Claustrophobia: emotional and spiritual meaning

What claustrophobia is

The word comes from the Latin for a lock, a closing. It is an irrational fear of being smothered or caught in a closed situation or place, a lift, a plane, a cave, a tunnel, where you have no control over what happens. You suffer the anguish of closed places, alone or with other people. Avoidance can shrink a life. Treatment, including psychotherapy, is appropriate. The source says so.

The reading below does not replace that. It looks at smothering, and at the space you have not taken.

The emotional meaning of claustrophobia

You feel like a prisoner, locked into a situation where you are entirely powerless. The source asks you to check first whether the fear comes from a thought, a mental fixation, whose origin goes back to the earliest periods of life. It speaks of birth: the passage through the "tunnel", and the possibility of having caught a mother's fear, or the fear of being pushed out of a closed, safe place into the unknown. A closed place later can recall the fear that was recorded.

Most of the time, it says, this phobia comes from a "sexual fear" in childhood. It is explicit that this does not necessarily mean touching or sexual abuse took place. It means a fear was recorded in emotional memory, and you felt caught, or were afraid of being caught, in a situation with a sexual character. Today you may constantly hold back sexual impulses, which feeds guilt. If something harmful did happen, that is a matter for care and for safety, not only for a symbol.

Breath, creativity, and your place

The questions the source leaves you with are practical. When you feel caught and you smother, might you be repressing emotions and feeling imprisoned by them? Do you need to express your creativity and stop yourself? You need to breathe, and you need space. Do you allow yourself to exist, to affirm yourself, to take the place that is yours?

That need for breath is why this page is linked with the respiratory system. It is the same tightening the source places beside anguish. If you manage to respect your needs, and to take your place while respecting yourself and others, you will no longer need to flee, and you can feel well wherever you are.

A gentler way to hold it

The aim is not to shut you in a small room to prove you are cured. The emotional perspective invites you to find where you are already holding your own breath.

• Ask what the closed place resembles. A situation in which you have no control, not only a lift.
• See whether the prison is the feeling you will not express. Repression is the lock the source describes.
• Take one piece of space that is yours. Breath, a creative act, a sentence that affirms you.
• If the memory is of harm, get help. The entry's caution is that a fear is not the same thing as an event. An event still deserves care.
• A guide is part of the remedy it names. Psychotherapy is what it offers for cleaning the emotional memory.