Living with agoraphobia and your relationship with others.

September 28, 2009 by admin 

I am an agoraphobic and that changes everything. 8 years ago the nightmare started and I am still waiting to see the light  at the other end of the tunnel. I find myself hiding the fact that I can`t do anything by myself because I am very embarrassed. My husband is the person I trust the most in the world, but it is destroying his life being tied to me. I want to free him but I don’t know how. The problem is that I can panic if he is not near where I am and take me home safely. So, he works from home. He only goes out to do his own thing when I am at Patchwork classes. And that is 4 hours a week. It is a very little time for himself. The fact that I need him near me makes me feel very bad, so bad I can’t explain it. I feel like I no longer qualified as a person, like I am not normal and there is always agoraphobia or panic attacks to be hiding. Not many people understand. In fact, I think only those who suffer the same I do can understand how little and insignificant somebody can feel when you depend on other so much. I could not even go to take my child to school on my own and some parents are already wondering why we always go together. My 5 year old daughter doesn’t understand why I can’t take her to school just the two of us and I don’t know what to say.

As you readers can imagine, I am not feeling very cheerful or happy right now. Most of the time I can pretend everything is OK. That this new very small world I have created to live in is enough, but the fact is that I have to take pills every morning and to sleep I have to take tranquilizers every night, which I am probably addicted to by now. But, as the doctor says, addiction is only a side effect….

Just waking up one morning and feeling that the fear and the difficulties to breathe are gone is every agoraphobic dream. How to get there? I don’t know if is possible if you don’t keep going a strong treatment and psychological help. Even though, I’ve never met anybody else with the same problem as mine.

My husband wants to go diving, sailing, fishing with other people. But he doesn’t do it because he’ll be to afraid that I will panic and won’t be able to hold onto him to save me. I want him to be happy, but he is not. And he is not happy because of me. That makes me feel so small. I don`t know what to do. The panic attacks are very scary. I am not even afraid of death anymore because I think that I have suffer so much that when it comes it will be normal and maybe even a relieve of the pain. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to die just yet. I have to beautiful children that give me strength to fight every day. But sometimes is so hard to stay focus.

Something so small like taking my child to school, if I could do that I would celebrate it more than a lottery winning. Simple every day life that normal people don’t even consider as a blessing, an agoraphobic like me is unable to do. Going out on my own in the car, even if it was just around the block it would probably give a huge panic attack, and is so scary that just thinking about it makes me all tense. I worry that I would faint and die in the streets on my own with nobody to help me. Those are the things I live with everyday.

Some people worry about the money, about the future of their children and those kind of things. An agoraphobic like me worries about all of that and as well as worrying on whether you are going to be left somewhere on your own, whether you are going to breathe properly,  or what horrible things are going to happen and because you are so useless you are not going to be able to get out of it.

Of course it must be very hard living with someone like me. I try to stay happy and smile, but most of the time is an act, I am keeping tears away from my family so my kids can have a happy childhood and my husband can stop worrying.

Another thing which is very hard for me is having to be almost praying for help everyday to do things that in theory we should be more than capable of doing. For example, going down the road to the patchwork classes one I slipped while pushing my baby’s pram. I was so scared that I would let go and the pram would go into the road, that my husband had to drive me 300 meters away every Tuesday and Thursday morning.  That was very very painful for me. I feel like an idiot, he doesn’t say anything but I know it must be very annoying. If I want to go anywhere or do anything I have to wait for somebody to go with me, and not anybody it will have to be some friend that I trust and I can’t go to far from home either. How restrictive is my own mind. I have created a prison for me and I have trapped my husband in it.

It’s a huge fear of mine the fact that nobody can live like this forever and sooner or later my husband will probably leave me and he might take the children with him because I could not take them to school or to the doctors, or do the shopping, or just work to support us if necessary.

Being in the agoraphobic world is very painful not just for us, but also for those who live with us. There are many times when my husband hasn’t done things he likes because I could not go or because I needed him to be near me. At the end, the result is awful.  He can not look at me in the eye because he is upset that he is missing so many things in life, I resent him for not being happy and loving. He is all day near me, but never with me. He is only around because he feels he has too. He is not enjoying his life at all and that’s my fault.

As you can see from my experience living with agoraphobia or with an agoraphobic is not easy, in fact is very very difficult. Patience and lots and lots of love is much needed.

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