Panic Attacks Be Gone!

Ah panic attacks- Mine have mostly vanished but seem to "rear" their ugly heads every once in a while when I"m in an elevator which I need to do three days a week at City College of SF. Last time when I got into an elevator, a woman getting out said she had been temporarily "stuck" and that she's claustrophobic but the police were great--very kind on the elevator phone and then like magic, the elevator door opened. I took a deep breath when the door closed and I was alone. The door on that elevator shuts very fast but takes a long time to open.

When I was very, very small--my best friend and I were on an elevator that stopped between floors and the door opened to nothing but a concrete wall, as if that was to be the place where we might have to live for the next hundred years--not a door I wanted to go through.

So it is mainly elevators that trigger the old panic. In NYC I was on elevators all the time. In San Francisco I mostly move in an elevatorless world except for those few hrs. each day at school.
I think there are some people, like my husband at times, who love enclosed spaces--spaces you can burrow into and maybe never be found. I'll try thinking of the elevator next time as my burrow.