why panic isn’t just fear: the attachment message behind it

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.

The Boundaries Debate Is Missing Something

Last night I was at a concert, and the artist mentioned offhand that the fashionable thing to do these days is cut all toxic relationships out of your life. He said he tried that and ended up with no one left. Then he made a dismissive comment suggesting that most people who cut someone off are doing it for trivial reasons, not legitimate ones. I sat there thinking, I think it's a wee bit more complex than that, my dude.

There are two loud voices in the culture right now about family and boundaries. One says cut off anyone who hurts you, toxic is toxic, protect your peace, good vibes only. The other says walking away from family is a mistake, that estrangement is a modern epidemic and people just need to try harder. Neither one holds the nuance of real relational health. The first ignores that some ruptures carry real weight and need real repair, not just distance. The second ignores that repair takes something from both people, not just effort from whoever's still trying. I tried writing about this in an earlier post but didn't get my thinking clear enough, so I want to try again to say what I actually think.

Community is hard, and that's not a flaw, it’s a feature. Being around people who disagree with you, who challenge you, who aren't easy, isn't a version of toxic. It's a version of real life, and it's where growth happens. Feeling humbled, confronted, or pushed past your comfort isn't immediately evidence someone is bad for you. Often it's the opposite: it's what respect between two honest people feels like, and it's an opportunity to get less prejudiced, more humble, and wiser. Community also gives people practice at healthy conflict that doesn't turn violent, at having a voice, including a voice of dissent, and staying in the room while it's used. That's a skill, and you don't build it by leaving every time it's called for. Discomfort and harm get flattened into the same word constantly. They aren't the same thing. That said, distance is sometimes the right call, and here's the framework I use to tell when.

We need to start with the goal. Connection is a survival need, not a preference. The healthiest life isn't the most protected one, it's the one with the deepest sense of community available. Boundaries don't build that. They don't create closeness or repair a relationship. What they do is protect the nervous system when connection isn't safe yet, or isn't safe at all, and they're about the needs of the person setting them. Having no boundaries is its own problem, a way of abandoning your own need for safety to keep a relationship intact. But a boundary doesn't create a healed relationship or better feelings on its own. Connection is what heals a rupture, but only if and when that becomes possible.

The emphasis belongs on that "if," and this is where power and attachment come in. Ruptures don't always look serious from the outside, it's easy to judge a moment without knowing what it meant to the person who lived it. A comment, a slight, a silence, a moment a child needed a parent to show up and didn't, a child's own feelings pushed aside in the name of religious teaching, these can create attachment injuries that never get named as such, especially once they become a pattern. Parents, elders, and leaders hold more power in a relationship, which means they also hold more responsibility for what happens in it.

I regularly see parents and grandparents in my office grieving a child who's gone no contact. Almost always, that grief sits alongside real trouble grasping the pain their own behavior caused, so the cutoff feels extreme and confusing to them. That pattern usually traces back further: people who hurt their kids' attachment were often hurt the same way themselves and never processed it. They're trying to hold onto the only way of relating they know, and a child's request for something different can land as an accusation instead of an invitation. Without realizing it, they're protecting themselves from feeling their own attachment pain by staying unaware of how they impacted their kids.

To be fair, the adult child's request often comes out harsh, because it's coming from a hurt place too. That makes it harder for the parent to stay regulated, curious, and motivated to look at themselves. But a harsh delivery doesn't erase the power dynamic underneath it.

So what does repair actually need? It usually starts with being able to say what happened and what it meant, and having that experience validated instead of minimized or argued with. It means being able to talk about not just the event but how it happened, whether this was one rupture or a lifetime pattern of them, and getting curious together about what kept it going. And often it means wanting the other person to do their own work: to show a deeper understanding of their own story and how it shaped the way they showed up in the relationship, not just offer an apology for a single incident.

None of that happens on a schedule. Even when both people are capable of repair and willing to do it, time and space are sometimes needed before repair is a good idea, to calm the nervous system down enough that the conversation can actually go somewhere instead of reopening the wound. A boundary held for that reason isn't a wall going up for good. It's someone buying the room they need to come back to the table able to listen.

Where does abuse fit in? Abuse is a pattern of behavior used to gain or maintain power and control over another person, causing harm through physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, verbal, or financial means. When abuse has happened, that same list of repair needs still applies, but the bar for proof gets higher: sustained change over time, real ownership, an actual apology, a demonstrated understanding of their own history and how it played out in yours, and a different way of relating going forward. That kind of change is possible, but rare. So when someone cuts off an abusive parent, the boundary is usually the right call, not a failure of nerve.

