Page 143 - Advance Copy: Todd Kaufman, Author

HOW TO MANAGE ANXIETY & END PANIC ATTACKS
some kind of brainwashing you are suggesting?!
In a word, no.
Remember: You are not your brain; you are a combination of your brain and some sort of energy (call it your soul, spirit or universal energy) and when these two are integrated, you call it your mind. Your brain is just another organ in your body (a really important one, but nonetheless, an organ).
Current research tells us that your brain processes events in your sleep, in particular during REM or Rapid Eye Movement sleep. That process is not always perfect, but when it is, you gather up all the bits and pieces of your day in your brain and store them like a book, with a beginning, middle and an end, in your hippocampus. Then, if you reflect on a memory, even the horrible ones, your mind knows there is an “end” to that part of the story, enabling you to relax.
If this process is not done well, or completely, you can trip over components of these stories as they get left unfiled in your brain. This can trigger an unhelpful response such as panic. Your amygdala can kick into overdrive to help protect you from a piece of a story that it recognizes as scary since it was left lying about and is not filed neatly in its proper place.
Working with a good therapist, you can unpack your most informative stories, collect up all those bits and pieces and file them neatly away. In doing so, you rewrite your stories in your brain’s filing system, removing the trigger for the default response panic from your brain. So your stories remain, and your memories remain; they are just sorted and filed in a way that they can inform you, not harm you.
One final thing to mention: Our old habits and beliefs can die hard! That is to say, even after mastering a new skill or a new way doing or being something, there is always some residual wiring that, if not addressed, you could inadvertently revert to using.
The clients I know who seemingly master this ARP technique, but who don’t put in place a way to continually
119