choices, and taking responsibility. You can encourage all this by asking
how you can help them before you start helping.
The response will undoubtedly be, “I don’t know,” but who cares? The
thinking about the question does the magic, regardless of the answer. If
the explosive person doesn’t ask for anything, don’t do anything. Just sit and
wait. I don’t knowis just an unconscious attempt to restate the basic message,
which is, “I feel bad, and I want somebody to make me feel better.” Stepping
out of an unconscious pattern is the most helpful thing you can possibly do.
“I can’t take it anymore!” Jane shrieks. “I can’t go on living this
way. I’d rather be dead!”Sometimes, stepping out of the pattern can intensify the explosion,
but it doesn’t make the disorder worse. If you ask what you can do to help
and the explosion escalates, regard it as a more emphatic restatement of
the basic message. Ask again, and keep asking until the person calms
down. You cannot do harm by asking what you can do to help.This situation
is one in which you can safely ignore talk about suicide. In Chapter 8 we’ll
look more closely at suicide threats.
“What can I do to help,” Jane’s husband asks, undaunted.
Jane sighs. “I don’t know what to do. That’s the problem.”That isthe problem—not that Jane has panic attacks, but that she
doesn’t know what to do about them. Now, she and her husband can dis-
cuss what both of them can do. If Jane keeps asking for something to make
the panic attacks go away, her husband might respond with a refresher
course in what drugs can and cannot accomplish in preventing or allevi-
ating such attacks.
Any drugs that make fear go away are addictive, and more dangerous
than the fear itself. Serotonergics like Prozac don’t cure fear disorders, but
often they make a cure possible. Medications can improve mood and give
people more conscious control over their emotions. To get better, people
have to exert that control a little at a time.
If there are medicated fearful people in your life, their doctors have
explained these things to them. You may have to repeat them a few hundred
The Psychology of Fear ❧ 103