And when someone keeps showing they can't or won't do that work, no matter how many chances they get, it gets hard to know when to stop trying or checking in. Jesus told Peter to forgive seventy times seven, which is really a way of saying forgiveness shouldn't run out. But forgiveness and reconciliation aren't the same thing. With someone who stays unable or unwilling to change, forgiveness probably looks like letting go of the anger and resentment you're carrying, while still keeping the boundary up. You can release the weight of what happened without reopening the door.

None of this fits neatly into either camp. Cutting people off isn't automatically strength, and staying in contact isn't automatically love. The work is figuring out, case by case, whether connection is possible yet, what you need to recover, and how power dynamics and responsibility play into it too.

Why Couples Get Stuck (And How Therapy Helps You Move Again)

Many couples come to counseling because they feel stuck in the same arguments, shut-downs, or misunderstandings. Most don’t know why it keeps happening, especially when both partners say they love each other and want things to improve. It can feel confusing and discouraging.

Couples counseling can help, not by assigning blame, but by helping you understand the patterns underneath the conflict.

Patterns Are Like Loops

Most couples don’t just have “fights.” They have loops—the same dance repeated with new content. One partner reaches out, the other pulls away. One pushes for clarity, the other protects by shutting down. One gets louder, one gets quiet. The topic changes, but the loop stays the same.

These loops form because each partner is trying to protect something important—usually a longing or a vulnerability they stopped showing a long time ago.

It’s Not Just Communication. It’s What Communication Is Protecting

Communication skills matter, but skills alone often don’t solve the deeper issue. Many couples already know how to communicate—they just don’t know how to stay connected when they feel misunderstood, criticized, or afraid.

That requires understanding what’s happening inside the relationship space between partners. Therapists call this the intersubjective field, but practically it means:

“What is it like to be me with you, and what is it like to be you with me, especially when we are stressed?”

That space between partners is where relationships actually get repaired.

Improvisation: The Opposite of Keeping Score

When conflict loops form, couples often start keeping score: who apologized last, who’s trying more, who should change first. Scorekeeping feels organized, but it makes relationships rigid.

In couples counseling, we help partners learn something closer to improvisation. Instead of sticking to defensive scripts (“here we go again,” “I already know how this ends”), partners learn how to stay responsive and curious in the moment.

Improvisation creates openings. Openings create repair. Repair builds real trust.

Why This Approach Works

This style of couples therapy focuses on:

• recognizing your shared pattern
• understanding how each of you protects yourselves
• identifying the longings underneath conflict
• creating space for new emotional experiences
• practicing repair in real time

When couples experience successful repair—not perfection, but repair—their nervous systems begin to trust each other again. Arguments become less about survival and more about connection.

You Don’t Have to Stay Stuck

If you and your partner feel trapped in a loop, it doesn’t mean your relationship is broken. It means the two of you are due for a new way of relating—one that allows both partners to feel seen, understood, and safe enough to show what they actually feel.

At Analog Counseling in Overland Park, we help couples across the Kansas City metro learn how to repair, reconnect, and build new relational patterns. In-person and telehealth options are available.

FAQ: Couples Counseling

Why do couples get stuck in the same arguments?
Most couples repeat patterns because each partner is protecting a deeper longing or vulnerability. Therapy helps reveal and repair the loop.

Is couples counseling just communication skills?
Communication skills help, but lasting change comes from understanding the emotional patterns underneath conflict—not just the words.

How long does couples counseling take?
Most couples attend between a couple of months to a year or two of weekly sessions depending on goals, pace, and level of conflict.

Is it too late for counseling if we’re considering separation?
Not necessarily. Many couples wait until things feel urgent before seeking help, and repair is still possible.

Do you offer in-person or telehealth sessions?
Yes. We serve the Kansas City metro through in-person sessions in Overland Park and secure telehealth for Missouri and Kansas residents.

The Hidden Nature of Attachment Beliefs and Their Impact on Professional Success

Attachment beliefs are like invisible forces shaping our behaviors, often without us realizing it. These beliefs were formed before the left side of our brain—the part responsible for logic and conscious thought—was fully developed. Instead, they’re rooted in the right side of the brain, where feelings dominate and conscious reasoning takes a backseat.

This makes attachment beliefs tricky to recognize and even harder to change. When we think about our attachment behaviors, it’s easy to focus on situations where we’re consciously aware of our choices and actions. However, to truly understand and work with attachment, we need to shift our focus to those moments when we don’t notice anything wrong at all.

