Agoraphobia
Stop hiding
Start living
Agoraphobia limits you and makes your miserable
-only 10% of people with agoraphobia will recover without treatment
-about 2.6% of American adults will experience agoraphobia at some point in their lives
-agoraphobia increases the risk of developing co-occurring conditions such as depression
-agoraphobia makes people feel isolated and misunderstood
Agoraphobia treatment
I have worked with clients struggling with agoraphobia for years and love seeing how people who struggled to leave their home go outside and are able to enjoy the sunshine and the view of the open sky.
What therapy will look like:
-you will learn many tools and techniques to control your anxiety and panic, so that you feel equipped
-understand thoughts and behaviors maintaining your phobia and change them
-I use hypnosis to help you overcome your phobia more easily
-when you are ready, we will do GRADUAL exposure therapy (gradual desensitization) at your speed, it will be very tolerable.
Exposure Therapy
I typically start with imaginary exposure and help you build up to real life exposure.
We will create a hierarchy of your fears related to agoraphobia starting from the least scary to the most scary and start doing imaginary exposure in the same order (you will think about these situations, imagine them). We will stay with each situation for as long as needed for your level of anxiety to go down and you to become bored. Then, we can move to the next situation. Because we work with the least scary situations first, it is easy to tolerate and because we use coping strategies in the process, clients often report feeling relaxed after the exposure. We can also do in vivo (real life) exposure.
I want you to have successful experiences with exposure. We will take it easy, so that you can see your successes and start believing in yourself again.