I worked with a woman who grew up with a very overprotective mother. She recalled that her mother was afraid to let her ride her bicycle without supervision, even after she had learned good safety habits, and even though it was the norm in her neighborhood for kids her age to ride without supervision. (Just to put it in context, this woman grew up in the 1940s and ’50s, when this was the general rule). Her mother developed this solution. She kept a ring of talcum powder around the bicycle in the basement, so that her daughter couldn’t move the bicycle without leaving a telltale mark in the powder. She would be punished if she moved the bicycle, and in this manner her mother tried to protect her from an accident.
My client was a very determined person, even as a young girl, and was not to be deterred. She became strong enough that she could lift the bicycle straight up into the air and carry it away without smudging the powder. Her mother never discovered her secret, and she was able to ride her bicycle to her heart’s content. But though her body had developed to the point where she could lift the bicycle, and then ride it for hours, her mind hadn’t developed to the point where she could truly feel okay about what she was doing. Because she was put into a situation where she had to break the rules in order to ride a bicycle like the other kids, she developed a strong sense of guilt, an underlying idea that she was doing something wrong, and that she would be punished for it eventually. As she reached late adolescence, this developed into panic attacks that would occur whenever she ventured “too far” from home.
My client believed that this was her “root cause,” and I pretty much agreed with her. She probably inherited a genetic predisposition to caution and worry from her mother’s side of the family, and her experience with the bicycle seemed central to the activation of this predisposition. I think this was as clear an example of finding a “smoking gun” cause as one can generally expect.
But knowing this didn’t stop her panic attacks. She knew why she had the first one, but that didn’t bring the recurrent attacks to a halt. She didn’t have the recurrent attacks because of her background and bicycle experience. She had the recurrent attacks because she kept getting tricked into trying to protect herself from them.
When she was able to undo that, she had a good recovery. To help you to save yourself from a panic, buy lexapro.