Kerry Washington Describes Suffering Panic Attacks at 7 Years Old Amid Parents' Marital Troubles

etonline.com:

Kerry Washington is looking back on some of the formative experiences and long-hidden traumas of her childhood in her emotionally charged new memoir, In an excerpt from Washington's forthcoming book — published by — Washington recalls the vitriolic fights her parents used to get into when she was a child, and how the fear and stress from their bitter battles impacted her own young mind.«From what I remember, most of my parents’ fights were about money, and about the fact that neither of them felt like they were in the marriage they wanted to be in, or more precisely, that they were married to the person they wanted to be married to,» Washington recalls in her book.The celebrated actress explains that her parents «both harbored deep disappointment over what their lives had become» and would scream at one another with deeply held anger.

However, it was also important to them to keep face around their kids and other families.«We pretended to ourselves, to each other, and to the outside world that our family was not suffering the pain of life’s disappointments,» Washington writes, explaining that her parents would often save their brutal bickering for when she was asleep, wrongly believing that insulated her from the tension between them.«As a young child, I would lie in bed and listen for signs of how serious each battle was and when it might come to an end… I developed panic attacks at night,» Washington writes, saying that the panic attacks began when she was only seven.«They manifested first as a rhythm of anxiety that encircled my brain, then evolved into a rapid pulsing, a whirling frenzy of metallic thumps, like those nauseating old spinning rides at a county fair,» she recalls.