Peter suffered from generalized panic attacks. The first occurred when he was 22; by the age of 28 he had found a mental strategy to control them. Now in his fifties, they had shown up again. In a first session, we tried to identify life events which could have caused these panic reactions, but every time something seemed to come to the surface, he went blank. A careful interview, a timeline, and flash questions; no technique reached the deeper layers from which the panic attacks were being triggered. The timeline gave at least some information: It became clear that the fear had been there for his entire life. I asked Peter if the concept of past life trauma made any sense to him. He had already wondered if something had happened to him in a past life. However, it was clear that there was no way to access traumatic memories directly. The original traumatic event at the root of the panic attacks must have been so horrible that Peter couldn't even think of it, so I changed my strategy to a more general perspective.

Bad things happen in the world, and if you read the newspapers, you're informed of them. I asked him if he read newspapers and what was the worst he could remember reading. He didn't need much time to answer: executions, people being killed on purpose by other people. I switched to an "If, what" type of question: If an execution led to the panic attacks, what could have happened? Peter felt that that had been the case. I got a flash that the panic attacks were triggered by observing an execution, not by having been executed. When I told him this Peter could identify with this idea. In the following session he was able to access the medieval world of a sixteen-year old girl, witnessing the execution of her father in a riot. In the key image, an axe split the head of the man. I gave Peter the Logosynthesis sentences for this image, and after the third sentence Peter felt himself moving away from the scene, while the girl waved at him and smiled.

After this cycle, Peter felt quiet and happy. As a future pace exercise, I asked him to leave the room, go outside and explore what was different after this session. He went out and returned after five minutes. The fear was gone. There was no reference to it in his experience outside. Peter later shared that during the trip home he experience a state of "just being", which continued until the following day. His body kept trembling, adapting to the new condition. He was still extremely impressed by the impact of the session. Memory? Fantasy? Metaphor? In the practice of Logosynthesis, it doesn't matter: Just one more energy construct to dissolve.