In 2000, I had been living in London for just over a decade and working at EMI Records for five years. I had moved to Brixton from Surrey – where space and peace were generally abundant – in the late 80s, and I’d noticed I was becoming increasingly anxious and claustrophobic, particularly on public transport.
As things got progressively worse, I had a string of distressing panic attacks. Every time, it felt like the world around me was closing in. Then, in July 2003, during my daily commute between Brixton and the South Bank, I had a panic attack so intense I tried to climb out of the tube carriage doors. Thankfully, other passengers held me back until we arrived at the next platform – but I knew the problem was no longer something I could ignore.
The following year, my GP referred me to a hypnotherapist. During regression hypnotherapy sessions, I would sit on a chair, close my eyes and feel as if I was falling back through time to different points in my life. After three months of retracing old memories, my therapist asked me plainly if I had ever been in a train crash. “No, I think I’d know if I’d been in a train crash,” I said, slightly taken aback. Despite my insistence, she asked if I would double-check with my parents next time I saw them, in case I had been too young to remember.
double quotation markDuring my daily commute, passengers had to stop me trying to climb out of the tube carriage doors
When I returned to my family home the next weekend, I did as my therapist had requested. To my disbelief, my parents looked at each other for a second before admitting that I had, in fact, been involved in a train accident as a child.
It was 4 September 1965 and, at four years old, I was returning home from a trip with my grandmother to Ireland, where we’d spent the summer with other relatives. We had taken the ferry from Dublin to Holyhead in Wales, then boarded a train to London. As we sat waiting to depart, another passenger train entered the platform and crashed into us. Our train was thrown a few feet backwards, lifting the carriage off its framework and trapping us inside. My grandmother and I were both unharmed but we were squashed together in the September heat amid rising panic, with other passengers seriously injured around us.
My parents said they had tried to talk to me afterwards about what had happened, but I would only scream and run away. Not wanting to upset me further, they stopped talking about it entirely.
McNally: ‘With my therapist, I developed the tools I needed to stop living in fear.’ Photograph: Courtesy of Mike McNally
The conversation with my mum and dad changed everything. I suddenly had clarity about the source of more than a decade’s worth of fear and panic. It explained why I had struggled with boarding trains, planes and sometimes even a car. Every time I found myself in a situation where I felt trapped or stuck, my brain had subconsciously taken me back to the crash, despite having no conscious memory of it. Discovering the truth meant I could work with my therapist to develop the tools I needed to stop living in fear.
A short while after finishing my hypnotherapy, in 2006, I went on a work trip to Vancouver. We had a team meeting at the top of Whistler Mountain – and the only way up was a 30-minute cable car ride. My colleagues told the cable car workers that I suffered from claustrophobia, and they reassured me there was a halfway point where I could get out if I felt I couldn’t make it to the top. But as the journey began, I found myself feeling surprisingly calm, despite knowing I would be trapped for at least 15 minutes. As the cable car reached the mid-point, I saw that the venue staff had come out to applaud me. I knew then that I could make it the whole way up. Instead of choosing to disembark, I called my hypnotherapist and said: “You’ll never guess where I am – halfway up Whistler Mountain!”
Not feeling so terrified all the time meant I could finally live the life I had always wanted. This became even more important when my daughter was born six years later. I wanted to be the best version of myself for her – and that wouldn’t have been possible when I was living in a constant state of fear. Now that she’s 14, our shared love of music means we are always travelling across London by train or tube, going to packed concerts together. If it weren’t for my unexpected discovery, I might never have been able to share those moments with her.
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