The Personality of Agoraphobia

Tonight I would like to write about a set of personality traits that are common among people with agoraphobia. These personality traits are not likely to cause agoraphobia alone, but usually conspire with other factors in a person's life to cause the disorder. Still, people with agoraphobia or who are highly anxious will typically have many of these anxiety-producing personality traits:

1) Oversensitvity to emotional stimuli. It takes less stimuli for a person with agoraphobia to respond with feelings of sadness, anger, hurt, rejection, or loneliness, than it does the average person. On the other hand, it also takes less stimuli to make them feel excited, joyful, elated, passionate, or affectionate. People with agoraphobia not only feel emotions more readily, but they also feel emotions throughout their entire bodies (hence, the capacity for panic attacks). The are more likley to have physical responses to emotion than other people. In addition to being overly sensitive to their own needs, they are also highly sensitive to the needs of others.

2) Highly creative and imaginative. People with agoraphobia usually have vivid imaginations and lots of creativity. This can be a blessing or a curse. Imagination and creativity are both great virtues, but with an anxiety disorder like agoraphobia the ability to create powerful visual images of dreadful possibilities can really work against you. People with agoraphobia can come up with an infinite number of negative possibilities to worry about in a given situation. They can also imagine a catastrophic event like having a panic attack in a feared setting so vividly that they can start to hyperventilate because the imaginary experience feels so real.

3) Rigid Thinking. People with agoraphobia tend to perceive everything in extremes or absolutes. Things are black or white, right or wrong, good or bad, fair or unfair. They also have a strong tendency to think in terms of what "should" or "must" be. When they experience events, people or life circumstances to be different from how they think they "should" be, they are easily upset or get anxious.

4) High need for approval. People with agoraphobia are often people pleasers. Because they have a low sense of self-worth, they rely on the approval of others to feel valuable or significant. Because they need the validation of others so much, they are sensitive to criticism and have an extreme fear of rejection. They also have trouble saying no and avoid conflict or confrontation for fear of losing the approval of others. This extreme need for approval can combine with their high levels of sensitivity, causing them to feel responsible for other people's problems and feelings.

5) Perfectionism. People with agoraphobia have a tendency to set unrealistic expectations for themselves and then fear not living up to them. Because they are people pleasers, they also worry about meeting the expectations they perceive others have set for them. Since they consider anything less than perfect a failure and they have an extreme fear of failure, the constant striving for perfection causes people with agoraphobia a lot of worry and stress.

6) Need for control. People with agoraphobia have a high need for events to be predictable and to be able to exert large amounts of control over their environment or circumstances. In many cases, they even feel the need to control the feelings and behaviors of others. They live in fear of losing control and after the onset of agoraphobia, feel a lot of anxiety over hiding their condition to appear to be in control to others.

7) Inhibition of feelings. People with agoraphobia feel a lot of anxiety over trying to hide or supress negative feelings. This may be because they fear losing the approval of others, fear losing control, or feel like they "shouldn't" be feeling a certain feeling. Whatever the case, holding in feelings over a long period of time cause them to build up inside the person. Then when the person gets under stress, they are likely to feel all of their bottled up feelings all at once which causes panic or anxiety.

8) Neglecting physical needs. People with agoraphobia often show the tendency to ignore their bodies needs for rest or proper care. This may be because they are constantly striving towards unrealistic expectations. They are usually only aware that they are tired and need to rest when they become completely exhausted.

Tomorrow I will talk about where these personality traits behind agoraphobia come from.