Agoraphobia: emotional and spiritual meaning

What agoraphobia is

The word comes from the Greek for the public square and for fear. It is a panic of crowds, and often of any place that is hard to leave: shops, transport, open space, being far from home. You may feel safe only in one place. It is a known anxiety disorder, and treatment helps. It is not a character flaw.

The reading below does not replace that care. It looks at sensitivity, fusion, and the safety you are afraid to leave.

The emotional meaning of agoraphobia

The source links it strongly to an unconscious fear of death. You are probably very sensitive, receptive on several levels, especially in the mind, with a fertile imagination. Affectively you are very dependent, and you have never really cut the maternal tie, or the tie to the adult who raised you. It is hard to tell your real self from what you create in thought, and those thought-forms keep the anguish going.

A sponge, and one safe person

You are like a sponge. You absorb other people's emotions, especially their fears, without discerning, filtering or protecting what is yours, and you amplify both your fears and theirs. You fold in. You feel responsible for everything. You communicate very little, except with the person you trust enormously and feel safe with. You isolate yourself for fear of leaving that safety. You feel like a rat in a cage, and you cling. You feel fragile. You do not know how far the limits go, limits you create yourself, which curtail your freedom. Taking up the adult role is hard.

It is easy to control everything in a place where you are totally safe. The moment you leave, everything collapses. You fear other people's eyes and their judgements. You anguish about everything, until you feel you are losing control. A strongly stimulating experience, a birth, an accident, a death, a catastrophe, can sink you further into the anguish of noise and people, without a lasting situation, and the agoraphobia grows.

You may think you are going mad. If that thought is constant, see a doctor. The source asks you not to settle into that belief. It does not ask you to handle it alone.

Criticism, and a tie based on expectation

Criticism runs high, because insecurity is high, trust is low, and things are not going as well as you want. Sometimes a conflict with your mother sits underneath, and you criticise her constantly. She may have leaned on you a great deal, a dependence of her own. The relationship becomes based on expectations instead of love. You may have felt a great void, and that void is felt now that you are adult. You had so strong an impression of having to merge with her, or with another reference adult, that being surrounded by people is hard. Unconsciously you fear having to merge with them, and that is too much to ask.

A gentler way to hold it

The aim is not to throw you into a crowd to prove a point. The emotional perspective invites you to separate your fears from other people's, and to take one direction of your own.

• Filter what you absorb. Other people's fear is not automatically yours.
• Leave the safe place by one small step. The collapse on leaving is the pattern the source describes.
• Look at the uncut tie. Expectation in place of love, and the fear of merging again.
• You are responsible for your happiness. You do not also have to determine everyone else's.
• Get help if you cannot leave home. This is a treatable fear, not a life sentence.