Imagine being in a conflict where you’re utterly convinced of your perspective, yet others around you question your behavior. Their doubts might leave you feeling confused or even defensive because, in your mind, everything makes perfect sense. This disconnect happens because attachment beliefs operate on an unconscious level. They’re so deeply ingrained that they influence our actions and reactions without us being aware of it.

In a professional setting, these unconscious patterns can significantly impact team dynamics, communication, and overall company success. If left unchecked, attachment beliefs can lead to misunderstandings, hinder collaboration, and create an environment where employees may feel disconnected or undervalued.

Understanding this is key for leaders and team members alike. By becoming more aware of these unconscious patterns, we can start to see where our beliefs might be holding us back or causing misunderstandings in the workplace. This awareness is the first step in making changes that lead to healthier, more authentic connections with others.

For a company to thrive, it’s essential that team members feel seen, heard, and understood. By learning to recognize and address attachment beliefs, leaders can foster a more inclusive and supportive environment. This not only improves interpersonal relationships but also enhances productivity, creativity, and overall job satisfaction.

In the end, working with attachment beliefs isn’t about fixing what’s broken but about shining a light on what’s hidden. It’s about being open to the possibility that there’s more going on beneath the surface than we realize—and that by exploring these depths, we can unlock greater potential for both personal growth and professional success.

What Are Attachment Styles?

Attachment styles are ways people connect and relate to others based on their early experiences with caregivers. John Bowlby, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, developed Attachment Theory, sometimes called the science of love, after studying relationships between mothers and troubled teenagers. He wanted to understand how early relationships influenced later behavior. Along with his colleague Mary Ainsworth, who studied interactions between parents and young children, they identified different attachment styles based on how children responded to connection, separation, and reconnection with their caregivers.

Ainsworth's research led to the creation of "The Strange Situation," a study that helped categorize four main attachment styles.* These styles are learned behaviors developed in response to early experiences of distress and are not meant to label someone as good or bad. Instead, they show how a child felt they needed to behave to feel emotionally safe with their caregiver. These unconscious patterns often continue into adulthood and influence romantic relationships, parenting, friendships and professional life. People tend to form relationships with bosses, co-workers, friends and partners who have similar attachment styles to one or both of their parents.

The Four Attachment Styles

1. Secure Attachment
Children with secure attachment felt listened to and trusted that their feelings would be respected. They grow up with a healthy ability to handle emotions and feel good about themselves.

2. Anxious/Ambivalent (Preoccupied) Attachment
These children experienced inconsistent attention from their parents, leading to prolonged anxiety. They learned to keep their parents' attention by being pleasing or entertaining, but this created a sense of low trust and a need to control. As adults, they might seem clingy, angry, controlling, or critical, stemming from a deep fear of abandonment and insecurity. Often they have to dissociate negative emotions like anger for fear it would cost them the relationship.

3. Dismissive/Avoidant Attachment
Children with this attachment style learned that expressing big emotions would be ignored, so they turned down their anxiety and disconnected from their feelings. They often come off as self-sufficient, preferring solo activities over team or emotional ones. They might appear uninterested in close relationships, masking low self-esteem with an inflated sense of independence.

4. Anxious/Avoidant (Fearful Avoidant) Attachment
These children experienced both pain and comfort from their parents, often due to abusive relationships. They couldn't develop a stable coping strategy, leading to a mix of needy and avoidant behaviors. This "come here/get away" approach causes high anxiety and difficulty regulating emotions, resulting in low self-esteem and low trust in others.

Understanding Attachment Styles

Attachment styles are patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving around emotions and conflict. They can change over time with effort and can vary with different caregivers. Recognizing your attachment style can help you understand your behaviors in relationships and work towards healthier connections.

I like this free Attachment Style assessment outside of an officially administrated test: https://www.attachmentproject.com/blog/four-attachment-styles/

*There are good critics that these initial assessments were not done with a broad enough sample size. There have been many follow up studies to work to validate the categories across cultures. However, I think it is still a working theory (as most things are) and worth holding in tension with diverse norms. People want to grab these studies and use them to dictate health/unhealthy and I think that can be tricky at best and dangerous at worst. I find this especially happens when religion or morals are superimposed onto them.

