Anxiety and panic attacks
Anxiety makes you believe that there is something here and now that is dangerous and that you need to run away from it.
This is very effective if you find yourself in a situation where you are in immediate physical danger, but if you are not in immediate physical danger, fear creates a bad experience of physical and emotional stress.
If your anxiety runs very high in a short period of time, you can have a panic attack.
It may be that in general you feel anxious often.
It may also be that your anxiety is more focused, such as fear of social contact, places where many people come such as (public) transportation, public places (such as parking lots and marketplaces) or enclosed spaces (such as stores and cinemas).
Another form of fear is a specific phobia, such as blood, natural phenomena (e.g. thunderstorms, heights, water), injections or injuries, certain animals (e.g. spiders or dogs), hitchhiking, driving or flying.
Anxiety and panic are often accompanied by certain physical reactions (such as for example, diarrhoea, abdominal pain, sweating, palpitations, tremors, hyperventilation, dizziness or nausea).
An estimated 1 million people in the Netherlands suffer from anxiety and panic attacks
Watch the video in which Ingeborg Bosch explains how PRI looks at anxiety and panic attacks.
We are afraid of what has already happened
It is very distressing to feel that your life is controlled by fear. PRI shows that although fear seems to be about the here and now, that is not true.
Fear has a specific function. The reason that you become afraid of situations that are not dangerous is that your brain distracts your attention from a deeper, painful feeling, which has arisen much earlier in your life. In the period when you were still a small dependent child who could not take care of yourself.
In situations that are somehow similar to what has happened to you before and what felt life-threatening then, your fear becomes active and makes you believe that you are now in danger.
How can PRI help you?
With the help of PRI, you learn to recognize which situations in your daily life cause your feelings of fear to arise.
Next, you and your therapist will discover what old, repressed painful feelings lie beneath.
In this way, step by step you separate your past from the present. Fear and panic lose their function and with it, they disappear.
The result is that you are less often, less long and less violently at the mercy of fear and panic.
Moreover, you get a grip yourself, because your therapist teaches you how to apply PRI instruments yourself, now and in the future.
Your physical complaints will decrease and you will experience more and more freedom of movement in your life.
My fear of failure turned out to be a fear of being laughed at, with PRI I gained this insight and I was able to free myself from it.