08/09/2026
Anxiety always has a cause. Even when you can't remember.
Last week, the Guardian featured Mike McNally's story. For over a decade, Mike had been anxious and claustrophobic on public transport, without knowing why.
This culminated one day in him, mid panic attack, trying to force open the doors of the moving train he was on and other passengers having to stop him. Mike had no idea why this was happening but the incident prompted him to seek help.
Eventually it turned out that at four years old, he had been trapped in a train carriage after a train crash. His parents filled him in on the story that they had stopped talking about when he was a child, because it had upset him too much. And so Mike gradually forgot this had ever happened.
But whether or not he consciously remembered, or had a story to tell, the memory encoding of this incident followed him into adult life anyway with severe emotional effects.
I have often worked with people who have already tried all sorts, counselling, coaching, medication, and have read every book on the subject, but they are still living with anxiety, or fear. They often believe they are failing somehow, after doing so much work on themselves, but they aren't. They are presented with a mystery that most therapists and coaches don't know how to solve.
There's always a reason someone is anxious. Anxiety, in my experience, is never random. It is the logical consequence of something you experienced as difficult or traumatic.
This could be an event, or it could be, and typically is, a many layers of a pattern experienced repeatedly over many years, for example in childhood, that taught your emotional system to go into protection mode.
The trouble is that now, in the present day, this protection mode comes at a high price, impacting your quality of life and the level of success that you can reach.
My first move is to help you track down the causes, then we dismantle the encodings that hold them in place, on a biological level, quickly, and permanently, often within a handful of sessions. This is what REPAIRenting® was designed to do.
If you've done the work, tried the therapy, read the books, and the symptoms are still there, you are not imagining it, and you are not the problem. There is a reason, and we can find it.
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