Filled with panic and struggling to catch a breath, Elisa Trayner couldn’t understand why this was happening to her. As the midday sun took its place in the cloudless sky, nausea took over her body. While to others it was the perfect summer’s day, for Elisa, 49, from Tonbridge, Kent, it was a nightmare. Almost in an instant, it had become her greatest fear.
“I’m half-Spanish. I was born in Spain and I’ve spent a lot of time there throughout my life. I was a total sun goddess. I loved to lie in the sun and I loved to have a tan,” she tells us. “My family had an apartment in Majorca which we’d visit a couple of times a year. It was like my second home.”
However, during one holiday to the Spanish island two decades ago, things changed and a visit to the beach left the former investment banking secretary with severe sunstroke – and an equally severe phobia of the sun.
“We spent all day there. We were there for a couple of hours in the morning, headed to the beach bar for lunch and then returned for two or three hours. In the afternoon I lay on my sunbed face down with my hat on, reading my book. I’d always done that, but this time I started to feel sick. I thought I’d had too much sun so I got in the shade. That’s when I really started to feel ill,” she recalls.
After heading back to her apartment, things got worse for Elisa, who couldn’t stop retching. With an upset stomach, she tried to make the most of the holiday and headed to a restaurant, though just the thought of food was enough to worsen her symptoms.
“The waiter put my food in front of me but I couldn’t eat it as I was so sick. I went to the doctors the next day and it turns out I’d got sunstroke. They gave me rehydration sachets to put in water. I didn’t feel great, but I carried on with the holiday,” the mum-of-one explains.
After her holiday came to an end, and despite getting better physically, mentally something had changed. Where once the sun had been a welcome sight, suddenly Elisa found herself doing all she could to avoid the heat.
“I started to get fearful every time I went in the sun. As soon as it touched me, I felt sick and began to panic that I’d have an upset stomach, just as I’d done when I had sunstroke,” she says. “Even seeing a picture in a magazine of someone with sunburn or of a beach would make me feel sick. My daughter would ask if we could play in the park, but I’d tell her we couldn’t because it was too hot. I’d avoid things because it was easier to stay at home. I’d go on holiday and pray for it to be cloudy. It was shrinking my life.”
But it wasn’t just the sun that filled her with dread. Over the years, the anxiety began to seep into other areas of her life. “Going to restaurants was really tricky and I would walk around with what could have been a chemist in my bag. I would have paracetamol, Rescue Remedy and a toothbrush, just in case. I would check the menu beforehand and I’d always want to know where the toilets were. It was ridiculous,” says Elisa.
“For a long time everything was just an endurance. If I was going to the cinema or theatre, I’d spend the week leading up to it filled with worry and then once I was there I’d endure rather than enjoy it. As soon as I was on my way home, I was absolutely fine. I was heading back to safety.”
Consumed by anxiety, Elisa was prescribed beta-blockers and she tried Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Having suffered from crippling anxiety for almost 20 years, she knew it was time for change and turned to the internet for answers.
In search of someone who could help tackle the root cause, Elisa found trauma and anxiety therapist Chris Meaden eight years ago. He uses a range of techniques, including Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and his own rapid Meaden Method, which he says rewires emotional responses and can help in as little as one session.
“I remember sitting in the waiting room and feeling like I was having an anxiety attack. It was an afternoon in May and it was quite a hot day. I had a really bad headache but was desperate to get it sorted out,” says Elisa. “I went for one treatment and I didn’t need to go back. My mum picked me up and she asked me how it went. I told her I felt like if I put my trainers on I could go and run a marathon. I just felt completely liberated.”
Two months after her session, Elisa headed to Majorca for a family trip. Despite the August sun and with temperatures of almost 40°C, the stylist and life coach didn’t suffer a single panic attack.
“There was a day where someone suggested we go to the beach, and I eagerly obliged. Even when plans changed, it was me who suggested we still went. It was incredible. The old me would have used that as a get-out, but I insisted we went,” she says.
“I had a wonderful two-week holiday where, for the first time in 18 years, my body relaxed. I came back feeling like a new woman. I was able to do things I’d been scared to do, like a training course and setting up my own styling for wellbeing business (elisatrayner.com). I’m a mental health first aider too.
“If I go to the theatre or cinema, I still sit at the end of the row if I can. My daughter was in a show and I couldn’t choose where I sat, so ended up in the middle. It was a bit uncomfortable, but the most important thing was I was there to watch my daughter. It feels good. It changed my life.”
Trauma and anxiety therapist Chris Meaden, 57, from The Meaden Clinic (chrismeaden.com), explains, “It can be caused by a traumatising event when there is some injury or a sense of danger. In the case of Elisa, she had severe sunstroke so whenever there were sunny days she would be in a heightened state of anxiety.
“Once the amygdala [which plays a key role in regulating emotions] in the brain is triggered, it looks for patterns of similarity. The brain generalises, so if a traumatising event occurs, it encapsulates what the perceived threatening situation was in that situation, but also co-encodes the nonthreatening aspects of the experience.
“Consequently, your amygdala can misfire a response when there’s no perceived danger. You start with one phobic fear response and then that can generalise into more areas. Effectively it’s like your world starts closing in on you because you’re thinking, am I going to be anxious? Am I going to have a panic attack? Am I going to have a response?”
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