Unlocking the Unconscious: Understanding Our Hidden Coping Mechanisms

The unconscious might seem like a mysterious, complex part of our minds, but Dr. Mark Solms, a neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst, simplifies it for us. It's essentially the part of our brain that stores how we automatically coped with difficult situations in the past when we couldn’t do or cause what we really wanted. In that way, it is place in the brain where we hold memories of stress and the solutions we used that weren't actually solutions. Here's how it works:

When faced with a challenge, our first reaction is to seek help, showing signs of distress. If help doesn't come, we might try to fight the situation or run from it. And if those aren't options, we freeze, tapping into our deepest survival instinct.

For example, as infants, when left alone too early, we experience all kinds of distress in our body and cry for attention. If our needs aren't met, we eventually calm ourselves in a way that might seem like we're soothing ourselves, but it's actually a form of shutting down to cope with the stress (i.e. freeze). This process creates a mental template for what to expect in stress concerning our personal needs, what we believe about ourselves when we feel our needs and how to handle similar situations in the future. Only its a template that we don’t think we just feel. It’s automatic (i.e. unconscious).

As adults, then, when overwhelmed, we might find ourselves not asking for help, because deep down we think it won't come, that we’re unworthy so the best option is to freeze by trying to avoid the assumed reality of the situation altogether. We might distract ourselves (e.g. food, alcohol, sugar, sex, phones, TikTok, YouTube, shop, start a fight, exercise, get religious, etc.) or procrastinate, reducing our stress in the moment but affecting our productivity and relationships.

The key takeaway is that these responses aren't just “how you’re wired”; they're learned coping mechanisms from our earliest experiences (that we remember in felt convictions, actions and body but not in thoughts) that the modern science of neuroplasticity tells us can change (each person’s change potential is specific their unique situation). Recognizing and understanding these patterns can start us on the path to changing them. By becoming aware of and curious about the roots of our behaviors, we can learn what we really need and work to rewrite our story to one where we handle stress in healthier, more productive ways. This journey is about more than revisiting the past; it's about shaping a future where we're better equipped to face life's challenges.

To Recap:

• The unconscious is not what you think it is and it's not as mysterious as you think. Dr. Mark Solms says the unconscious is where we store our past attempts to tackle challenges, like a memory bank of our problem-solving efforts when we were stuck or in need.

• Our first reactions to stress, like seeking help, fighting, fleeing, or freezing, start early in life, like a baby's reflex to shut down when distressed. This shapes how we handle stress and view ourselves as adults.

• Realizing these coping methods are learned, not built-in, allows us to find healthier ways to manage stress, helping us change our life stories for the better.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF EMOTIONAL AFFAIR

By: Aaron Mitchum

Having split off emotions and needs is like having an affair. Your vulnerable emotions and their needs are kept out of your regular life. You go on with your day, your friends, spouse, kids, job, etc. without your vulnerable emotions and needs being involved. In fact, the people close to you don’t even know about your vulnerable feelings. Those feeling are kept in exile, in hiding. They are not to be acknowledged. That said, you do visit your feelings...in secret. Just like an affair you meet them at the "hotel" for a rendezvous. The "hotel" in this situation are habits like: pornography, alcohol, drugs, eating, intensities like extreme sports or exciting adventures, shopping, watching sports, etc. In those spaces you can feel the permission to have emotions you can’t usually. These places help you feel things like: relaxed, loved, seen, alive, wanted, excited, confident, sexual, soothed, etc.

Side Bar: You might notice that a lot of those things can become addicting. In psychology addiction is often understood as an attachment disorder. Meaning, we have come to use these things to meet attachment type of needs (i.e. seen, soothed, safe, secure, etc.) instead of seeking those things through relationships (i.e. opening up to those we’re close with or seeking a hug, etc.) or self help (e.g. mindfulness meditation, yoga, massage, etc.). We establish these patterns out of stressful times (usually when we are young) in which don’t have the help we need. Eventually these things become patterns and happen automatically. In other words, without much thought or awareness we grab that next beer not realizing that we are doing that because we are hungry to feel loved in that moment.

Back to our metaphor…we may meet our feelings in the hotel and get a fix but soon it’s back to our regular lives (perhaps with some guilt in the background for behaving in a way, once again, we don’t really want to). And as long as those emotions don’t show up at our door where our friends and family live too (cause that’ll be shocking and painfully messy we fear) we continue to maintain our split lives: a main self that is non vulnerable and doesn’t trouble others with our messy needs (sure we can’t quite connect deeply with others but we compensate with just doing more) and our secret selves that meet with our “messy” emotions and needs on the side.

#emotions #emotionalintelligence #falseself #integrated #wholeself#coaching #selfhelp #vulnerability