Robert has just pointed out in his comment on the last post that agoraphobia is a conditon, not an illness. This is so important that I want to repeat it here to remind myself. It is a state of being and not a state of poor health. How can a person go on for eight or nine years and not ever understand the nature of their problem? It may sound so obvious now but it never really occured to me to question this. All I knew was that I felt unwell, I didn't know what was causing it, so I must therefore, have an illness. No one has ever told me what I suffer from, not labelled it to my face. Silly to only have the penny drop now, but it does make me think.
A condition! Then I've learned it, this way of being? Did I make the panics start? I know that unconciously I must have kept them going. Then what makes them happen in the first place? A deep subconscious thought that triggers the central nervous system into a reaction. So to beat them, it has to be a change in thinking, to learn to change the conscious thoughts, and get to the automatic ones and switch them off. At last, a chink of light! Now I can tell people that I have a condition, I feel so much better than saying I have an illness! It's far less intimidating. It's just that I was about to tell someone who I was writing to, and again, didn't know how to explain it, break the news gently. 'I have a condition'. That sounds better even if the symptoms are the exactly the same.
Robert has just pointed out in his comment on the last post that agoraphobia is a conditon, not an illness. This is so important that I want to repeat it here to remind myself. It is a state of being and not a state of poor health. How can a person go on for eight or nine years and not ever understand the nature of their problem? It may sound so obvious now but it never really occured to me to question this. All I knew was that I felt unwell, I didn't know what was causing it, so I must therefore, have an illness. No one has ever told me what I suffer from, not labelled it to my face. Silly to only have the penny drop now, but it does make me think.
A condition! Then I've learned it, this way of being? Did I make the panics start? I know that unconciously I must have kept them going. Then what makes them happen in the first place? A deep subconscious thought that triggers the central nervous system into a reaction. So to beat them, it has to be a change in thinking, to learn to change the conscious thoughts, and get to the automatic ones and switch them off. At last, a chink of light! Now I can tell people that I have a condition, I feel so much better than saying I have an illness! It's far less intimidating. It's just that I was about to tell someone who I was writing to, and again, didn't know how to explain it, break the news gently. 'I have a condition'. That sounds better even if the symptoms are the exactly the same.