I am currently in therapy twice a week. My therapist is using a psychological modality called EMDR to help treat me. How EMDR works is, I put on headphones that play an alternating beeping sound in each ear. The beeping sound is slow, rhythmical and reminds me of a game of relaxed Sunday tennis. Once I have closed my eyes, taken several deep breaths and become comfortable- she then tells me to go to my safe place. My safe place is a creation of my imagination- a place on earth that does not yet exist. It is a very modern room with warm hardwood floors, a comfortable couch, walls lined with books and tall windows that look out onto redwood trees and a fog covered Northern Californian coast line. There is a beloved large Rottweiler (my protector) resting at my feet and I am sitting on the couch with my legs crossed looking out at the sea.

Once I am able to fully visualize myself in my safe place my therapist asks me to feel my body. The feelings of openness, peace, satisfaction, safety and relaxation that I feel are unusual for my normally tense and constricted “real” body. I enjoy this feeling of freedom and drink it down like I would a bottle of red wine. Once I am comfortable in this space my therapist then asks me to focus on feelings of impending doom. “Go back through the television channels of your childhood and find a particular time when you felt doom,” she says. This is not difficult for me, and immediately I am met by memories that I would rather not have. I try to disconnect and my therapist notices my discomfort. She asks me what is going on, “I am afraid that I am going to suffocate and die,” I say and she reassures me that I am safe.

For as long as I can remember I have been suffering through the outrageous slings and arrows of chronic anxiety (which, is defined as a painful or apprehensive uneasiness of mind usually over an impending or anticipated ill). As a grown man, I have not yet been able to outgrow the box that anxiety keeps me stuck in. Instead, my anxiety has mutated and taken on new and disconcerting forms. As resistant as I once was to doing any form of therapy, about six months ago I was not leaving my house, my throat was closing up every time I went in public and my heart was moving in strange ways inside my chest. My wife insisted that I get help from someone other than the wine bottle. So did a lot of other concerned individuals. One thing I have learned in life is that if more than two people are telling me the same thing, repeatedly, maybe I should humble myself and listen. So now, I find myself in a womb like purple chair twice a week listening to alternating beeping sounds through a headphone and reliving a past that I thought was buried far beneath the ground.

Years ago when I read Marcel Proust’s À La Recherché Du Temps Perdu (“The Remembrance Of Things Past”) I was struck by how our past experiences can manifest in the present moment through the simple act of tasting, touching, hearing, smelling and seeing. A simple smell can reunite us with an individual that has been dead for over twenty years. A slight sound can bring us back to a place we have not seen in over a decade. A little taste of a cookie can remind us of a childhood experience we thought was long ago digested away. As hard as I have tried to repress my past- it seems to still endure in me with every sight, sound, taste, smell and touch I have. My past is embedded in my present, embedded in the very cells of my living body like a piece of glue that has dried on my skin. Through the hours spent in my therapist’s office, I am slowly learning that my past may have more to do with who I am today than I could have ever imagined.

I have a fear of enclosed spaces. I also have a fear of suffocating and loosing control, especially in public. I have a fear of open spaces, where there is no immediate help in sight. When I was around eight through twelve I always had to have a bottle filled with water when I drove in a car. I was afraid that my throat would close up and I would not be able to breath. This happened to me a few times and drinking water always seemed to bring relief. Now at the age of thirty-eight I have a hard time driving in a car without a flask filled with red wine or hard booze. I get a lot of anxiety out on the open road, my head fills up with a dreadful medley of chattering thoughts and images and the booze is the only thing that makes all the discomfort slither away.

I have fled from commercial airplanes, just as they were about to shut the door. I have pulled my car over on freeways and run for my life, gasping for air. I have vomited when locked in small rooms. I have panicked on bridges and on bicycle rides in the country. At the age of eleven I sat in a doctor’s office suffering from a fear that my lungs would collapse and I could stop breathing. I have even lost control in my father’s small airplane (my throat had closed up again and I did not have a bottle of water) as it was getting ready to land, nearly causing my father to crash the plane with my sister and mother in it. All of this happened to me before the age of seventeen, before I could understand what the hell was going on. And now as a 38-year-old man who has been diagnosed with panic disorder, depression and minor agoraphobia- I am having to live all of this all over again.

I enjoy listening to the beeping sounds. I find them to be calming (even though at times the rhythmic beeping makes me think about what it must be like to lye in a hospital bed listening to the heart rate monitoring machine). I listen to my therapists soothing voice and fall away into each alternating beep, returning to a world that I thought was long gone. I do not lose myself in tears or have a terribly unpleasant emotional response (which, my therapists tells me normally happens) but I have at times felt like I was going to vomit, my heart rate does speed up occasionally and I do feel short of breath when recalling past traumas. I often interrupt the session, open my eyes and say, “why do we have to do this? It’s just to painful to go back to these places,” but my therapist insists that it is very important if I am going to heal the pain and anxiety I still struggle with everyday.

When I recall my past life and all my struggles with fear and anxiety, I sometimes think that Woody Allen could not write a better script. A part of me laughs and says how ridiculous and comedic it all is. “What a joke!” I think. Here is this child and young adult living an upper class country club existence in what appears to be, on the outside, the ideal American dream. On the inside however, I am crippled with fear, terrified of my big house, my dad’s Mercedes and the mandatory weekend flights in his airplane. But then there is this other part of me- the part of me that lives in my safe place and feels comfortable, satisfied and at peace all the time. This part of me says, “there is nothing funny or ridiculous about what you have had to endure. In fact, it is really sad and fucked up and has taken a heavy toll upon your health and quality of life. You need to really understand what is going on here so you can open your heart and hopefully regain control, power and a sense of wellbeing. Then one day, if you really do all the hard work to heal your mind, heart and soul- you can become me.”

When my fifty-minute session is up, my therapist takes the headphones off my head and tells me to just relax and breathe. The beeping stops, my safe place goes away, the beloved Rottweiler fades away, my childhood memories recede and I return to the normalcy of my therapist’s office. I try not to notice a few tears swelling up in the corner of my tired eyes. I cannot cry in front of another. My therapist sits back down in her chair, which is directly across from mine. She takes a few deep breaths with me. I can see a teary redness in her eyes that suggests to me that she also wants to cry. She just stares in my eyes with what feels like unconditional love and then says to me “I am so sorry that you have to re-live all of this. I am so sorry for you and what you have had to suffer through. But we are going to get to the bottom of this and somehow set you free so that you no longer feel like you are suffocating and have to make the great escape.” There is a moment of silence. I look out the window and then down at my feet. It is then that I feel a rebellious tear trickling its way down my cheek.