About Me/Why I have this website

Sometime in the winter of my 8th-grade year I had my first panic attack.  I had been the kind of kid that worried about stuff – my parent’s relationship, how I was doing in school, you name it.  That winter I came down with the flu, and in addition found myself in the middle of some really frightening evenings – heart-stopping fear, unexplained vertigo and numbness in my hands and arms, nausea and (as a result) a serious lack of sleep.  I was experiencing my first panic attacks.  That went on for 6 months, then, mysteriously (to me, at the time) they stopped.  But they didn’t go away…

As the years passed I found myself avoiding certain activities, developing ways to essentially trick myself into falling asleep, worrying that the panic and fear would grab me again.  And of course it did, with greater and greater frequency, until the winter of 1990, when the panic attacks came to visit and didn’t leave. 

I would spend the next 4-1/2 years taking anti-anxiety medication, living in dread of bedtime, terrified of any sign of dizziness or vertigo, and wishing desperately that there was something I could do to end my fear and anxiety.  At the end of my rope (literally – I was becoming suicidal) I stumbled across a therapist who gave me some good basic tools to start doing exactly that – end the reign of fear in my life.  (You’ll find the link to the program I used – CHAANGE – in the links section of this website.) 

I would spend the next 5 years learning to apply some of the tools I learned with CHAANGE.  And make no mistake, it helped, enormously.  But I began to think that this didn’t have to take this long or be this painful/hard to do.  And I began to think that there were elements missing from what I’d learned that could help me do this cleaner, quicker and with stronger results.

This website is the result of that thinking and work.  My goal with this website is to turn it into a resource for people who want to be free of chronic anxiety and fear.  It begins this week with the start of this blog and articulating there my system for unplugging fear and anxiety from our daily routine. 

Bottom-line:  You don’t have to be the victim of fear and anxiety.  There are solid, powerful tools to help you shake free and be in charge of fear and anxiety both.