I believe that people with mental illness have an almost sacred obligation to share their experiences, recovery, successes, and failures with others. There is help, and it helps. When you’re in it, it’s easy to forget that.

Unlike people with some chronic diseases, we get to recover every day.

We are not obliged to hide from our illness or the things we have learned in surviving and dealing with them. There is no shame in being ill.

I want to say that I am not interested in or in need of pity or commiseration.  I don’t want anyone to be sorry for me. I am well aware that so many children have had much worse experiences than I have had, I hear them from the refugee children all the time.

I have come to believe that children are the forgotten victims of mental illness, they can’t speak up for themselves and too few people speak out for them. My sister and I learned this all too well.

I know I am fortunate to be alive and where I am in my life, I won’t dishonor that experience by running from it or denying it, or keeping what I am learning from others.

Saturday morning, I had one of the most severe panic attacks in many years at around 2 a.m.

A panic attack is not just mental or emotional, it is a debilitating and sometimes severe shock to the system,  body, and soul. I feel it all over my body and for days afterward.

I suffer from what the shrinks call “panic disorder,” even though I haven’t had an attack on this scale for years. I hoped and believed these were behind me. But what you can do with mental illness, I have found, is live with it and deal with it, but you can’t ever completely leave it behind.

For those of you who might unknowingly have these attacks or are  not familiar with them, or see them in friends and family, here is what the Mayo Clinic has to say about a panic attack:

A panic attack is a sudden episode of intense fear that triggers severe physical reactions when there is no real danger or apparent cause. Panic attacks can be very frightening. When panic attacks occur, you might think you’re losing control, having a heart attack or even dying. Many people have just one or two panic attacks in their lifetimes, and the problem goes away, perhaps when a stressful situation ends. But if you’ve had recurrent, unexpected panic attacks and spent long periods in constant fear of another attack, you may have a condition called panic disorder.

I do have this condition, it is important to say so out loud.

Writing has saved me in that way.

My panic attacks began when I was young. I was a bed wetter, I wet my bed at night until I was 16 or 17 and the panic attacks came when I woke up in the darkness, hoping and praying I hadn’t had an accident, but knowing from the feeling and smells of the bed that I had.

These “accidents” made my father angry and disapproving, he was embarrassed by me – he was a social worker –  and convinced they were a sign of weakness. He refused to get any kind of help for me.

When I was very young, the panic attacks occurred almost daily.

The panic shot through my mind and all of my body, I sweated profusely,  thought about suicide, was short of breath, felt my heart race. The feeling was unbearable. I felt unable to control my own body, something almost everyone I know could do.

In the 1950s, it was different, as we all know.

Parents and doctors knew little of the mind, especially the young mind. My father was a social worker who didn’t believe in psychology or trauma or psychiatry. He said he could handle it himself.

He believed my bedwetting was due to a lack of will and character. I was punished for years for wetting my bed and lectured so severely I did everything I could to hide my accidents, including faking sleep for hours until he had left for work.

I was too young to figure out how to wash my own clothes and psychologically unable, and besides that would have alerted the household.  And I was hiding from them.

Mostly, I just lay in the urine all night, staring at the ceiling, hoping that no one would come in and smell it. My parents often came and woke me up to take me to the bedroom, but bed wetting has nothing to do with how much you drink or what you eat.

I could not, of course, go camping, sleepover at anyone’s house, or invite anyone to sleep in mine. I also, after some years of this, began to have wetting accidents in the school, in full view of the other students, which were, of course, noticed by my peers, who reacted in the way young children do. It was another kind of nightmare.

This was also noticed by my teachers, who also told me I could prevent it, and punished me by making me stay after school and writing things like “don’t have accidents” on the blackboards.

I internalized the idea that everyone else seemed to believe, that there was something wrong with me. Mostly, I thought I was a coward, or “sissy,” as my classmates put it.

I was terrified,  ashamed and panicked almost every night of my life, sometimes more than once.

In the winter – we had no heat in my house at night – I lay in this frozen urine for hours, trembling, crying sometimes, staring at the ceiling for hours.

The summer heat was worse. Even my dog wouldn’t sleep in the bed. I was paralyzed most nights, I just waited for the ax to fall.

I had recurring panic attacks for much of my life, when there was a money or work crisis, when I had to move, or stormed out of jobs in anger, or when I felt alone, or when I just woke up shaking in the night, an echo of the first years of my life into adolescence.

Often, I had no idea what the trigger was. I’m learning more about that and will be learning for the rest of my life.

It wasn’t until I went to college that I trusted myself not to wet the bed. And I didn’t last long in college, I suffered from anxiety, severe distraction, and yes, panic disorder. I never went to class.

Other than to lecture me and scold me, the only treatment I was ever offered was a trip to our local pediatrician, who asked me to draw figures of my parents, and then told them – he never spoke to me – that there was nothing wrong with me.

