Travel for me is something that I love to do, I love to experience new places seeing how people’s lives and their surroundings are different to mine, the colours, the smells, the sounds and not knowing what is around the corner or what I might find.
The excitement of flying or travelling by car and the feeling of arriving to somewhere new, all adds to the excitement and so after two years of planning and the cancellation due to Covid, me and my fiancé finally embarked on our two-week driving exploration trip, around Italy and France, at the end of August this year.
We were set and ready to GO!! We had the whole itinerary planned out, Airbnb’s booked along with a few hotels and the places we wanted to visit, locked in and with that we were off!!
People in my life, know that through my years I have had my own challenges with my claustrophobia, and fear of spiders and it just goes to show that although I am a hypnotherapist, I am human and stand alongside the thousands of other people that suffer with this, in their life and so I have first-hand experience at knowing what panic is like, how it can trap you and the embarrassment it brings.
I have always found my own way to deal with it and work harmoniously with it, in my life, failing miserably sometimes, this was before I found solution focused hypnotherapy and understood more of what is happening in my brain when we go into panic and our flight and fight mechanism kicks in. For most of my life the claustrophobia has only mainly affected me using ‘Lifts’ and the odd tunnel here and there, but I don’t come across tunnels much, spiders on the other hand play more of an active role, because there are more of them, than lifts!!
So here we are one week and a few days into our trip, I had successfully completed the journey through the Eurotunnel, with ease, travelled to our first stop, Lucerne in Switzerland, marvelled at the amazing basilica in Florence and done the obligatory holding up of the ‘leaning tower of Pisa’ photo.
From there we drove down to the Amalfi Coast, where we spent the day before driving along the Amalfi Coast to Positano, one of the most famous drives of the world, staying for two-nights, two of my bucket list places ticked off.
We then travelled over to Sorrento next and then the reason for our whole trip, the place that I have wanted to visit for many many years ‘Pompeii’. We spent the day looking around the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, followed by the next day’s climbing of the famous Mt Vesuvius volcano with the most amazing view of the bay of Naples, from the top. What we had experienced so far was life lifting with so many new places ticked off my bucket list.
From Pompeii we headed up the country to Rome, one place that I have been to before and a city that is steeped in history and romance. From here things started to change.
My beautiful fiancé is Swedish and loves his ‘Blue & Yellow’ as he calls it, to you and me it is ‘Ikea’. He grew up in an area of Sweden called ‘Småland (Nick named little country) not too far from where the first Ikea was built, in a place called Almhult. He is very proud of this part of his heritage and so, if given the chance, will have a quick pop in to visit Ikea’s in different countries, but particularly this one because it had an electric charging point outside, that we needed to use and so our first visit in Rome was to Ikea.
For me a visit to the ‘Panic Room’ was just around the corner and hit me like a freight train.
I started to think ‘Gosh’ there are loads of people here, as we walked across the car park and towards the entrance, I could feel the stress and panic start to build, as I walked in.
Our brains are fascinating and complex, and the area of the brain where our ‘flight, fight, freeze and panic’ mechanism comes from, is our very old primitive part. This part of the brain is made up of three parts, The AMYGDALA, which is the centre and influential part of this area of the brain, it receives incoming sensory information and process it for an emotional response. Its job is to protect us and so it is constantly alert to the needs of our basic survival, it assesses what it thinks is danger, in our lives, and acts on it.
The HIPPOCAMPUS helps regulate our emotions, it creates our new memories, but it also holds onto old and inappropriate behavioural experiences and patterns. It picks up on old memory patterns and pattern matches.
Lastly The HYPOTHALAMUS which releases the chemicals in our body, the stress hormone cortisol and adrenalin that gets us ready and gives us the strength to fight, run or stand still. This alongside our sympathetic nervous system, which you will know of if you have ever had a panic attack, a fright, been nervous or a fear, like speaking in public or spiders, as this is the part that quickens your heart rate and makes your heartbeat faster, makes you sweat, opens our airways and tenses our muscles getting us ready to deal with whatever the threat is.
So, my primitive brain had well and truly kicked in and I entered that panic room, but this wasn’t a lift? My Amygdala assessed the danger of going inside, my Hippocampus picked up on an old memory pattern match and my Hypothalamus released an abundance of cortisol and adrenalin, my heart went like the clappers and in my mind ‘I was trapped’ with this my surviving mode, out of the three, was to run!!! Out the wrong way of the door, fighting my way through the people coming in and leaving my poor fiancé shouting ‘Honey it’s this way’ and me baffled as to what just happened and ‘Why’.
