Using simple language, she went on to explain how the parasympathetic nervous system works and how, under extreme stress and fatigue—states of mind that she said could be triggered by emotions, travel, traumatic events and even extreme dieting—we tricked our bodies into displaying symptoms that were really just stock-standard survival responses: just surges of adrenaline running through the body with nowhere to go, because most of the danger was just in our imagination. And no one ever died from a silly little thing like a panic attack, she said. Although I might think that I was suffering from ‘an illness of how you feel’, I was in fact just being duped by my own thoughts, and that ‘thoughts that are keeping you ill can be changed’.
Dr Weekes said this was perfectly normal—when triggered, when nerves were raw, our survival brain mistakenly thought that the best way of helping us to survive was to ruminate again and again on the saddest times of our lives. For whatever reason, this seemed to trigger the hormones that kept us alive and alert. But it was just a little trick of the brain, she said, and we weren’t going to fall for it anymore, were we?
You’re kidding? I thought. I was hooked. I couldn’t read the words fast enough.
She wrote that although such suffering could make us feel frightened, there was really nothing terribly wrong with us—it was only the fear of fear itself which perpetuated the cycle of fear, and therefore the symptoms. Fear of fear itself! Of course! That made sense!
Since this dreadful business first set in after Phil collapsed on the Tube, I felt as though I hadn’t been able to remember a single happy thing. It was as though every joyful, relaxing memory from my childhood had been completely erased and all that was left were the saddest bits, the scariest bits, and all the memories around Rowena, and her illness, and her death. I was at an absolute loss to explain why my brain kept going back there, and I had no idea—night after night, day after day—how to stop it. Here, in Dr Weekes’s words, the explanation became clear. The only reason my mind was thinking this way was because in its exhausted state it had somehow mixed up the hormones of sadness and anxiety with the hormones of survival. This anxiety—and its subsequent cascade of fight-or-flight hormones—was just my brain’s misguided attempt to keep me alert and, therefore, safe.
Even just that—this reminder that it was perfectly natural to be thinking so much about the sadness of Rowena’s illness and death at a time like this—felt like a hopeful place to start.
Dr Weekes’s writing on the page, her clarity, her confidence, made me feel safer than I had felt in months. All of a sudden, there was an expert in the room. An adult. A coach. Someone who knew exactly what I was going through and exactly how to come out the other side. She was not at all patronising; just very clear and confident that she could tell me everything I needed to know in order to recover. She said it would be up to me to do the work but, if I decided to do it, I could, and would, recover.
When I read this I wept with relief.
Yes, of course! I wasn’t nuts, not really, I was just being duped by the symptoms of panic, by adrenaline, by the constant shocks and starts. My reaction to what happened with Phil, and then later at the backpackers, was exaggerated, but also normal. I was not sleeping, I was not eating—my body was doing everything it could to shock me into taking care of myself. It’s not that
I was a bad person, or that I actually wanted to kill myself; I was mainly just a tired person who needed some sleep. She said again and again that, given time and rest, I could and would recover, and the moment I believed her was the very moment my true recovery began.
For the first time since I’d come home, I felt not only happy, I felt excited—so excited that I yelled out, ‘Mum! This book is amazing!’ She ran up the stairs and said, ‘Yeah?’ and I said, ‘I think it’s gonna help me!’ and she made a face like she was trying not to cry and said, in a high voice, that she was going to go and get me some soup now.
That night, instead of staying up worrying about why I couldn’t sleep, I just read and read and read, my heart full of hope for the first time in such a long while. It wasn’t that my panic wasn’t there, it’s just that I wasn’t quite as afraid of it as I had been.
By the morning, I was clear: It was me and my thoughts and my stories that had triggered my breakdown. And it was me and my thoughts and my stories that were going to get me well again.
The solution Dr Weekes offered was simple and achievable.
She wrote that recovery did not come from sitting at home, hoping to get better. She said that it came from getting up and out into the world again, and allowing yourself to practise facing and floating through those feelings of panic and unreality. Not flinching. Not backing down. Not clenching up in dread. Just accepting. Panic may come, but
