When it became hard to breathe

I gained some awareness around stolen breath and grief, deep attachment wounds and loss this week after watching Australian soapie Neighbours. One of the key characters who was a recovering alcoholic, called Sonya died on Wednesday and the effect on one of her closest friends who suffered two other losses is being sensitively portrayed. In the middle of a panic attack his brother is there for him, getting him to put his focus on the breath and then Mark just collapse mid attack and starts crying. He has been struggling with the pent up feelings for weeks prior and managing it by running as much as he can. In the series he has just broken off his wedding.

It got me to thinking how often the breaking point of my own breathless or panic attacks often comes when grief finally emerges from beneath. Tara Brach talks a lot in her book True Refuge of how control and anger block grief. I can certainly relate. Loss, grief, the ending or severing of important key attachments cause us great feelings of pain and powerlessness (especially abandonments we did not voluntarily choose.)

My own breathlessness and panic attacks started shortly after my husband told me he was leaving me via a long distance phone call from the UK in 2004. He was on holiday there and told me first, he was not going to come back, despite the fact he had a house full of things and we were trying to sell our property in Australia at that time. He then decided to come home but it was a very painful trip from the south coast to Sydney to collect him as he told me on the way home how he no longer loved me. I look back now and think it was honest and it was the end but I started not being able to breathe from then on in. He packed up and left within a month and left me with the house to sell and tidy up, abandoned and alone in a remote part of country with no friends close.

My severe head trauma happened on the first anniversary of this in 2005 after I travelled back to the UK to try to pick up the threads of the life I had been trying to build independently of family there in 1999 -2001. But the bike crash destabilised me enough to make me feel I was safer coming back to Australia which I did going into nearly complete isolation at the coast house my father built in 1978 just a few short years before his death.

As I look back now I see I should not have been there alone. I needed help and support but it took me another 5 years to really find it. I got into a fairly dysfunctional relationship at the lowest point and I tried various therapists but not many worked and my then partner was blaming me for the entire thing and refusing to address his own history of abandonment trauma. Its just as well it broke apart in 2011 so we could go our own separate ways. Its taken me all of these past 7 years to realise that victims of emotional neglect are not that skilled at choosing healthy life partners, we just don’t have the tools, understanding or awareness required until we uncover the roots of our attachment traumas.

Anyway breath has been stolen from me at many times in my life. When my sister left at 3, when I nearly lost my life crushed up in the blue Datsun 120Y at the tender age of 17, when my sister nearly died from an aneurysm six months later, when my father died in 1985, when I had to go overseas all alone with buried grief, and when I got into other relationships in which I had no self awareness but was just longing for a healing of all that got so badly broken me over subsequent years of other multiple traumas and addictions.

Is it any wonder I struggle to breathe so much sometimes still, most especially when I hear from Scott and he wants help to come closer.. when I hear of my sister’s cancer returning. It just the taxing on my heart, its not really rocket science. I was glad of the Doctor who after my marriage broke in 2004 told me not to seek relief of this breathless condition with medication but to undergo counselling. Truth is I never have take psychiatric meds as many of you know I saw what long term use of lithium did to my older sister. It literally crippled her.

The truth is I may struggle to breathe sometimes. Sometimes that flood of everything will rise up and just eclipse my breath and maybe if I can just surrender to it then in time it will die down, washing things up and clearing the landscape, at least until the next grief/over powering wave of flooding hits me.