Agoraphobia: Why Going Outside Can Generate Anxiety?

For people who suffer from agoraphobia, the outside world is a continuous generator of anxiety. When they are outside their home, whether in open spaces or in places with a large influx of people, they live in anguish because they feel in extreme danger.

They think that, at any moment, something critical could happen to them and that, for whatever reason, they will not be able to receive the necessary help to survive.

Why can leaving home cause anxiety?

Every day of Pedro’s life passed with this enormous suffering, when he decided to come to my office for help to solve his problem. Pedro had been experiencing intense fear for a long time every time he had to go outside.

He thought that he was going to have a new anxiety attack (he had already had a couple) and that, unable to receive medical help, he would die. He had reached a point where it was very difficult for him to leave the house without the help of medication and, in fact, in order to come to my office, he always took a tranquilizer previously prescribed by his psychiatrist.

When speaking of agoraphobia, popularly, this term is often related to a problem of fear of people. However, this is a much broader disorder with much more complex implications.

Agoraphobia, literally, means “fear of open spaces.”

People who suffer from it, present great anxiety in situations where it is difficult to escape or receive help (means of transport, crowds of people, large buildings, tunnels, bridges …). The problem is not limited to feeling anxiety when surrounded by many people.

The fear generated by the idea of ​​suffering, outside their home, a panic attack, anxiety or any physical problem and dying due to not having been able to receive help on time, also creates unbearable anguish and stress for these people

People who suffer from agoraphobia live with a continuous sense of danger in their lives. Although nothing serious has ever happened to them, fear is limiting them. Gradually, they reduce their exits and spend more and more time locked inside the house (the place where they feel safest). In the long run, they are in danger of developing depressive features, which further aggravates their discomfort.

How to solve the problem of agoraphobia

As we have already spoken on other occasions, in this blog, in order to heal, we must not only observe the obvious symptoms, but, in order to deactivate them, we must first understand the origin of these fears.

In his first session, Pedro, a young man in his forties, told me that his problem started unexpectedly and for no apparent reason. On any given day, after a week of intense work, he decided to go to the movies to unwind and rest. Just as the movie was about to begin, she began to feel her heart race and she was finding it difficult to breathe.

He had an anxiety attack so bad that he thought he was going to die.

At the time, Pedro didn’t realize it, but he had been accumulating stress at work for a long time. Faced with such an accumulation of tension, his body could not take it anymore and he suffered his first anxiety attack.

After a few days, the young man suffered a second attack. This time, in the middle of the street. After this new episode, Pedro’s mind grew fear of having an attack again at any other time or place. He had experienced, both times, such a sense of helplessness and lack of control that he was afraid of having another crisis and not being able to receive help from anyone.

The work we did in therapy was twofold.

• On the one hand, he realized that he had accumulated a lot of stress and that he had to learn to slow down and relax so as not to continue overloading his mind and body.
• On the other hand, he understood that his anxiety attack was not random, but that in addition to stress, its origin could also be traced in the complex experiences that he had suffered as a child.

Deprogram a fear that may come from the past

Pedro’s mother and father were always working in the family business and from a very young age , he had to take care of his sister. As Pedro told me in one of his sessions, “I was my sister’s father.”

In addition to his sister, he took care of keeping the house clean and studying. All day he didn’t have a free minute to play.

The parents told him that since they were very tired, his obligation was to be a good child and “have everything under control.”

Thus, the child assimilated the idea that in order to survive, that is, to feel loved by his parents (and thus safe and protected by them), he had to have everything under control. As an adult, Pedro was still a hyper-responsible person. Now that he was running the family business, he allowed himself almost no rest and even had not gone on vacation for several years so that nothing escaped him and, thus, he could continue to have everything under control.

In therapy, Pedro worked to deprogram the harmful idea that he needed to control everything in order to survive, to be worthy of being loved and to be able, in this way, to feel safe and secure. Also, he understood, that in life, you cannot control all situations. In addition, he worked to learn to relax, to take care of himself and to stop feeling responsible for everything and everyone.

Several months later, in one of his last sessions, he told me: “I have felt as if I was lifting a weight. I can make my life and I can dare to do new things even if I don’t know beforehand what is going to happen ”.