I just shouldn’t drink water after 4 p.m., he said and I should be awakened several times a night and taken to the bathroom. I didn’t drink water, I did get up often and was awakened often,  and still wet the bed.

The thing is, something was wrong with me, but it wasn’t my character.

Once I got older, my father gave up lecturing me, or even speaking with me much,  and we rarely spoke.  I just washed my own sheets and nobody ever said a word about it again, not for the rest of their lives.

This is hard to write because my panic attack Saturday was severe, and it felt just like those early ones. I am still feeling it.

I should say there were also issues of abuse in my family. Later on,  the shrinks said this was almost certainly the cause of the bed wetting, abuse is now seen as a prime symptom of sexual abuse. When I acknowledged this, it was horror in some ways, a relief in others.

This wasn’t my fault.

My first understanding of my panic disorder came during Freudian analysis in New York City and in dynamic therapy in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. It also came from reading the works of Anna  Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, who studied panic disorders for years.

Panic attacks, she wrote, often come when one lies to oneself. A panic attack is an episode of terrible fear, but it almost always occurs when there is no real danger or apparent cause. Or when people believe things about themselves that are not true.

A soldier in combat can feel awful fear, but that is different from a panic attack. Combat fear is real fear from real and imminent danger. In the case of panic attacks, it is frequently not clear where the danger came from or is coming from. But it is quite real.

I was lectured and shamed for my bed wetting, but I was not in literal danger. According to Freud, when you lie to yourself – believing you are weak, shameful, disliked even when it is not true – your sub-conscious rebels and goes to war with your conscious mind. As a result, you panic, something so severe it spreads through the body.

Something is wrong, but you don’t know what it is and you can lose touch with reality, which is terrifying in itself.  Your psyche is at war with itself, the subconscious is in open rebellion, and the body reacts.

Understanding the reality of who you really are is essential to healing from panic attacks, because they suggest, by their existence, that you are lying about yourself, usually to your disadvantage. Once I grasped that idea, it was much easier to come out of these attacks.

When I have a panic attack, I know now that I am not in truth,  so I find someone to talk to who is in reality, and I talk to them about what I am feeling.

In my case, I talk to Maria, who has suffered from panic attacks herself, usually caused by her feeling that she is incompetent or weak or unable to care for herself. As she learns this is false, her panic attacks have receded, become less severe.

We are fortunate to have one another.

One of the frequent causes of my panic disorder has been money, followed by work. When I have to spend a lot of money or pay a large debt, I used to panic. When I feel I have failed in my work, that is also a trigger.

I didn’t believe I could handle money, even though I could and have.

As I have taken responsibility for the managing of my money, I have learned that I am a good manager of money, careful and prudent. I was out of sync with myself.

I have accountants and bookkeepers backing me up, but my fear of being incompetent with money is a lie that still haunts my sub-conscious.

I am especially prone to panic attacks in the darkness when I used to wake up in terror in fear of what my body had done to me.

I’ll never forget those smells in the cold or heat or that fear.

The fear I felt Saturday was just like the fear I felt so many years ago – I remember every detail of those dark and awful nights as if they were yesterday, I learned to play dead, like a possum, when my father came in to tell me I was weak and that I could stop if I really wanted to.

To push me farther, I was forced by my parents to go to a two-week summer camp, where no one was told about my problem. I was put in an upper bunk and wet the bed night after night until my parents were told to come and get me. I spent the day hiding in the woods.

We never talked about this again.

I’m not certain what triggered the panic attack Saturday, I have a few ideas, but first I want to recover from it, that will take a day or two. I’ve learned to get some distance before I piece it together.

It felt it very much in my heart and stomach, I was soaked in sweat and shaking, nauseous and disoriented. It did feel like a heart attack, but since I had a heart attack, I knew it wasn’t quite the same thing.

I took it easy today, I let Maria drive, I went to Jean’s for breakfast, we saw a movie, I’m going to watch British mysteries tonight after I review the Quentin Tarantino movie.

I feel weak and shaky still. And vulnerable. The fear is receding steadily, but it is still there, right in the upper part of my chest, where fear often lives.

I did have the good sense to wake up Maria, and she began talking me back into reality. Usually, I don’t trust anyone who tries to tell me my panic attacks weren’t real,  I thought they were lying and just didn’t know.

That’s what I thought when Maria tried to tell me this at 3 a.m., but this is different:  I do trust Maria, and after an hour or so – I was sure she didn’t know what she was talking about and was not telling me the truth –  I began to believe her.

My mind and body began to recover.

If and when I figure this out, I will share it with anyone out there who needs or wants to know.

I’m  75 percent of the way back. Fortunately, nothing, even panic disorders, keep me from writing or taking photos. And I’m off to see the new Quentin Tarantino movie about Hollywood, which I will almost surely review.

Thanks for listening, this is something I want to share and need to share.

I’m going to be nice to myself for a day or so, I can feel my healing underway. I get to recover every day.