why panic isn’t just fear: the attachment message behind it
Panic often works like a guard dog for buried feelings, but it's also a call for connection. Psychotherapist, Aaron Mitchum explains what panic is really protecting.
I want it and I don’t want it at the same time
It happens in my office often. People are resistant to their feelings. Or to put it another way, they are protecting themselves from re-feeling overwhelm and flooding. This, of course, is a wisdom on their part. They have experienced overhwelm and instinctively avoid having to go through that again. This is not a weakness nor a stubborness. Yet they have also felt the cost of chronic avoidance, an act that is not conscious but automatic, and they have sought out help to feel their feelings and work with their unconscious habits around them. So they want their feelings and don't want their feelings at the same time. Whom among us can’t identify or relate to that? I know I can.
Panic is a guard
One symptom of this conflict is panic. Panic can act like a guard dog for repressed feelings. When people feel panic, they believe something is wrong, and they work to get away from wherever they are emotionally. But in effect, it's more like a guard pointing a gun loaded with blanks. It can hurt, but it can't kill. When we engage panic with somatic and therapeutic techniques, it opens the locked room where the feelings live.
The relationship between panic and attachment
Underneath that guard duty, panic is also an attachment signal. Panksepp identified a distinct PANIC/GRIEF system in the mammalian brain, separate from ordinary fear, whose job is to register separation and pull us back toward connection. It is the same circuitry behind a child's cry for a caregiver. When it fires in an adult, the underlying request hasn't changed: be seen, be safe, be soothed, so a person can feel secure again, to borrow Dan Siegel's language used with kiddos (but from experience I think this applies to adults too). Attachment researchers Mikulincer and Shaver describe this as the attachment system's basic move: distress activates a search for someone to turn toward, and finding them is what lets the distress settle. So panic isn't only a guard at the door. It's also a call for someone to come find you. This is why often if someone is having a panic attack, if they are connected with in a helpful way they shift from panic to the vulnerable feelings of grief or rage or fear. Their nervous system needed the added safety and increased connection of the attachment to be able to allow the feelings.
Panic isn't an obvious sign, but it's often a dependable one, that you're looking in the right place for the lost feelings, and places in need of connection underneath them.
References
Busch, F. N., Shear, M. K., Cooper, A. M., Shapiro, T., & Leon, A. C. (1995). An empirical study of defense mechanisms in panic disorder. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 183(5), 299–303. Found that panic patients relied more heavily on reaction formation and undoing, defenses consistent with difficulty tolerating angry feelings toward others.
Milrod, B., Busch, F., Cooper, A., & Shapiro, T. (1997). Manual of Panic-Focused Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. American Psychiatric Press. Lays out Freud's concept of signal anxiety, in which a small dose of anxiety alerts the ego to dangerous unconscious wishes, and how a failure of defenses to contain that signal can escalate into panic-level anxiety.
De Masi, F. (2004). The psychodynamic of panic attacks: A useful integration of psychoanalysis and neuroscience. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 85, 311–336. Describes panic attacks as arising from a breakdown of a person's defense organization, often during periods of life crisis, linking psychoanalytic theory with neuroscience findings on implicit fear memory.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton. Introduces neuroception, the nervous system's involuntary, non-conscious process for detecting safety or danger, which underlies automatic defensive responses like panic.
Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books. Describes Somatic Experiencing as a body-based approach that helps complete thwarted defensive responses stored in the nervous system, with case reports showing reduced panic symptoms as this completion occurs.
Levine, P. A. (2009). Panic, Biology, and Reason: Giving the Body Its Due. Documents a case in which restoring a client's interrupted defensive response led to a progressive decrease in panic anxiety.
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press. Identifies PANIC/GRIEF as a distinct primary emotional system governing separation distress, distinct from the FEAR system, and rooted in attachment biology.
Panksepp, J., & Watt, D. (2011). Why does depression hurt? Ancestral primary-process separation-distress (PANIC/GRIEF) and diminished brain reward (SEEKING) processes in the genesis of depressive affect. Psychiatry, 74(1), 5–13. Describes the PANIC/GRIEF system's role in social bonding and the pain generated by separation from attachment figures.
Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2020). The Power of Showing Up. Ballantine Books. Outlines the four S's of secure attachment: a child (and, by extension, an adult) needs to feel safe, seen, and soothed in order to develop a lasting sense of security.
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2003). The Attachment Behavioral System in Adulthood: Activation, Psychodynamics, and Interpersonal Processes. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 35). Describes how distress activates the attachment system and drives proximity-seeking, and how a responsive attachment figure allows that distress to resolve into felt security.