Why Me? Why Us?
As I struggled to decide what to write for this week’s column, I kept thinking that I should start talking about solutions. “People want solutions,” the nasty little critic who lives in my forehead kept whispering. Or she started out whispering. After a couple of days she knew she had got my attention and was pretty much jumping up and down delightedly pointing out to me how I am failing everyone and who do I think I am, anyway, trying to write a column about something which had me totally pinned down for ten years and has not entirely lost it’s grip yet. “You’d better start providing solutions,” she chanted. “But then you don’t know anything do you?” She really is an incredible little witch.
I guess we are all – or most of us - always in a rush to fix things. I am anyway. But I have found that rushing seldom gets me places any faster – and often it actually slows my progress. So… I want to continue to explore the underpinnings of agoraphobia before I leap ahead to fixing it. The more clearly we understand the recipe of physical and emotional ingredients that combine to make an agoraphobic, the more clear we are about how and why our minds play the tricks on us that they do, the better chance we have to make the therapies that are available work for us. So, let’s begin to explore what makes us tick. What is the recipe for phobia stew? What makes some people profoundly susceptible to intense panic, while others find even the concept of that kind of fear almost incomprehensible?
I recently read an interesting interview (http://www.healthyplace.com/Communities/... ) at http://www.healthyplace.com, with a therapist named Paul Foxman ( http://www.drfoxman.com ) who specializes in treating patients with anxiety disorders. Asked to describe what he calls the “anxiety personality,” he noted a number of common ingredients in the make-up of anxiety prone people, among them: strong “biological sensitivity” to body sensations and outside stimuli; personality traits which include perfectionism, difficulty relaxing, need to please, desire for approval and worry; and finally “stress overload.” Sounds about right to me.
Let’s look at these one at a time. What Dr. Foxman calls biological sensitivity, I would probably call being empathic. I haven’t read his book yet (it’s on back order), so I’m not sure what his definition for such sensitivity is. What I do know about myself and others to whom I have spoken is that we are often so deeply intuitive that we feel the moods and feelings of others in our own bodies. For much of my life I did not understand some of my shifts in mood and energy. I would be feeling fine and happy one minute, then walk into a room full of people and - wham! - suddenly feel exhausted or sad or deeply stressed with not a clue as to why. This is one reason that big cities are probably not an agoraphobic’s best friend. Large cities are so congested that it is hard to avoid being bombarded with outside stimuli. They are also just by their nature, highly stressful places to live. I’m sure there are also purely physical aspects as well. I suspect that there is a high incidence of sexual abuse victims who become agoraphobic at some point in their lives. I know that – in part at least because of my history of sexual abuse and my mother’s very distorted views of sexuality – that I am quite literally afraid of my own body. I don’t know if I my physical experiences are particularly intense or whether my fear makes them feel more intense, but I do know that my relationship to physicality is confusing and distorted at best.
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