*An Agoraphobic's Tale
*EMDR
*Holographic Repatterning
*Therapy
*Sexual Abuse

AN AGORAPHOBIC'S TALE

I don't know how or when I became agoraphobic. It did not happen all at once, but slowly, over time. Day by day, week by week, my life became more and more difficult, my world smaller and smaller, my journeys out the door of my apartment less and less frequent, limited to "safe" places - my therapist's office, one movie theatre, one grocery store and one bank. I am able to go to these places for three reasons: 1) they are known, 2) they are all within a three block radius, and 3) I can come and go by cab, thus circumventing, at least to a degree, the relentless voice in my head which whispers over and over "what if I can't make it?" This does not by any means imply that I jaunt easily from location to location even in this short three block span. Instead, I lurch from place to place praying that I will make it, fear and trembling mounting in my body, the muscles in my back becoming more and more tense, my legs simultaneously stiff and shaky, as though that whisper is inserting itself into my muscles and bones. For some reason, my efforts to defy this fear have only seemed to reinforce it. I stagger through my tasks, wild-eyed and trembling, chased by the belief that I am seconds away from disaster. I stand praying that I will survive long enough to hail my cab, terrified that this will be the time when I do not beat the clock, when my luck runs out. So far, I have made it. I am here writing these words, in the comparative safety of my apartment. But even this cave is not safe, because it is a prison and because the fear seems to control almost everything.

I told my therapist a while back that I feel like I am a five year old being asked to do grown-up things. Everything feels overwhelming, too big and too complicated and too difficult. And I am so ashamed of this. Once, in better days, I used to be quite self-reliant. Although I think, on one level, perhaps my phobia, my sense that I was safer with the dangers inside than outside actually began when I was very young...

One of the characteristics of agoraphobia is panic attacks. For most agoraphobics these happen outside the home and are a major part of what holds them inside. I have heard it called "fear of one's fear." and I think that's an excellent description. I am not in the norm in this way as my real panic attacks have all happened when I am at home. Outside I am prone to a more paralyzed kind of panic in which my my heart races and my muscles go rigid, making it painful and difficult to walk. My breathing may become labored, but it is not the suffocating loss of breath that comes with a full blown panic attack.

I'm not entirely certain of when I had my first panic attack. Initially, I thought they were allergic reactions, but I could never find a source. To be continued....

2/24/2000... Well, It's about time I kept my word and continued the Agoraphobics Story. I was hoping that I could declare myself cured as my continuation, but unfortunately that hasn't happened yet. In some ways I'm actually worse than ever, which might sound like it contradicts the glowing things I have said below about EMDR and Holographic Repatterning, but it really doesn't. In many ways, the deepest qualities of the agoraphobia - the really intense panics and racing heartbeat and such are gone. What needs to be conquered now is inertia and the ravages of many years of depression and inactivity.

What holds me inside now is habit and obesity and the stress that that places on my back and knees. Although not all agoraphobics become obese and/or depressed, these things often accompany this condition. There are only so many ways to entertain yourself when you never leave home, and eating is one of them. It is a form of solace for many people - myself included. Of course it is a solace which doesn't console, but that's another story. The next demon to battle, I guess. My obesity. But I'm not quite ready really to talk about that yet. I've mentioned it and I guess that's a start.

Things aren't all bleak. Even as I write this, I'm sorting through 30 years of life in my apartment and getting ready to move to Arizona where I will live with my niece Cindy and her husband Rick and where I will hopefully move into the next phases of healing. I think being around people (especially people who love me) will be healing in and of itself. Agoraphobia is a difficult condition for anyone, but I think living alone with it is particularly difficult.

One of the things I'm recognizing, at least for my own story, is that I have been going at one part of the healing process backwards. I was waiting to get well before I went to be near my family. And it pretty much took a house falling on me to make me recognize that it's that attitude which is part of what has kept me locked inside my home for almost 10 years. Shame and pride have been my twin companions for a long time. I have been too ashamed of myself and my anxiety to go outside and too proud to admit how bad things have been or to ask for help. I doubt I am alone in this. I don't know if Pride and Shame are the parents of panic - I don't think they really are - but they are certaily it's boon companions and best friends and the three together are profoundly destructive. I am hoping to leave them behind me as I move into my new life in Arizona. I'll keep you posted, or as I've said before... to be continued...

