What is Agoraphobia?

Agoraphobia is an often misunderstood anxiety disorder that is marked by an intense fear of ending up in a situation where a panic attack occurs but there is no way to escape. People who are suffering from agoraphobia often make an effort to avoid unfamiliar places or public places.

Agoraphobia may become so severe in some people that they create a safe place or a safety zone that they have great difficulty traveling away from. For most people suffering from Agoraphobia, this safe place is their home, and they have great difficulty leaving it and dealing with public places in general.

How debilitating is Agoraphobia?

Even the less severe forms of Agoraphobia are debilitating because they cause panic attacks in situations where the suffer does not feel safe, feels trapped, feels out of control, fees insecure, or simply feels too far away in distance from their personal zone of comfort. In more severe cases, someone suffering from Agoraphobia may be completely confined to his or her home, unable to go outside at all for fear of having a debilitating panic attack without any relief.

What Agoraphobics seek above all else is some semblance of control over the situations that are in, which makes strange new environments difficult for them to deal with. Someone suffering from Agoraphobia can develop more than one safety zone, but it takes time for them to develop a level of comfort in these spaces. When someone with this debilitating disorder leaves the safety zone that he or she finds comfortable, they may have a powerful panic attack.

What contributes to the onset of Agoraphobia?

There are a number of different factors which can contribute to whether or not a person develops agoraphobia. The most prevalent contributing factors include family issues, including having a parent who is overly critical or being abused as a child, personality factors such as having a high need for approval or an oversensitivity to specific emotional stimuli, or biological factors including an oversensitivity to specific physical stimuli or hormone changes, or high amounts of sodium lactate present within the bloodstream.

Additionally, research on Agoraphobia has uncovered a specific link that exists between the disorder and troubles with special orientation.

How can Agoraphobia be treated?

Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, is a form of therapy that is completely unique to regular psychotherapy. Rather than concentrating on diagnosis and assessment of standard behavioral or mental disorders, NLP works on helping clients overcome the issues that they perceive or that are subjective to them.

NLP is a unique form of therapy that can quickly and remarkably eliminate powerful phobias in as little as twenty minutes. People who were previously suffering from truly overwhelming and debilitating phobias like Agoraphobia will suddenly find themselves able to handle their daily lives without requiring safety zones and other special trigger avoidance tactics.

What is NLP?

Neuro-Linguistic Programming uses two different forms of therapy to treat phobias directly, respecting the wisdom and the capabilities of the patient while helping them create their own goals for intervention and overcoming their phobias.

The first form of therapy is projection booth, which allows the person to see themselves as if in a movie theater from the projection booth area. They can watch themselves encounter what they are most afraid of, allowing them to release the phobia in the process.

The second form of therapy is logical level therapy which works with sub modalities. Logical levels of therapy work on scrambling how the phobia is stored by the brain so that the phobia reaction is no longer the automatic reaction when the patient encounters that which he or she was previously afraid of.

These two forms of treatment can be combined or worked individually in order to remove the patient's automatic fear reaction to the stressor. As little as twenty minutes worth of therapy can allow the patient to let their irrational fears slip away. This form of therapy involves an understanding of the patient that their fear is an over reaction so that they may learn to overcome it, or to develop means of reacting more traditionally when the object of their phobia is presented to them.

You can learn about NLP for free! If you are interested in implementing life changing NLP therapy strategies in your own life to overcome debilitating agoraphobia, click here!