Originally Posted by
W.I.F.T.S.
I'm just like this too. Sometimes it's hard to even leave my room and go downstairs (like today), let alone leave the house. My mum lives about 5 miles away and it's hard work for me to go and see her. It's good, really, that I manage a football team that play in the same town as my mum and so I'm forced to go there every week. I used to have a job that was a little further away and I used to absolutely dread going there. I started at 2 pm and I'd put it off and put it off everyday and always end up being late, which got me a bad reputation, which I didn't like.
It's really depressing because I used to live 200 miles away from here in London with no problem at all. Infact, I quite liked being independent. Now, I had to drive 15 miles last weekend and it was an absolute ordeal. I really wish that I had the freedom to go to London, Wales, the coast or wherever, like I used to have.
For as long as I can remember, the thought of long haul travel has always petrified me. There's no way that i could get on a plane and cross the Atlantic, however much I'd like to go to America. That's really upsetting because I feel so restricted in what I'm able to do....which really gets to me when I hear about other people talking about their travels and adventures.
I've got GAD (generalised anxiety disorder), which I've had severly for over 4 years. I wake up in the morning feeling very tense, anxious and depressed and I very, very rarely ever feel relaxed. When I first became poorly I was ok driving out of town, but as it's gone on and i've had panic attacks to do with bridges, motorways, hills (you name it), I've tended to avoid more and more things and my comfort zone has shrunk so much that I'm not far from being agoraphobic.
I work in a school and every year the kids of skiing in Italy, Austria or France and I just can't get my head around how they're not terrified of going so far away from home. I know deep down that it's my thinking that is faulty, but it's a really difficult thing for me to comprehend.
My mum had chronic agoraphobia for 4 years and would barely leave the house at all and now she goes on foreign holidays every year, so I guess it's a question of relaxing, accepting, being philosophical and facing the fear. My mum had never been abroad until she was in her forties and my stepdad was awarded quite a bit of money in compensation for an accident. He'd never been abroad either and he spent the large proportion of the money on a holiday. My mum was petrified, but she felt like she couldn't back out because they were normally very poor and not likely to be able to afford a holiday again and she didn't want my stepdad to waste his money. She was really, really brave and she's never looked back.
At the end of the day, exposure is the only way that anyone is going to overcome a phobia (as demonstrated by the panic room, bbc3 last night). I was a very nervous, anxious kid but I had the courage to leave home at 18 and go and live 200 miles away. My confidence did build and I became comfortable (and even excited) about travelling all over England, even driving to Amsterdam. I then had my breakdown and I feel like I've gone right back to the beginning again.
I've got to do it all over again. Some of it will be about doing it a little bit at a time and feeling more relaxed and confident generally and other parts of it I'll have to dive right in. That's the way it goes because I'm not just going to wake up one morning being cured of all my phobias and neuroses.