprinted feeling mass, I call it our apperceptive mass.

What can we do about it? Feel it and put it back in the past in context so it's no longer immediate and constantly scary. We need to feel why we were about to die; most likely lack of oxygen at birth, a drinking or drug-taking carrying mother or a mother terrorized all along her pregnancy, either from internal reasons or fear of her husband and his violence. No matter the source it is now installed permanently in the offspring, and the minute her defenses are weak, death approaches; that is, history surges forth, real memory, not some ephemeral wisp of the past. If there were no immediate threat of death originally, there will be none now. But life in the womb and at birth are often the most perilous of our lives, and it is then and there that pure terror resides. Terror is a memory that lives inside of anxiety and propels it. We call it anxiety but it still that terror of dying. We feel it like it is now because in the memory it is now, not later. It is the memory that is coming up intact.

If you want some advice from someone who had it, don't think about because it is inevitable and think about life if you can. If your history forces you to focus on the past terror then you have to get rid of it, reliving that past fully. It is the best I can offer.