From then on and for the rest of our trip, my brain was on hypervigilant alert, to almost everything around me and it seemed that very normal things that I otherwise wouldn’t blink an eyelid at, became an excuse to panic, causing me a great deal of concern. I took 15 minuets to get into our Airbnb, because I thought I would get stuck in the stairwell, any lock became a problem to lock, because I just thought it would not open and I’d be trapped inside, toilet locks, accommodation locks and so I had a few sleepless nights lying there waiting for morning so I could unlock the door, this was incredibly strange!! Then came the panic attack in a museum in Rome and very much the same as Ikea, I bolted out the way I came in, with the museum attendant calling at me ‘excuse me, excuse me, that’s not the way out’ and then came the car parking system in some of the smaller places in Italy, like Portofino and Monaco, Cannes, and St Tropez in France. Tiny NCP car parks spanning underground, well in the end I just ended up getting out at the entrance and waiting for the car to be parked.
Our travels took us from Rome, up through Tuscany and around to the beautiful Portofino and on around and down into France, where we visited Monaco, Cannes, and St Tropez, what a beautiful drive. This area is very mountainous and the road cuts through many mountains and so I was then faced with ‘Tunnels’ and there were many of them. The first few felt uneasy, and I found myself willing for the exit to arrive, I had many thoughts run through my head ‘What if we hit a traffic jam inside a tunnel and we have to stop’? or ‘What happens if there is an accident inside the tunnel’? or ‘What if we come to multiple tunnels underground and we don’t know which way to go’? All these thoughts were creating more anxiety, on top of what was already there, because what you might not know is that our primitive brains job is to pull up resistance to something we don’t want to do and it responds to the pictures we make in our minds and the words we tell ourselves, but this primitive part of the brain can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality, so what I was thinking, to my brain, it was happening.
But by the time we had passed through, what felt like 30+ tunnels I had stopped counting and had it down to a T and found nothing to worry about as these tunnels are big, very well-lit and each one, on entrance, tells you how long it is and let’s face it, I thought, it’s a tunnel so it has an entrance and an exit, what goes in, must come out!.
Until we came to Monaco in France and one of my fearful thoughts came true!!
By this time, I was starting to feel a little tired and drained, not understanding why I was coming across these strange challenges, almost being on hypervigilant alert 24/7 because every time I panicked or even had a fearful thought, my body released cortisol and adrenaline and my sympathetic nervous system kicked in, as I mentioned earlier, which sped up my heartrate, sending out chemicals that made me sweat and every time this happened my arms went all tingly.
We had a lovely time looking around Monaco, finding all the starting squares drawn out on the road ready for the Monaco Grand Prix cars and gulping in awe at the £150,000.000.00 pound yacht called ‘Lionheart’ owned by Sir Phillip Green, founder of Topshop, Burtons and Dorothy Perkins.
After a time, we headed back to the car and stated our journey, heading out of Monaco towards Cannes, via Nice. We had only travelled 5 mins down the road when we came to a tunnel, not a problem I thought because I had delt with so many previously, this was east, but on entry it was clear that this tunnel was different!! Almost like a rollercoaster, down we went to an underground network of small tunnels and roundabouts!!! Oh Christ!!! And guess what!! Yes, we took the wrong tunnel and ended up reversing out of it and into the correct one, brilliant!! We were out ‘Nope’, this tunnel then lead down to another roundabout, still underground with multiple small tunnels leading off it. My anxiety went into overdrive and although I didn’t panic, I was incredibly uncomfortable and my brain went into overload with fearful thoughts the chemicals had been released, my hands were tingly and sweaty, my heart was pounding and then the most amazing thing happened!!
My fiancé Johan is very very confident at driving in Europe and because he is Swedish, he drives all the time back and forth to home and over to Germany for work and so I have the upmost confidence and faith in him. He is a person who never panics, is always calm and just always knows how to solve a problem or get out of a tricky situation, he is my rock. But at this point in our journey, he uttered the words ‘I don’t know which way to go’!! So here we were, underground with a maze of tunnels, roundabouts, and cars and my rock uttering these words with a slight panic in his voice, I felt my safety net disappearing. But to my amazement the most amazing thing happened, I felt the anxiety and fear completely disappear, and I was able to return to my logical/rational part of my brain, where I felt completely calm, my rock now needed me!! And I stepped up to the challenge and with wide eyes and a clear brain, I sat up and navigated us out.
