Up from Agoraphobia: How to break out of your prison of fear

One evening in 1980, a friend and I were chatting on a sofa. She turned to me and said, “Someone told me something about you that I have difficulty believing.” “Oh?” I responded.”What’s that?” “She said you used to be a recluse,” my friend related. “I find it hard to believe you were ever a recluse.” I said, briefly, I was housebound with agoraphobia for several years, but things are fine now. I had, indeed, come a long way from being the teen-aged boy who was confined to a small corner of his bedroom, sitting on the floor, afraid to move. People who had helped me overcome agoraphobia had urged me to write a book about my struggle with agoraphobia. I was, they said, considered to have been one of the worst cases and had not been expected to recover, but there I was. The book could have been of some value. At the time, there was still relatively little being written about agoraphobia, and my book would, at least, have shown other sufferers they were not alone, and that there is hope. I passed on the idea, though, because I enjoyed my newly found freedom from fear. I was interested in continuing to move forward and not to spend a lot of time looking back. Now, some decades later, I am writing a small volume about it. I have no explanation as to why I have decided to write it, other than I awakened from an afternoon nap and decided it would be a good idea. In surfing the World Wide Web, I see many people with agoraphobia who feel alone, and this book is largely for them. The pages I devote in this book to my own story are relatively brief, however, and are designed to show agoraphobics that I understand, that they are not alone, and there is hope. The book is not a comprehensive study of agoraphobia. It is an introduction to the topic, with my ideas on how your condition can improve; with some insight on what may get in the way of recovery. Near the end of the volume, I list a number of sources I consider trustworthy for more information and help.