Phobics: The Masters at Avoidance!

Scenario 1

Let's set the scene: You're in the grocery store squeezing melons and all of a sudden you feel a wave of dizziness wash over you. Your palms begin to sweat, your heart races, and you become short of breath. You don't know what's causing this, but one thing is crystal clear: You have to get out of there!

You leave your shopping cart, your coupons, your grocery list (and maybe even the kid you have sitting in the cart!--just kidding!) in the middle of the aisle and race out of the store. And it's not until you're on your way home that these symptoms begin to subside. Sometimes you’ll feel brave enough to go back to the store, but as you approach those melons again the memory of what happened the last time invades your brain and the symptoms reoccur. So it's exit, stage right once more. The next time you need to go to the store, the memory of that horrible feeling becomes overwhelming, so you get your spouse/neighbor/relative to do the shopping for you. Thus begins the chain of avoidance.

Scenario 2

Next scenario: You're standing in line at the bank, tapping your foot impatiently at the little old lady in front of you counting out 86 years worth of pennies. You look around, check out the bank manager's new suit, stock up on deposit slips (and any other freebies sitting on the counter), look out the window. All of a sudden, the thought occurs to you that this little old lady could take a very long time to make her transactions and you could be trapped in that line forever!!!

Instead of brushing the thought away with a "Nah…never happen," you begin to obsess on the idea of being trapped. The dizziness, palpitations, sweating and shortness of breath begin again and the next thing you know, you're halfway home, driving 90 miles per hour, deposit slips fluttering in the breeze. You think, "I sure don’t want that to happen again!" and the chain of avoidance continues.

So now there are two places you won’t go…

Once this chain of avoidance begins, it snowballs until you find there's very little you're comfortable doing. Your "safety zone," or territory, continues to shrink until even the thought of going too far from home can bring on the symptoms. And before you know it, you're reduced to the perimeters of your home.

It's not uncommon for phobics to shrink their territory to the point of becoming uncomfortable by simply looking out a window. Suddenly, all those tasks we took for granted: bringing in the mail, taking out the garbage, grabbing the Sunday paper off the front step, become Herculean in nature. And we simply can’t.

Actually, it’s not all that sudden. It takes a long time, even years, to become sensitized. But once that chain of avoidance begins though, it's very difficult to stop it. Sometimes it's so subtle, we don’t even realize it is happening until it has.

Anticipating Anxiety

Another of the extra-added attractions of agoraphobia is one of my personal favs, anticipatory anxiety. This involves not only becoming anxious or panic-stricken in the actual event, but anticipating how you're going to feel, react, etc. This can bring on the same or higher levels of anxiety than the actual situation itself.

For example: If you're socially phobic in conjunction with being agoraphobic, the thought of someone being in your home is particularly uncomfortable for you. And one stormy winter day your heater cuts out. Now, you have to call a repairman to come and fix it. The thought fills you will terror. Your mind begins to race: "What if there's something horribly wrong with the heater and I have to get it replaced, and he’ll be here for days, and I'll have to hand him tools, and feed him dinner, and put him up in my guest room, and he’ll like it here so much he’ll never leave?”

So now, before you even make the phone call, you’re running around with your hair on fire, and have yourself so juiced, you’d rather freeze to death than have that repairman in your house. You finally work up the courage to make the call, the repairman gets there only to find it's simply the pilot light that has gone out and it’s a 3-minute fix. So, you’ve spent an entire day panicked to the eyeballs, when in fact, the reality wasn’t all that bad. You coped, got your pilot light lit and he left. End of story. But the anticipatory anxiety really had you going and made you miserable for the better part of that day.

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