Between June 19, 2001 and October 23, 2005, I had a column on Suite101.com on the topic of AGORAPHOBIA. Although the column is no longer current, these two and a half years of articles are still availble in the archives along with the discussions around them. It was a precious gift to me to be able to write them. I miss the process and am still hoping to find a new venue for writing again.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Displacement Reprocessing and is a strange therapeutic technique which is based on (if I understand it correctly) the concept that for some of us when we are confronted with a profound trauma, a kind of short circuit happens in our brains and instead of the memory being stored in it's proper location, it is mislocated so that it continues to impact us. The process involves creating a memory scenario, rating the level of intensity of the fear or whatever emotion one is working with, coming up with an affirmation regarding this, and then going through an odd process where the therapist slowly moves his hand back and forth in front of your face and you follow the movement with your eyes, keeping your head still. No one knows quite why this process works. The eye movement seems to replicate the eye movement pattern of REM sleep, but why that shifts memory or our response to it remains a mystery. I tried this process, not really quite believing that it would work and had profound results up to a point.

Not to bore you with my life story (I will do that elsewhere) but to give you a sense of how it works, I'll share a brief account of my first actual EMDR session. There were a number of preliminary sessions to determine if I was a good candidate for the process and once it was determined that I was, we decided to proceed. I decided that I wanted my regular therapist present for a variety of reasons, so we set the date and met in my regular therapy office as it was a more familiar and therefore safer setting for me. The EMDR doctor felt that I am dealing with two levels of agoraphobia, one from childhood and the other adult onset. We worked with the childhood problem in the first session.

For my "scenario" at this session, we chose to work with my memory of seeing three teenage brothers break a window in my building when I was about three years old and of me seeing them see me see them do it. My job was to some up with an image. Then (gee, it's been a while and my memory is vague on the details) we came up with an affirmation - something like "I am safe and secure" and rated it on a scale of one to ten for believability. I think it was a "1" (not believable at all). That done, the therapist seated himself directly in front of me and began moving his hand back and forth in front of my face asking me to follow the movement with my eyes, while focussing on the scenario. I was asked to report back to him any sensations, images, body feelings which arose as this happened. For me there was not anything terribly dramatic. Tightening in my muscles, and some feeling of intense fear. No big releases or revelations. I was convinced that the process was not working. I should add that a session consists of a number of these hand movements segments (each lasts for 3 to 5 minutes) with breaks for review and sharing.

Well, we went through the process and as I said nothing dramatic was happening and when we stopped the process I was convinced that it was a failure, just another dead end. At the end of the hand movement session, however, you bring up the scenario again and re-rate it. Two very interesting things happened: first the image of the scenario had chagned dramatically! In the original image, the boys were big and tall and I was tiny. Now when I pulled the image into my mind, they were at least two blocks away and very tiny... Amazing! And even more amazing, was that when I went outside to return home after the session the really deep paralyzing terror - what I think of as deer in the headlights terror - had dissipated. As easy as that.

I had four sessions in all. Two were very potent and produced instantaneous and remarkable shifts for me. The other two did not go as well, which may be because I did not feel entirely safe with the therapist doing the EMDR and the territory being covered was moving into very intense and vulnerable psychic space. Nonetheless, I would recommend trying EMDR if you are suffering or housebound or dealing with any kind of post traumatic stress. It didn't solve all my problems, but it certainly helped remove a layer of deep terror that I was glad to be free of.

For additional information on EMDR you can check these links. The EMDR Institute and The Counseolor's Couch.

I am currently exploring Holographic Repatterning and can't say enough good things about it. Like Reiki, it can be done in person or long distance, so I have been working with a woman in Arizona (I live in NYC). The process itself is so odd that it is almost impossible to describe. I have links to two Holographic Repatterning sites on my links page; one of them gives as good a description of the concept behind the process as you can get and the other provides a list of people who are trained in this healing art.

For myself, I have had four sessions so far, spaced over 3 months and the results have been subtly profound. My depression, which had been quite deep has lifted. I still have a lot of problems but I don't feel as hopeless. I have dug into creating this website which I would not have done before. Lots of things are changing. I had a session 6 days ago (from when I am writing this) and one of the things we worked on was the pain I have been stuggling with in my knees and back. I didn't really expect much from this, but I figured, why not give it a try... what do I have to lose? Well, I won't say my pain is completely gone, but it is very, very different. I think that is a small miracle...

