If this is your first visit, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to be informed of new articles. Thanks for visiting!
An Agoraphobia treatment that works is the dream of all suffers of this frightening condition.
Agoraphobia is commonly defined as the fear of open space although the Latin, literal translation is ‘fear of the marketplace’.
Agoraphobia manifests itself in sufferers in a number of ways but most commonly as:
• The fear of being away from a trusted person
• The fear of traveling away from a place of perceived safety
• A fear of being alone – this can be at home or away
• A fear of driving or traveling alone
Agoraphobia treatments are generally provided through the medical profession as either medication and/or psychotherapy. The most common psychotherapy used is CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Before discussing conventional agoraphobia treatments and their lack of success at providing a curative solution, you need to know how Agoraphobia develops.
Agoraphobia is an anxiety condition and not a stand-alone disorder as is commonly believed. Agoraphobia cannot exist without an underlying anxiety condition which elevates the base-mark anxiety level. High anxiety fuels Agoraphobia by providing the mind with a cue to perform ‘risk assessments’ in order to quickly make decisions about what course of action to take when confronted by a real danger. In anxiety disorder, there is no real danger present.
These ‘what if’ thoughts present you with a risk assessment based on data sent to the brain by the sensory organs, the ears, eyes, nose, mouth and skin. If there is no ‘real’ danger present these thoughts can focus on creating danger where no real danger is present.
Coupled with growing concerns about the physical symptoms that most people experience, it doesn’t take long for an anxiety sufferer to start restricting their geographic movements in order to attempt to control their anxiety.
Of course, the more someone practices this avoidance behaviour, the more ingrained that behaviour becomes and the ‘anxious habit’ becomes the normal setting for the sufferers anxiety levels.
An agoraphobia treatment would need to address this inappropriate subconscious, anxious habit directly in order to destroy the neural pathways of agoraphobic behaviour, to replace them with ‘non-anxious’ neural pathways – the same behaviours you were born with.
But, how can you do this? Is there an agoraphobia treatment that works without medication and psychotherapy?
Medication can never ‘re-set’ an anxiety disorder, how could it? The neural pathways which MUST be addressed in order to do so can’t be accessed by medication. Even if they could, the treatment would be so indirect that other areas of the brain would be affected too – medication cannot selectively erase memory.
So, what about psychotherapy – well, if you wanted to learn to play the piano, would doing a 40 minute session once every week or two with no practice in between work? That wouldn’t provide the part of your brain responsible for learning through repetition with enough repetition for it to ‘hold onto’ that learning.
Even if psychotherapy wasn’t massively counter-productive in content… and it is, it just isn’t enough to render the inappropriate anxious learned behaviours obsolete and replace them with new, non-anxious ones.
The only way to undermine anxiety and provide a targeted agoraphobia treatment that works every single time is to provide a structured, targeted, simple, non-threatening process which quickly removes those anxious neural pathways and replaces them with new, non anxious ones.
Popularity: 94% [?]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
