About Panic Attacks in the Car and How to Transform Shame

A few weeks ago the word rape passed my lips - and with it, somehow a big part of the shame and disgust I had felt for years could finally leave me.

When the first memories of being sexually abused as a 12 year old came back last summer I would have never ever thought what came up for me this summer.
I never thought of it as such a long process. Looking back at it now, I can see how my system just carefully gave me the memories back in little pieces.

I remember how last summer I thought to myself - wow now I’m working through this, I process this and I will come out of this so much stronger! Hopefully I will feel whole again, hopefully I can finally transform this feeling of disgust that has been with me and internalized for so many years now. And I pictured myself one summer later as a more calm woman. As more healed. With less panic. And finally able to drive my car alone again, without panic.
I imagined a slower summer, one full of joy. And even though a lot of these imaginations didn’t come true, one has - I’m feeling more whole even though I find myself still sitting in the middle of the pain sometimes. But somehow there is so much light within it. Or to say it with Maya Angelous words - there are so many rainbows in my clouds.
But let’s start earlier:
When the first memories came back, I thought to myself - this is crazy challenging but also it finally allows me to move through this - to get to the root of all my panic attacks, that had reached a point that simply felt insane. I remember one day where I had to stop my car in the middle of the road and started to walk home.
I didn’t even bother where the car was parked, all I knew was that I needed to get OUT. And away from the car. As soon as I felt my feet on the ground and started walking, stared into the sky and the trees around me and could notice my breath again, really breath again, it slowly got better. A bus passed me and stopped and the driver asked if I wanted to get in - I said no but the bus driver insisted in a polite way and somehow again, there was a rainbow in my cloud, there was help. There was kindness.
Once I had to start thinking about how to get my car back, I felt so ashamed though.
The shame part then started to take over and I pushed myself for the rest of the year to drive as much as possible - to “practice” - so I could finally feel normal again.
But obviously (at least obviously for me one year later now) it just got worse - and I can say with great confidence that enforcement and healing are definitely not something that work well with each other. Which was a lesson I needed to learn I guess. Patience, tenderness and kindness on the other hand are the best companions in any healing process. Something that feels so challenging though to cultivate when a big part of you feels shame.
But that was my journey this year so far - to encounter my shame with patience, tenderness and kindness whenever possible - and also with a lot of curiosity.
And that allowed me to slowly notice more. To slowly be more present with my tense body. To slowly notice what my body wanted to tell me in the car the whole time. So I could finally realize it was never about stopping the car, it was always about getting out.

I’m writing this, after the most intense July I could have ever imagined.
Today I accidentally cut my knee on a rusty nail in the garden and went into a full blown panic attack, the cut mimicking a physical violation and taking me far away from the present moment. Just feeling a much deeper wound. Feeling an insane amount of pain in my body that had nothing to do with the cut itself. Flashbacks immediately starting to come, a nervous system that completely shut down.
And yet something shifted. The panic might be still there as a reaction, like last summer, when I cut my finger and had a panic attack in a hospital.
But now I have clear language for what happens in my body. And language means power. I have words. And I’m not silent any longer. And I’m just one of many who expierenced the exact same thing. It makes me not unworthy or disgusting - the word rape makes the perpetrator all of that! It’s an act another person did and not something that describes me or my worth in any way. It doesn’t make me less whole and most importantly it does not define me.
It does not victimize me, but it makes me a survivor. And I’m proud, lucky and grateful about that. Because it has had an absurd and devastating effect on my life to this day. And I think every rape survivor understands that! And yet the amount of blessings and rainbows in my clouds have been equally strong!
I feel so much support in my healing journey - opening up to the people, friends and chosen family around me was the most scary and most healing thing. I remember speaking with my godmother two days after the word rape crossed my lips for the first time in front of my therapist. I was feeling so ashamed and blended with a part of mine that certainly felt and thought my godmother could love me less when she finds out. That she could finally get a proof that I was not whole, that I am disgusting.
But speaking for that, sharing exactly these feelings and parts so openly with her was the most healing experience ever!

I will never forget the amount of panic that moved through my body when the sensations came back. When my body started to trust me enough to stop numbing me. And how bringing that up in a therapy session was the most challenging, overwhelming and yet most transforming experience ever - the fear and panic to work through that, to really be with what had happened was so huge that my whole body was covered with marks and bruises of my fingernails that took weeks to heal afterwards. I remember saying to my therapist in the midst of the panic that I have no idea how I can ever be with this.
And yet we were. We stayed with it. And to simply let that wave move through me with another human that holds the pain with you in love and compassion was the first step into acceptance, into healing and ANGER! I had glimpses of anger before but I was not prepared to feel so much anger in my whole body. A feeling that felt familiar and that I felt after I started eating again with 19 years old after being anorectic for years after the rape. I just had no idea why there was so much anger back then. I had no words for it. And continued to numb my body in other ways once I started to feel it.
It’s simply insane to me, that rape survivors punish their own bodies for something that someone did that would deserve the actual punishment.
The reason why I’m sharing all of that is connectedness and acceptance. When I understood that I had been raped as a 12 year old, when the first memories came back, I was far from sharing that with anyone - it felt like something you could never ever share. And before putting it into words, my system allowed my body to share it in a therapy session first. I went to a trip to Sweden after that session, the first time in a long while traveling alone without being completely overwhelmed by fear and with me in my luggage I had “ Being Peace” by Thich Nhat Hanh.

It felt to me this would be the exact book that would feel healing and soothing now. Never ever did I expected to encounter the word rape in there.
I was at the sea, in between soft grass and rocks, my friend I was visiting a little further away, playing with her dog. And there it was - the word for what my memories showed me. In a book about peace. He wrote it because this is what happened to a 12 year old girl. She didn’t had any help, any rainbows in her clouds. The 12 year old girl drowned herself in the ocean. I felt waves of compassion in my heart and waves of gratitude about my rainbows. For my possibility to heal. To experinece life with a body again that is able to be without tension. That is my hope. My goal. And I have a deep knowing that this is possible. And that’s why I share this here - because it was so healing for me to encounter the word - to get my power back and not hide it. To say it out loud and with that let go of the shame and disgust that never belonged to me.
Because no one should feel the shame and the need to stay silent when such a horrible thing has happened to you - who ever reads this and feels the same - you are not alone! You are beautiful, worthy and whole and deserve all the love in the world, especially your own. What still shocks me incredibly is the amount of women (and of course also men!) this has happened to and is happening to every day and there are still so many questions inside of me - one of the biggest: how can you rape anyone? How can you rape a child? I have no answer to these questions but more and more I come to the conclusion that when we can encounter our own suffering and don’t hide from it, we are also more open to the suffering of others. But this is a whole other topic.
I guess what I just want to say for now and with this text is that no one should ever hide out of shame and that you are not alone. And that healing is possible.
What helped me a lot and continues to be a powerful companion during panic attacks is poetry, especially Mary Oliver’s wonderful poems. A woman that has also worked through her sexual abuse childhood trauma and to say it with her words '“got saved by the beauty of this world”. So I want to end this text with one of my current favorite Mary Oliver poems, because it’s full of hope and power and about noticing all the little and mysterious wonders of being alive:

Starlings in Winter
by Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,

but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.