I don't really think it's possible to describe a Holographic Repatterning session in a way that is anything but garbled and confusing, so I will not try to do so here. I will just add to what I have said already that I have a friend who did a couple of sessions at the same time I did and she too has felt deep changes. And a former client did one session about a week ago. I have had at least three calls from her since the session, in each of which she describes some new and unexpected way of feeling in the world and follows with "Do you think it's the Holographic Repatterning? Can it really be making that much difference?" I can hear hope and excitement in her voice I have not heard before. The changes with this process are subtly profound... Or maybe it is profoundly subtle... They kind of sneak up on you almost without your noticing them, yet they also seem to be life changing. I can't say enough good things about my own experience so far. I'm not out of the house yet, but I have hope for the first time in a very long time and I really believe that it will happen. And that makes me very happy indeed.

Additional information about Holographic Repatterning can be found at the following links: Repatterning, Inc., Holographic Repatterning Association, and Seminars of D'Light. Check it out. It's pretty amazing.

I recently came across a wonderful resource for people struggling with agoraphobia and other panic disorders. It's an excellent web site called PANICCURE.COM. If you are struggling or know anyone else who is struggling this is a good place to get some hope, some guidance and some excellent resource information.

Two other good sites for help and information on Agoraphobia and Panic are: Encourage Connection, and The Healthy Place.

Click below for additional information on panic disorders

I suddenly realized that while I have shared information about the more exotic approaches to dealing with things like sexual abuse and agoraphobia, I completely forgot to mention Psychotherapy, the bedrock process which prepared me to benefit from those other processes.

I am fortunate to have found a GREAT therapist. "Dr. Jim" as I like to call him, combines humor, compassion, wisdom and a clear, but very gently drawn sense of boundaries. Although we have not been able to heal my agoraphobia, I am a much different and emotionally stronger and healthier person because of the work I have done with him.

That said, I should say that therapy is not for the faint-hearted. It is a journey with lots of twists and turns. It is about moving beyond who you have been told you are by your parents and beyond limitations you have put on yourself. It is about probing your inner landscape and cleaning up mental and psychological pollution. And it is also about laying claim to neglected gold mines of talent and beauty which lie dormant under the debris of childhood wounding. It's difficult, daunting, dramatic, traumatic, glorious, uplifting, amazing, reveletory, confusing, frustrating, magical, joyful - and worth every tear you shed in the process. With a good therapist, you also laugh a lot. (A personal rule of thumb for me: If you can't laugh with your therapist - or anyone else for that matter - move on. Laughter is holy and healing.)

I don't think there are many people in this world who can't benefit from the process of therapy, but that is a personal decision.

Finding the right therapist isn't always easy. Living in New York City, I have had lots to choose from. Some parts of the country or world may not offer as much choice. In all cases, I recommend not staying with someone if you don't like them. You may have been given your family for life, but you don't have to stay with a bad therapist just because you started with him or her.

There quite a few schools and styles of therapy and within those schools unlimited individual approaches. You may want to research the different schools of therapy in looking for a therapist. I'd stay away from Freudians, if I were you, but that's my personal bias. Go to what you are drawn to. Personal recommendations from someone who has worked with a therapist are also good, but realize that what works for your friend may not be what you need. Since I believe in angels, I think there's no harm in asking to be guided to the right person.

Once you hook up with a therapist, it's important to enter into the process knowing that he or she isn't going to miraculously "fix" you. Your therapist is a mirror, a guide, a support system for helping you take the steps to heal yourself. It's important to pick someone with whom you feel comfortable and safe and to be willing to work through the inevitable conflicts which are a part of the process of this kind of journey. It's important not to run away at the first feelings of discomfort, but it's also important not to replace dysfunctional parents with an equally dysfunctional therapist. Listen to your heart.

I think there is something I have have not remembered to include here, but I can't figure out what it is, so I will leave it at that. If anyone in the New York City area is looking for a great therapist, you can't do better than James Mulry (aka Dr. Jim). You can't do better than him.

There are a number of factors which have fed my agoraphobia. My sister's murder was one. And the recovery of some sexual abuse memories at about the same time is another piece of that puzzle. I had not planned to talk about that on this site, but then someone on a bulletin board I read posted something today on the subject and it seemed that maybe I should post my unpublished article. (That is something I am enjoying about having a website. I can publish myself... All my unread treasures are now going to be offered to an unsuspecting world.) I wrote this a number of years ago when I was still struggling with my shock at the discovery that I had been molested, so it is a bit dated. It is also addressed to an American audience since I am an American, but hopefully there is enough in it that is universal that it may have some meaning for victims of sexual abuse everywhere....

