Those who suffer from panic attacks often feel their body is turning on them.
As their heart beats out of their chest, as they get tunnel vision, there is a strange sense that their own body is outside of their control.
Or is, as some put it, turning on them. Or seems not to belong to them at all.
This has been called a loss of bodily ownership. Whatever term we want to use, the fact of the experience is central to how a panic attack develops. When a rising heart rate is first noticed, the person may sense vaguely that something is terribly wrong—but they don’t know what it is. Adrenaline—the fear hormone—is secreted in response. This, ironically, increases the heart rate even further, causing the heart to pound harder than before. Then, a critical step: these worsening signs are taken as confirmation of the person’s worst fears—that something is indeed very wrong. This interpretation, or this confirmation, then causes more adrenaline to be released, and so on.
It’s kind of like a squirrel, with its tail wrapped around a small tree. The squirrel looks around the tree and sees the tip of his own tail, and suspects it’s the tail of a rival squirrel. This causes fear, and so naturally, the tail (his tail) starts to quiver. The squirrel sees this and misinterprets it as confirmation that the other squirrel is indeed ready to move on him.
With a self-confirming feedback loop like this, it is easy to see how panic attacks spin out of control. A snowball turns into an avalanche.
In panic attacks, the sufferer never suspects that they themselves are the cause of the thing they take as confirmation of their fears. The question “Might I have anything to be afraid of?” cannot be answered by observing the heart—quickened as it is, by the very question.
Again, a lack of bodily ownership is the underlying problem. “My heart is turning on me.”
Is it someone else’s, then? The idea that your body does not belong to you is foreign to today’s thinkers—over-civilized as we are and saturated by ideas of consent, bodily “rights,” and American individualism.
But the opposite perspective is not all that strange.
- Small children do not have a strong sense of body ownership, and that may be precisely why they learn so fast through imitation. Mirror neurons function like this. While watching a parent’s lips forming a sound, a baby can immediately reproduce the sound with their own lips.
- Many sexually active adults, and poets, have reported feeling as if sex’s merging of two bodies blurs the boundary between “mine” and “yours.”
- After some rare strokes, there are people who believe one’s own right or left arm or leg belongs to someone else. This is called somatoparaphrenia.
- In hypnotic states, many people also lose a sense that the body is under their own control.
- Siamese or conjoined twins literally do share one body.
With these human experiences being real, is it all that surprising that panic disorder could be added to this list? I propose that it should.
This concept may also be a key to healing from panic attacks.
Panic looks a lot like separation anxiety in a child, and so we can hypothesize that a core issue with panic disorder is separation—and abandonment. Let us further suppose that there is a strange comfort, perhaps, in your body not belonging to you. Perhaps it belongs to someone else? Let’s suppose you are afraid of losing that person. Well, if one of your body parts belongs to them, how can they ever truly be away from you?
Yes, this may sound quite irrational. However, it isn’t too different from the experiences listed above.
A strange sense that your body does not belong to you may exist as a refuge from a fear of being abandoned. Add to this the fact that panic attacks often occur after a person hears news of the death of an acquaintance or family member.
I had a male patient once whose father had just died. He was looking at the hairs on his arm, and the smell and look of his arm, and he suddenly had the overwhelming impression that the arm was his father’s arm.
You can immediately see that grief, and a wish to have a father around, could cause someone to lose a sense of bodily ownership.
Acknowledging these underlying thought processes—and reasserting ownership of the body—are, I believe, very helpful to those with panic, and ought to be incorporated into the ordinary treatment of the condition.