Most people know of agoraphobia as the disorder that means you’re afraid to leave your house. Few of us realize how common it is. In fact, following the global pandemic, as much as 35% of Americans experienced symptoms of agoraphobia. According to the American Psychology Association (APA) those numbers are declining as people seek out treatment and learn to cope with symptoms, but rates are still well above the normal 2% of the American population affected.
If you or a loved one is experiencing agoraphobia, it’s typically about a fear of being in a situation you can’t escape from. That’s normal after trauma, loss, or being told that leaving your home could put you and your family at risk. At the same time, if agoraphobia worsens it can become an unreasonable fear that cripples your ability to live your life normally.
As a result, people with agoraphobia often need help. And, according to Harvard University, while about 10% of people struggling with agoraphobia do recover without treatment, the other 90% do not.
How Virtual Treatment Can Help with Agoraphobia
Cognitive behavioral therapy and counseling are the two most common approaches to help people overcome agoraphobia. Both of these treatments can be delivered as part of early agoraphobia treatment via telehealth or virtual treatment. However, considering the nature of agoraphobia, it’s also important that you work leaving the home and exposure to the outside world into treatment.
You May Need Medication
A large percentage of people with agoraphobia require medication to reduce panic and anxiety during early treatment. This means that even if you’re following a virtual treatment program, you may end up with a 5-6 week prescription of Zoloft (sertraline) or Prozac (fluoxetine) to help you manage anxiety. This prescription will be very temporary and is mostly intended to help you get anxiety enough under control that you can benefit from your (virtual) therapy. If your agoraphobia is not that bad, you likely won’t get a prescription.
Understanding Underlying Causes
Online therapy can deliver behavioral therapy to help you understand the underlying causes behind agoraphobia. That means understanding triggers, figuring out what leads to feeling agoraphobic in the first place, and figuring out places in your thinking and behavior that lead to agoraphobia. That means you’ll go over your history of mental health and triggers with your therapist so you can understand why you feel anxiety and what you attach that anxiety to.
For many people, it’s about losing control. For others it’s about a specific trauma or incident. Whatever the cause, understanding it is often one of the first steps to recovering.
Learning Coping Skills
Once you understand where agoraphobia comes from and your triggers, you can start to build coping mechanisms for those triggers. Often, learning to manage agoraphobia takes two approaches. The first is exposure, where you slowly build up exposure and tolerance to the things you’re anxious about, create good experiences, and try to keep recreating those until you feel more confident and better about doing them.
The second is to create ways to handle, let off, and manage your anxiety when it crops up. That often means learning breathing exercises, figuring out distractions, finding someone to talk to, finding a calming routine, and learning to stop downward spirals and negative thought patterns that lead you towards feeling panicked in situations out of your control.
Often, that’s about recognizing when you’re being anxious and anxiety doesn’t necessarily reflect reality, understanding where anxiety is making things worse, and actively working to stop those spirals. That can be reflected in things like learning to go, “I am being anxious and it is making me feel bad, I will take a break and be right back after I feel more in control”. It can also mean learning how to tell yourself that everything is okay and anything negative is just anxiety talking.
Coping skills can take a lot of forms but they often start with awareness of your emotions and their triggers, control over your emotions, and tools to react to triggers in healthy ways. So, for example, if you get anxious when stuck in traffic, your therapist might work with you to understand that you feel trapped, and work with you to get yourself to acknowledge that you feel trapped.
Motivational Therapy
Your virtual therapy can also help you with motivational therapy or acceptance and motivation therapy. Here, you learn to acknowledge that you have problems with anxiety, experience panic in certain situations, and hopefully where that comes from. From there, your therapist will work with you to build up motivation to engage with those situations as well as trust that your therapy and your coping mechanisms will help.
That will give you the tools to work towards engaging with the outside world, even if you aren’t up for it now. And, that can be extremely important if you are suffering from agoraphobia, because in this case, you’d probably need assistance to make it to a therapy appointment out of your home. Taking motivational therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy first means you can build up those skills before starting to work on leaving your home. That lowers the barrier to actually doing the work and building the skills to get better.
Getting Help
Agoraphobia is a very normal mental health disorder. However, if you or a loved one is struggling, you don’t have to do so alone. Mental health treatment can give you the tools to manage triggers, panic, and anxiety, while working to treat and heal from the underlying causes, so you can recover your quality of life and your ability to live a normal life. Treatment may not make agoraphobia go away, but it will give you tools to cope and to live your life how you want. And, for many of us, treatment can mean sending agoraphobia into remission, sometimes permanently. Virtual treatment is a great first step and it can give you the tools to get your life back on track.