As a victim of childhood sexual abuse who is currently dealing with the emergence of much repressed fear and emotion, I am glad to see a growing awareness in our society about the existence of this problem. Thanks to the courage of many victims who are speaking out, we have come a long way in the journey of recognition and acknowledgment of the dark side of our societal psyche. It's not an easy journey for any of us, victim or not. Sexual abuse of children is cruel and ugly. It leaves horrible scars, but it leaves them in places where they are not easy to see; it leaves them on the heart and spirit of its victims. Sometimes the trauma is immediately evident, sometimes it emerges only after time, when the child is old enough and strong enough to face it or when some other trauma shakes loose the armor of repression in which so many of us cloak ourselves. My own memories are still very nebulous in some ways. They are mostly body memories, and vague visual images which I continue to push away despite my desire to remember, to face down the enemy. I can't tell you exactly what happened to me. I can tell you that it wasn't my family. I can tell you that I was very young and that it was less sexual than sadistic. I can tell you that when I am touched in certain places I become paralyzed with terror of an enemy I can't see. I can tell you that I was no more than three when it started, that I was held or tied at the ankles. I can tell you that it is the most confusing thing which I have ever dealt with in my life because it both clarifies and confounds my sense of who I am or who I thought I was. It confounds the notion that I had a rather carefree childhood. It both confounds and explains the depth of my innocence and naivete. It explains my deep fear of my own body. It explains intense panic and anxiety attacks. It explains my obesity and my fear of relationships. It explains why, when I am otherwise intelligent and assertive, in the face of sexual encounter, I have let men do things to me which I did not want them to do, have sat outside myself, repulsed at the way they were touching me, yet unable to say "no, I don't want you to do that." All this, yes, is/was compounded by growing up with an alcoholic father and a mother whose views on life and sexuality were highly judgmental and distorted. Whatever happened to me, they were not available for healing and comfort. That, too has been a factor in dealing with the upsurge of such memories, that cruel truth, that no one protected me, that those whom I trusted failed me. It is a complicated blend of family and external abuse. I grew up in a family where the expression of negative feelings was (to put it mildly) highly frowned upon. Communicating the kind of terror which attaches to being molested would have seemed very risky to a young child (as it still is to my adult self). Add to this, the message (and this memory is clear), "make a sound and I'll kill you," and you have fertile ground for repression. Undoubtedly, my family situation, like that of so many victims, compounded the trauma, the feelings of abandonment, betrayal, confusion. I am still struggling with the feeling that if I go somewhere new I'll die or something terrible will happen to me. Of course I know, intellectually, that I'm not likely to die, but the emotional force behind these feelings is enormous, and most powerful because I don't know what I'm afraid of. I'm still struggling not to deny the truth of what I experience. I still feel bad, guilty, like there's something wrong with me, with the core of my being. Again, I know with my brain, that it's not me, but that feeling of wrongness is etched so deeply into my psyche that it is not easily modified. It's not conscious. What I think I believe is very different. What I carry in subtle emotional ways is the antithesis of my active, conscious belief system. Yet it has been running my life for a long time.

There's no way I can translate into words the profundity of the terror and trauma attached to my memories of what happened to me. I'm still struggling to understand it, to accept it. I am in some ways traumatized by my trauma. My case is complicated by my family history, by the fact that my older sister was murdered shortly after this memory process began, probably by the fact that my father died two years and seven days after my sister, and that my mother died three months after that. But everybody's life is complicated by something. At it's mildest, life is a tricky and intricate experience. Sexual abuse is not ever mild. It violates personal boundaries, it violates trust. And it is always violent, no matter what form it takes. It is an abuse of power. It is cruel and destructive beyond calculation.

Although our society is certainly more enlightened today than it was even five years ago, we still have a lot to learn. Hiding our heads in the sand won't make it any less true that mothers and fathers and brothers and uncles and baby sitters and priests and even some of our national heros have been both victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse. I'd actually like to stop calling it sexual abuse and call it what it is, and what it is, is RAPE. Sexual abuse, though unpleasant enough, is a euphemism. It's easier for us to hear. But it shouldn't be easy. It isn't an easy thing to live through and it shouldn't be an easy thing to talk about. When fathers (or whoever) put their fingers or their penises or their tongues into the vaginas of their five or ten or twelve year old daughters, it's rape, as it would be if they did it to an unwilling twenty or thirty or forty year old woman. Rape is rape. It's not less of a rape because the victim is a child. It's actually more so, because the child doesn't have the same physical, intellectual or emotional defenses that an adult male or female does.

