Ask a Facilitator: Can The Work Help with Agoraphobia and Panic Attacks?

Q: How do people with panic attacks and agoraphobia work with the four questions? In your experience facilitating people, does The Work help cut through them? Or have you heard of something more useful or to be used in conjunction? I have experienced EFT, CBT, Sedona Method, etc.

A: Byron Katie was agoraphobic before she began to question her beliefs. I was too, to a much lesser degree, but my "thing" was panic attacks. I had them on and off for years. They were provoked by nightmares, and also by loud noises. (Or, as it happens, my thoughts about nightmares and loud noises.)

My most direct experience with this is with myself: I had my last one in the middle of the night during the School for The Work in October of 2002; it lasted about two seconds before the inquiry took over. There was a loud noise in my hotel room, which turned out to be the air conditioning kicking in. I was fairly fresh from the experience of months of planes circling my post-9/11 New York City neighborhood, and the noise sounded like one of the planes to me. The sound woke me up; I made the association to planes, and then to terror attacks, and suddenly my heart was racing and I couldn't breathe. Almost instantly, the inquiry became alive in me; I realized I was believing my thoughts ("It's happening again." "I'm in danger.")—thoughts I had previously questioned many times. The symptoms stopped immediately.

I'm sure CBT, EFT, and other cognitive techniques help people with panic disorders, as does medication for many people; a therapist could better answer that question. I can tell you this: working with the fearful thoughts that lead to the symptoms of panic attack and being unable to leave the house can't hurt, and might enhance the effectiveness of whatever course of treatment is indicated.

The time to do The Work is when you are not panicking; otherwise it's not a search for truth, but an attempt to feel better, and therefore not as effective. You could start with core beliefs like, "The world isn't safe," "I will die," and "I need to protect myself." Use the One-Belief-at-a-Time worksheet, available at TheWork.com. It's a self-directed self-facilitation tool which is done as a written meditation.


©2008 by Carol L. Skolnick; all rights reserved.

A Question for You on 9-11

It's that day again...a day that has become a "holiday" of sorts. Yet we would never send anyone a greeting card that says, "Happy 9-11" any more than we would send one that says "Happy Cancer," "Happy Divorce," or "Happy Child's Suicide."

Why not? If, as I keep saying, reality is kind, why wouldn't I just celebrate? Because to say, as Byron Katie does, that the worst that could happen is the best that could happen, is not my 24/7 experience. I still have to question what I believe.

When I do that, I can see that nothing that I have experienced has been entirely terrible. Others recount similar experiences; they're not all "Workies" either. They're living their lives, and reporting what's true for them.

My friend Kathy tells me that, when recently asked what she'd been up to lately, she answered, "I had breast cancer; it was great!" Probably shocked the unsuspecting questioner to the moon and back. Who wants cancer? Maybe someone whose perfect path to enlightenment means double mastectomy, and the way it moved her to re-examine a life's worth of resentments. Cancer got her out of hell, gave her back a beautiful life.

I experience—in ways I cannot convey without sounding like a spiritual space-case—that my father's death from cancer could have been as good a thing for him, for me, for my mother, and for the planet, as it was a bad thing. That could sound very cold, uncaring, and selfish to someone who has never gotten this radical with the workings of hte mind.

What I can tell you is that this kind of thing is my personal work, that it has been healthy and healing for me, and it makes me a lot more pleasant to be around than when I believed I was especially unlucky, unloved, and damned to hell. If you get to a point where you can't deal with the mental pain anymore, I invite you to your personal work over your losses, traumas, and tragedies, if it serves.

Many of you have survived, and thrived, after a child's death, or the loss of home and livelihood, or incest, rape, torture, ritual abuse, war, devastating diagnoses, disfiguring and painful accidents. People go on to create amazing good in the world after such things; Anne Frank comes to mind, Nelson Mandela, Christopher Reeve, those women who forgive, visit, and befriend their children's murderers in prison, so many others. How can they do this when some of us can't get out of bed when the computer crashes or the marriage ends?

I have a friend in his 40s who can rarely get out of bed because of an increasingly painful, crippling physical disorder that may soon kill him. He has also, over the course of 20 years, lost his family, his income, the love of his life, nearly everything. He has dreams, happy ones, not nightmares. He remains creative, and as active as he can be when not hooked up to machines. He falls in love. He can always make me laugh. The guy doesn't even need inquiry, he just gets it in a way that I don't yet.

So I ask you, Soul Surgery readers—and in doing so, I do not mean to diminish, in any way, any suffering experienced by anyone, including myself, directly or not, due to the events of this day six years ago—if the universe is friendly, how could such a thing happen?

Can you find three genuine ways that this event—or insert your own worst nightmare here—has been for your highest good?

It's just a question. What are you afraid of losing, or not receiving, if you answer it honestly? (An honest answer could also be, "I can't find a single way that this has been for my highest good, or anyone's.")

P.S. Yes, I'm doing this along with you. Re-connecting with the kindness of reality is the only way for me to stay in the peace movement that has been vital to my existence these past six-and-a-half years...and to understand that unless I say otherwise, no one has died in vain.


©2007 by Carol L. Skolnick; all rights reserved.