I fought off my mugger... but I’ve been f loored by ‘shell shock’
Six months after a brutal assault outside his salon, society hairdresser Daniel Galvin Junior is still haunted by crippling panic attacks
WHOLE days now pass before Daniel Galvin Jnr finds himself mentally raking over the terrifying moment when he was attacked outside his salon in March.
But it has taken time and effort to get to ‘a place where I don’t feel constantly scared of my own shadow’, admits the celebrity hairdresser, who counts Johnny Depp, Kylie Minogue, Amanda Holden and Kelly Brook among his high-profile clients.
At least a few times a week, in the dead of night, he still wakes bathed in sweat and gripped with fear.
‘I’ve got better at dealing with it and recognising it for what it is: a panic attack,’ says Daniel, 45, owner of award-winning haircare ranges Dubble Trubble and Organic Head.
‘Now I am able to handle it better. I tell myself it’s just my body overreacting, that I’m not going to die, and I am in control and in charge, and that I will get through it.’ And, slowly, the racing heart and gripping anxiety subside.
It has been months since the incident but talking about it today, he still visibly shakes when recalling those terrifying moments when a would-be mugger approached him outside his salon in Belgravia, asked him for a cigarette, then tried to snatch his Cartier watch and mobile phone.
‘I was checking my messages from my wife and my emails,’ he recalls. ‘This guy, who was much taller than me, came over and asked me for a cigarette and I didn’t have one.
‘He then tried to grab my phone from my hand. I pulled my phone back, then he hit me round the side of my head with his fist.’
Although 23-year-old Alejandro Belhaouari threw the first punch, Daniel, a keen amateur boxer, fought back but then felt a stabbing pain. He says: ‘He pulled me towards him. At that point, I thought I’d been stabbed, but I then realised I had been bitten on the shoulder. The pain was excruciating – I was really fearing for my life, and that’s when I hit him.’
INCREDIBLY, Daniel managed to restrain his attacker, who also viciously bit his leg, until the police arrived. Initially, Belhaouari claimed that it was Daniel who had assaulted him, but CCTV footage corroborated the hairdresser’s version of events.
Daniel adds: ‘This guy was savage – my life flashed before me. It was brutal, horrible. He was a complete animal. He left bite marks.’
In August, Belhaouari was sentenced to three years in prison for attempted robbery. Daniel says the court case, during which he gave evidence from behind a screen so he did not have to face his attacker, finally gave him ‘some closure. It’s now behind me. I can move on’.
Yet when he falls asleep, the attack still plays out in the 45-year-old’s mind like a tape-loop, stuck on repeat. ‘It’s the what-ifs,’ he says. ‘What if it had been my wife, or I’d been with my son? What if it had been a client?’
The legacy of the attack is crippling anxiety and night-time panic attacks for which Daniel has been prescribed the powerful sleeping medication zopiclone, in order that he can get an uninterrupted night’s sleep.
Daniel was reluctant to take it, but accepted he needed ‘something to help me sleep. I was a mess’.
He also chose not to seek psychotherapy or counselling, claiming: ‘I don’t believe in it. It’s the “psych” bit, as in psychiatric, I don’t need. I don’t have a mental illness. I rely on psychology, and I have a mentor, someone I met in rehab, who I talk to about it all, and they help me.’
Daniel, the eldest son of hairdresser Daniel Galvin Snr, who famously gave Diana Princess of Wales blonde streaks, spent his 20s battling a £1,000a-day cocaine addition.
His drug problems ended in 1998 with a six-month stint at Narconon, a ‘non-medical’ ’ rehabilitation facility in America, based on the philosophies of L. Ron Hubbard, the scienceefiction writer who founded thehe controversial Church of Scientolology. Daniel tells me: ‘I am m not a Scientologist. In fact, whenen I was at Narconon I didn’t know ow it had anything to do with Scientoltology, until a friend from the UK rang and told me.
‘All I know is that the programme works, and teaches you to respect your body and mind.’
The Narconon plan shuns medication and traditional psychotherapy, focusing instead on nutrition and – somewhat unconventionally – marathon five-hour-long sauna sessions which, it is claimed, detoxify the body.
Though critics claim the method is not scientifically proven, Daniel found it effective where nothing else was. He says: ‘I’d been to rehab before. It didn’t work for me. Drugs don’t solve drugs.’
Despite the treatment and help from his mentor from Narconon, Daniel, who, with wife Suzanna and their 16-year-old son Rhett, divides his time between their London apartment and a house in Worcestershire, realised he might need conventional medical help in the weeks following the incident.
He admits: ‘I found difficult to focus on work because I was unable to sleep. I would wake in the night sweating and reliving the experience.
‘The early days after the attack were bad for me. I started to feel jumpy and incredibly anxious, which I had never experienced at all before. The best way I can describe it is that I felt like my head was constantly spinning.
‘I had always believed that I was mentally strong and didn’t need any help, but I felt as though the life had been sucked out of me.
‘One of my clients came into the salon, and we were talking about what had happened. I told her that I was all right and she said, “You’re not all right, you’re still shaking even now – you need help.”
‘I knew I needed to really confront what had happened. My GP told me I was suffering from anxiety and stress as a result of the trauma, and prescribed the sleeping pills.’
About five per cent of the population suffer from an anxiety disorder, the most common symptom of which is panic attacks. According to NHS statistics, one in three of those who go through a particularly
traumatic event such as a serious road accident or violent assault – or who witness one – develop a specific type of anxiety condition called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
Interestingly, when I describe PTSD to Daniel he tells me it rings true of him, although he’d never considered that could be his problem. The symptoms are similar to the ‘shell shock’ suffered by First World War soldiers who were ‘involuntarily shivering, crying, fearful, and had constant intrusions of memory’ after the shockingly violent battles they endured.
No one knows quite why panic attacks occur, but the generally accepted theory is that the body’s systems react as if there is an immediate danger.
Breathing quickens and hormones such as adrenaline are released, causing the heart to beat faster and the muscles to become tense.
Alongside psychotherapy, modern approaches to treatment also include antidepressants, which Daniel has also chosen not to take.
The sleeping pills, though, had a dramatic effect. He says: ‘Being able to sleep made a huge difference. But even now I may go to sleep for an hour, then wake up anticipating it happening again.
‘I start shaking, sweating and have very vivid flashbacks.’
Talking about his ordeal has also helped. He says: ‘The worst thing is to bottle up such a traumatic event, and I think I did try to do that to start with – I felt I had to keep up appearances. The reality is that it did happen.
‘I was unlucky then, but now I can use this experience in a positive way and keep moving forwards.’