Our last stop, on our wonderful two-week journey was a visit to our friends in the beautiful Verteillac, a stunning area of the Dordogne region in France. I was so looking forward to seeing this area as the Dordogne has been somewhere I have wanted to visit. I started to relax as I knew I didn’t need to worry about any tunnels, as this part of the country was fairly flat, or NCP car parks as we would park at their house, or locks because they knew their lock worked and the door would open and so I could feel the anxiety ease. But a different fear started to creep in, a childhood fear that came over me ‘The Dark’.
I didn’t want it to get dark!! as it was pitch black when the lights went out, outside and in, as the house was out on its own in a little hamlet of Verteillac and so there was no other light around apart from the stars. Once again, my thoughts turned to fear and this time I was stuck in a cave and couldn’t breathe, gosh was this ever going to end and what the hell was next. So, I kept the light on all night and fell asleep, calming my mind down, listening to my hypnotherapy relaxing recording and doing my breathing.
Morning arrived and time to travel home and one more hurdle to jump before being back in the UK, the Eurotunnel! This time I knew it was coming and from all the things that had gone on, there was no doubt in my mind that I would have sinister thoughts and possibly panic inside, so I armed myself. The thoughts were defiantly there but this time I spoke to myself, I acknowledged the fear and told myself ‘Well you have two choices’ A) You can get on the train with Johan, and a friend we were taking back to England with us and go home or B) Live in France forever, which is it to be!! Obviously, I choose plan A as plan B wasn’t really an option. Despair smothers all forms of positivity and I needed to turn this around. So, before we got to the Eurotunnel, I thought ‘What makes me happy? ‘What do I love’ and that answer came as quick as lighting ‘CHRISTMAS’ I love it, it is my most favourite time of the year, it makes me feel so happy, with all the lights the busyness and gives me a feeling of my childhood, my grandparents a feeling of calm and comfort, so I downloaded a Christmas movie to watch, charged my phone, got my earphones at the ready and I was set.
We arrived at the Eurotunnel, and I was feeling very fragile about what I had to put my mind and body through, yet again, I had just about enough of this feeling. We drove on and parked and I was probably 9.5 out of 10 on the panic Richter scale, but this time I was ready. The other times took me by surprise because it happened in the oddest of places, but this time I acknowledged this panic and thanked my primitive brain for bringing this to my attention, I told it that I didn’t need to worry and submersed myself into my film. It took a few minutes for my brain to stop thinking the worst and start concentrating on the film but after this I found myself relaxed and calm and the fear just dropped away. I did deviate once along the journey, but I just acknowledged again, told myself I was safe and pulled myself back into the film and before I knew it, we were across and back into England, home from our amazing journey.
What I have learnt on my journey into becoming a solution focused hypnotherapist, is that are primitive brain is stuck in its old ways, if it thinks for one reason or another our life is in some kind of crisis or emergency, it will step into help. When we think of negative or fearful thoughts, we create anxiety, and our primitive mind thinks this is actually happening. What we think, the images that we make in our mind and what we tell ourselves are turned into imaginative reality and alternatively this influences our living reality. We must learn to break these patterns of behaviour and make new ones. Through ‘My own journey through Anxiety’ I was telling my brain the things ‘I didn’t want to happen to me’, ‘I didn’t want to get trapped or stuck’, ‘I didn’t want to get stuck in a tunnel’ or ‘locked in a toilet’, I was trying to control a future that hadn’t happened and because I was telling myself these things, my primitive brain thought this was happening and acted on it, protecting me through my fight and flight sending me into panic and either running from the danger or diverting from it, when in reality this wasn’t happening at all.
If we shy away from something we are uncomfortable with, then we never get the opportunity to see if we can deal with it and so overcoming things that we find a challenge, telling ourselves ‘What we want to hear’, ‘I’m not trapped’, ‘I’m not locked in a toilet’, ‘I am safe & in control’, learning to live our lives in our logical & rational part of our brain and thinking positively within us, creates a positive pattern of achievement, we need to make the ‘Unfamiliar’, ‘Familiar’ and these new memories become new positive patterns to follow that help us going forward.
One of the incredible things that has come from this whole experience, is that I have started to manage my fear of spiders and get control. These small things can’t possibly be as scary as all the things I was experiencing, and I have started to work through the fear. I have caught two spiders from my house since I returned, the feeling of this achievement has been amazing and has now crated a new memory around the spider and this can only get better. I wanted to share in my achievement and show you my celebratory pictures.
Thank you for reading and sharing with me, in my own experience. I want to leave you with some beautiful words that you can keep with you and use whenever you need.
The only way to learn, is to live, Bonsai Tree Hypnotherapy.