When Panic Gives Way to Grief

Oct 5

What might become possible to feel when our bodies no longer have to work quite so hard to protect us?

There’s something that happened in my own life that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

During a season when cancer had brought a great deal of uncertainty into our family, I began experiencing intense anxiety and panic. There was a lot happening, and for a while my body seemed to be responding to all of it as danger.

Eventually, years later, something began to shift. The intensity of the anxiety and panic had settled, and I found myself able to access something that had been much harder to feel before.

Grief.

What surprised me was that grief actually felt safer.

Not easier, exactly. Grief hurts. There were real things to grieve. But it felt different from panic. Panic carried this sense of danger—something is wrong, something is happening, I need to do something. Grief was painful, but I could stay with it. I could cry. I could feel the sadness and loss without feeling like I needed to escape what was happening inside me.

I remember realizing, almost with relief:

I can do grief.

I’ve been mulling that over ever since.

Sometimes you have to survive something before you can feel it

You know how to keep going when things are hard.

There are people who need you. Decisions that still have to be made. Work doesn’t disappear because your life has become frightening or uncertain. Children still need breakfast. Appointments need to be made. Someone has to remember what the doctor said.

And you handle it.

You may handle it remarkably well.

That doesn’t mean you aren’t affected by what is happening. It also doesn’t necessarily mean you’re repressing your emotions or doing something wrong.

Sometimes functioning is exactly what the moment requires.

Your brain and body are remarkably good at helping you respond to what is in front of you. When there is a lot to manage, much of your capacity may be going toward simply getting through what is happening.

There may not be much room left for grief.

I think that matters, especially for the woman who looks back later and wonders, Why am I feeling this now? Why didn’t I feel this then? I thought I was doing okay.

You probably were doing okay.

You were also surviving something.

Those two things can be true at the same time.

Feeling more doesn’t always mean you’re getting worse

We tend to imagine healing as a process of feeling less.

Less anxious. Less reactive. Less overwhelmed. Less affected by the past.

And certainly, relief matters.

But sometimes healing also gives us the capacity to feel more.

More sadness. More anger. More tenderness. More awareness of what something actually cost us. More ability to recognize a loss that we didn’t have the space, language, or capacity to fully experience while it was happening.

That can be confusing.

You’ve worked hard to feel better, and suddenly you’re crying more.

You’ve made it through the crisis, and now you’re sad.

You’re finally functioning with less anxiety, and something painful that seemed quieter before is suddenly much more accessible.

Your first thought may be: What is wrong with me?

I’m interested in a different question.

What if feeling this now doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going backward?

What if you finally have enough room to feel something that was difficult to hold when so much of your energy was going toward surviving?

That was part of what my own experience made me curious about.

The grief wasn’t new.

My capacity to stay present with it was.

Panic is not simply grief in disguise

I want to be careful here.

I don’t want to turn my own experience into a clinical conclusion. I don’t think unresolved grief is simply an explanation for panic, and panic can have many contributing factors. Anxiety and panic deserve to be understood in the context of the whole person, and medical or psychological evaluation can matter.

I’m not suggesting that if you could just find the sadness underneath your anxiety, the anxiety would go away.

Human beings are more complicated than that.

The question that interests me is different:

What happens when there is grief to be felt, but our bodies haven’t yet had enough safety, capacity, or support to feel it?

I don’t think there is one answer.

But I do think our capacity to experience difficult emotions can change.

Something that once felt overwhelming can become painful but bearable. Something we once needed distance from can become something we can stay present with. An emotion can still hurt without our body experiencing the emotion itself as an emergency.

That distinction has become important to me.

What has become safe enough to feel now?

You have probably had seasons when there simply wasn’t room for everything you felt.

You were caring for someone else. Raising children. Making decisions. Keeping a job. Navigating uncertainty. Holding a family together. Doing what needed to be done.

You may have been the strong one then, too.

And strength can sometimes look like staying focused on what is directly in front of you.

Later, when life is quieter—or when your body has more capacity—the things that didn’t have much room can become easier to feel.

Grief.

Anger.

Disappointment.

The recognition of how hard something actually was.

The awareness of what you lost while you were busy surviving the loss itself.

You don’t have to immediately turn those feelings into another problem to solve.

You can become curious.

Why now?

Not suspiciously. Not as though your body has failed to follow the healing plan.

Curiously.

What is different now?

What support do I have now that I didn’t have then?

What am I able to feel now that I couldn’t stay with before?

And perhaps most importantly:

What has become safe enough to feel now?

Sometimes healing gives us enough room to grieve

Grief doesn’t always mean falling apart.

Sometimes grief becomes possible because we no longer have to hold ourselves together in quite the same way.

And there are so many things to grieve.

People, certainly. But also relationships. Health. Time. Innocence. Possibilities. The life we thought we were going to have. Things we needed and didn’t receive. Versions of our lives that existed before something changed them.

Healing doesn’t make those things okay.

Some things aren’t okay.

Some losses remain losses.

What can change is our capacity to be present with them.

This is one of the things I value about EMDR, Brainspotting, and somatic, body-based trauma work. The goal isn’t to get rid of grief or convince ourselves that something painful shouldn’t hurt.

Sometimes the work is helping the brain and body have enough safety to experience what is true without experiencing that truth as an emergency.

There is a significant difference between:

This hurts.

and

I cannot survive feeling this.

Healing may not take away the first.

It can sometimes change the second.

I can do grief

When I think back to that season now, I don’t think:

The panic was really grief.

That’s too simple, and it isn’t what I’m trying to say.

What feels truer is this:

As the sense of danger became quieter, there was more room for grief.

And strangely enough, being able to grieve felt like progress.

Not because grief felt good or because I wanted the losses that made it necessary. It felt like progress because I could experience something deeply painful without my body experiencing the feeling itself as an emergency.

I could stay.

I could cry.

I could grieve.

I can do grief.

Maybe that’s one of the unexpected things healing can give us. Not a life without painful emotions, but a growing capacity to experience more of what it means to be human without every difficult feeling becoming something we have to escape.

So when something painful becomes more accessible after you thought you were doing better, the question doesn’t always have to be:

Why am I feeling this now?

There may be another question worth asking: