Finding your foundation

She suffers from panic attacks. When she is triggered somewhere, the feeling of fear bubbles up and then rages through her body. She has been suffering from it for years, but in the past year, it has gotten much worse.
That doesn’t surprise me.

I explain to her how everyone has a basic level of stress and how you can handle peaks in stress. When that base level is raised, very little needs to happen to get a peak that turns into a panic attack. The war, fleeing to another country, uncertainty about the future, about loved ones, about what to do now… The ‘normal’ stress level is considerably higher than before the war started.

Before we look at the fear, let’s find out where her safe place is. And she is literally making it.

She is working on the foundation of her safe place. Strips of cardboard are cut to size and woven together. With patience and trial and error.

Meanwhile, she realizes that she is not only working with cardboard, but is also laying a foundation inside herself.

Where her foundation was initially in her heart, it is sinking in her body to the hip area and even to her legs. She now experiences that she stands firmly on her legs, on her feet, that she can ground herself and has firmness to stand on. And that includes words that she wants to write on the strips of the foundation: trust, love, stability, strength… More and more words are added as she works.