Our children have been and are being raped. We are sexual beings in a society which approaches sex with a strange mixture of repression and promiscuity. We are out of balance on both ends of the scale and we are raising generations of wounded children who are being gored by both horns of our sexual mythology. Sex is glamorized and demonized in the same breath. How can a raped child, even if he or she has the courage to tell, get nurture from adults who react with denial or hysteria or both. Because "kill the dirty bastard" isn't the answer, either. Most of the dirty bastards are victims of other dirty bastards and until we start healing the wounded souls, including our own, we will continue to have child victims.

I don't know if Michael Jackson is guilty or not of molesting any children. If he is, and I suspect we may never know, we need to deal with his crime, but we also need to deal with the fact that this isn't a demon, it's a troubled human being who was probably molested himself. What troubles me more, or just as much, are all the people who now claim to have known and who did nothing. If he's guilty, Michael Jackson is manifesting an illness. What is the excuse of a half dozen people who, although they thought dozens of children were being injured stood by and said nothing? And now they and we are all full of holy self-righteousness. The issue here is not about good people and bad people or even about right and wrong. It's about facing some very difficult things and facing them head on and in depth. Because part of what self-righteousness does, is protect us from having to look. "Kill the bastard," "throw him in the dungeon," are all ways of pretending to deal with something we don't want to know about. But we have to face it if we are to survive as a healthy, functioning society. The rape of children is as much a disease in the body of our society as it is a crime. Although there are times when perhaps it is the only recourse, by and large healing an infected foot by cutting it off is not particulary effective medical practice. Good medicine, I believe, would be to treat the foot, look for the source of the infection and take precautions against a recurrence. Likewise, we need to look to the root causes underlying the rape of our children rather than shooting the perpetrators after the damage has been done.

We seem both to over and under-react at the same time with a combination of denial and hysteria that does little or nothing to heal the victim or to prevent such patterns of violence from repeating down through generations. I hope we will begin to face the difficult truth that our children are being raped. Sometimes they are raped by evil strangers, but most often they are raped by their loving mothers and fathers, by their uncles or their brothers or their priests or their next door neighbor, or their Mom and Dad's best friend or their grandfather. It isn't demons who are raping our children, though they may seem like demons to their victims. It's people, regular everyday people who were raped themselves by other regular everyday people. Until we confront this difficult truth, we are all part of the problem. Those who sit by and watch are as guilty, perhaps more guilty, than those who do the deed. People who rape children usually don't know how to stop themselves, and as long as we avert our eyes to their pain and the pain of their victims, we are partners in crime and part of the problem.

My pain and fear are enormous. The wounded, frightened child who lives inside me still feels unheard. I have learned from my family and my society to avert my eyes to my own pain, to plug my ears to my own cries, and to whimper when I should scream. What happened to me happened more than forty years ago. I'll probably never know who hurt me or why or how they got hold of me, whether they were baby sitters or neighbors or who knows. But I want to know that even if my cries weren't heard forty-three years ago, that they are heard now, that my terror isn't something silly or distasteful to be "gotten over" or held inside. It's real. What happened to me was real. The fact that, for whatever reason, it went unacknowledged and undetected by the parents who should have been protecting me, gives it an extra quality of unreality. The power of the perpetrators and my own helplessness and guilt must have seemed magnified in the face of my parents seeming indifference or approval although, in fact, they probably didn't know what was being done to me. When I try to convince others it is because I am still trying to convince myself of what I already know is true. I still need help and permission to accept my trauma as valid, as OK. Because it is over and not over at the same time. It will never be completely over. And because I am only remembering and dealing with it now, so much later, it is also a fresh and more complicated wound, layered over with scars and ancillary infections.

I ask you please to hear me. I was raped. I was three years old or less. It happened more than once and it happened until I was five or six. It is so terrifying and horrible to me now, that I cannot imagine what it must have been like to go through it as a tiny child. My terror is real and my pain is real and I have a right to it. It is. I don't need to be fixed. I don't need to be told that it happened a long time ago. I know that. I don't need someone to make it go away, although I admit to sometimes wanting that. It isn't going to go away. What I need is to be seen as I am, perhaps to be comforted. No one can fix what happened to me and so many others, but you can honor the truth of it, you can let us have our fear and our grief as you would if we had been raped last week. Please don't look away. Please hear me and see me and all the adult and child victims of this crime. When you hide your eyes you compound our pain and we are abandoned once again.