Causes and Development of Agoraphobia

How Agoraphobia Develops

by Stephen Price

Agoraphobia develops through processes called “conditioning” and “generalization.” Fear produced by a single panic attack conditions a person to fear a single place or situation. The fear eventually generalizes to nearly all places and situations.

Here’s how it happens:

Agoraphobia usually begins with an episode of spontaneous panic. In most cases, the person gets conditioned to associate panic with the place or situation in which they experienced the panic attack. This means that their mind attaches the emotional memory of fear to the setting in which the panic attack occurred.

A panic attack can be quite scary, especially if you don’t understand what is happening. You can feel like you are suffocating, having a heart attack, or going crazy. Because most people don’t recognize their first panic attack for what it is, their mind creates an extremely strong memory of fear that involves multiple senses.

Following the initial panic attack, the person becomes afraid of having another one. This fear leads to obsessive worry about when and where the next panic attack might occur. The person literally fears the fear.

This obsessive worry triggers more frequent panic attacks and the person gets conditioned to associate panic with each new situation or place in which he or she has an attack. Because unexplained panic attacks are horrifying experiences, most people start avoiding all of the places they have panic attacks.

At some point, panic attacks are experienced in so many places that the fear of having a panic attack generalizes. The person associates panic with nearly everywhere and avoids most public or outdoor settings.

At this point, agoraphobia has set in.