Where Do Anxiety and Panic Attacks Come From?

For years I have been discussing limbic fear versus brainstem terror; that is, as we go deeper in the brain the responses become  more exaggerated; mild hopelessness becomes suicidal hopelessness, fear becomes terror, anger becomes rage, and on.  The responses become more primitive as they emanate from a brain that is more primitive; older  and pre-human.  Those deep responses go way back in time to when they were the reigning animal reactions extant.  That brain is still alive inside of us and it provides all of the responses that existed millions of years ago.  In some respects we are still that alligator or shark with no pity or remorse, just instinct.  Those primitive animals are pre-emotion before caring and concern existed;  they do allow us to murder.  They also permit panic attacks.  And where do those attacks come from?  Ah.....They seem to come from a brain where panic is life-saving.  Where rapid and ferocious responses meant survival.    And where someone overwhelmed by his brainstem can  react exactly like the alligator does....and kill. He is acting out of his brainstem.

The panic victim feels threatened but  he doesn't know what he is afraid of.  Or, believe it or not, that he is  even afraid; it sometimes doesn't feel like fear; it is some unknown feeling that seems so alien.  I know what he is afraid  of..... Whatever  lies  in his brainstem.  Oh my, what  might that be?  That is the rub as  my friend old Willie (Shakespeare) noted.  When I was in graduate school I learned about antecedent-consequent reactions.  All it meant was that if there is a response something caused it.  Well in rage and terror something causes it; and it is not ordinary reactions; they are primitive in the full meaning of the term.  So far we have not known what that meant.  Stay with  me  now as it starts  to get interesting.

  What is clear in  my writing is that there are three brains in our head, (The Triune Brain), but we have ignored the first one, that I call "first-line."  In the first line  lies all of those primitive reactions; when there is trauma at birth or during gestation, long before we have an an intact emotional brain, our reactions are coded and  stored down on the first  line, the brainstem and the ancient parts of the limbic system.  When we suffer great trauma during those early times the gating system weakens and we have "leaky gates".  The trauma causes us to use up major supplies of repressive chemicals, such  as serotonin, that impairs the proper functioning of the repressive gates.....our defense system.  Not only does trauma use up serotonin; it damages parts of the brain that produce it, as well as dopamine and epinephrine.  This is especially true of smoking mothers, in my experience.

    We are less defended, so when we arrive at age thirty with  a panic attack it is such a mystery.  No longer, we can now understand its provenance.  It comes out of a remote nervous system, so remote  as to be constantly ignored, yet it is responsible for so much of our aberrant behavior.  Who would dream that inside us  lies all those primitive instincts that  can surge forth when our defenses weaken?  And up comes terror from a carrying mother who smoked and  drank  and who was effectively killing or damaging the baby from diminished oxygen.  That and many other configurations conspire to inculcate terror  in the baby that is imprinted  and sealed in  as a (Primal) memory.  When there is a panic attack or rage attack we must look to that brain for understanding and cure.  It is only with that brain that we can find  causes  and answers. And the cure involves reliving, as I have explained at length in my books and blog articles.  If  you all are interested I will go over it again but I think 2 blog articles ago I discussed in How to  Make a Cure.    Now comes the fascinating part:

Some recent research by Justin Feinstein at the University of Iowa City (Nature Neuroscience 2013), did a study with those who had a damaged  amygdala, the hub of the emotional system.  They did not have normal fear responses.  But if oxygen supplies were lowered and carbon dioxide supplies were increased, mimicking  suffocation (increasing acidity of the blood) there were panic attacks.  Where in the world  did those attacks come from?  Certainly not from the usual emotional structures.  They believe it includes the brainstem!  Because the lowering of oxygen supplies and adding carbon dioxide provoked the lower structures to sense the danger and reacted  appropriately.  Very much like what happens to a fetus when the mother smokes during pregnancy and produces those same effects.  What  all this means is what  I have been writing about for decades; fear and terror  are  two different reactions involving different brain structures emanating from structures million of years  apart in evolution.  However the emotional reactions have some similarities which allows resonance; that is, enough fear can travel  down in the brain  and trigger off those primitive panic/terror responses that I call first-line. It is not ordinary fear; it means a life-endangering cause and that come from our time in the womb and at birth.  In the  experimental patients, it meant and means  terror  of dying; that is what it feels like  to the sufferer because that is exactly what it is.  In the memory he is dying and the fear it evokes has a reason; a reason that is knowable. and therefore explains the reaction....and once known can lead to understanding about first-line and  a  cure.  If all this is ignored there will  never be a  cure,  no matter what the technique  use  to treat it.

    It is interesting that suffocation has such a great terror reaction associated with it.  And not so oddly in the panic attack there is often a feeling of suffocation, cannot catch one's breath, the heart beating so fast that it is about to jump out of the chest.  And these breathing problems are again brainstem originated (included the medulla of the brainstem).  It is all an ensemble of reactions originating deep down that later on set the stage for many kinds of pulmonary problems, asthma, shallow breathing and other malfunctions.  One other part of this reaction is that there may be a certain vulnerability for the suffocation feeling during birth; that is, if a mother smoked during pregnancy there is already a groundwork for the suffocation feeling at birth.  It  becomes  compounded, the anesthesia at birth in the mother and the background of a smoking mother.    We must keep in mind that this is all an imprint from the beginning of life that will affect so many parts of us including constant nightmares........again where one cannot catch one's breath; a nightmare of being in a dark room with no air or someone putting a pillow on our head.  It is fine to treat the nightmare, even to drug or medicate it but we cannot medicate an imprint; that remains to go on causing damage.  So nightmares, panic attacks, breathing problems pulmonary dysfunction are all part of an ensemble, a gestalt, if you will that must be considered as one problem, not many many problems.  Yes, there are many, many symptoms each must be treated until.....until we go to the generating source where it is all  treated at once and permanently.  What we must understand is that the physiology memory comes up intact with the whole panoply of feelings.  There is often too much terror to feel it all at once and integrate it.  That is why it needs to be revisited time and again.  So how does the patient know where it comes from?  Often not at first but after many relivings it becomes comprehensible. Clearly it is so remote an experience that it can be experienced but not immediately understood for what it is.  It is the same when reliving a gestational trauma.  We can experience it long before we understand it, and experiencing it is crucial for integration.  Non-verbal experiences can be relived and experienced on their own terms and in their own way; they can be integrated, nevertheless.  Let me explain further:

There are times when a patient can remember when his dog died, being hit by a car.  What  needed to be experienced and expressed was the repressed emotional aspect of the experience.  The pain needs to be unleashed and finally felt. It is the same with preverbal pains.  They need to be unleashed from their biologic constraints and fully experienced.  They then are integrated and become part of us.  That is the essence of a Primal.  We don’t have to know exactly where  it comes from because the fetus did not.  But he experienced it and repressed the pain.  It needs liberating.  It is what we do.

To reiterate:  because it is now established that lowered oxygen levels in the fetus creates panic in him, it should be clear that a carrying mother who smokes is damaging the baby severely.  Can he really feel terror?  I recommend to you the work of K. Anand.  He did an amniocentesis on fetuses and found as the probe invaded fetal space all of his stress hormones rose; he also grimaced and show signs of distress. He felt pain and terror.

    We have successfully  treated panic attacks (they are anxiety attacks, and they are terror attacks) and rage because we address the first line.  It is not a mystery; it just belongs to an ancient brain system that we have ignored for too long.  If we want to help those in danger of acting out in rage  and to help those who suffer panic we must travel to millions of years of phylogenetic history, deep in the brain  to find our answers.