In a small basement office in suburban Detroit, insulated from the noise of nearby traffic, residents gather to confront their daily fears.
Those trepidations range from riding in an elevator to driving a car. Controlled breathing helps calm them, so do positive statements about themselves. Belonging to Agoraphobics in Motion is what most members of this regional group say helps them cope the most.
“The biggest thing about AIM is support,” said Carolyn O’Neil, the group’s assistant director. “Everybody has different fears. We try to make it very broad to benefit everybody.”
O’Neil, 44, a native of Troy, Mich., has lived with a persistent anxiety disorder called agoraphobia for 20 years. Agoraphobia is the abnormal fear of being in open or public places. Such people fear being caught in a place where help would be unavailable or escape would be difficult or embarrassing should a panic attack occur.
For 16 of those years, O’Neil wondered why she would get agitated by situations that other people would find trivial, such as leaving home without her purse. Then she saw a TV show on agoraphobia and put a name to her disorder.
“I cried. I was so relieved,” she said, “but I didn’t want to tell anyone because it was weird. It was my secret.”
People who have agoraphobia often adapt by avoiding situations that might bring on a panic attack. In the most severe cases, people become homebound, sometimes for years, to avoid confronting their fears.
AIM’s mission is to help people deal with such phobias by learning skills that enable them to take control of their lives.
Some of AIM’s features include 10 recovery tools (see story on left) to supply information for people with anxiety disorders, a help hot line and group activities. Recently, one AIM support group visited a mall during the holiday shopping rush.
Mary Ann Gogoleski of Royal Oak, Mich., director and founder of AIM, started the support group in 1983 to help herself and others after learning she has agoraphobia.
“Nobody was telling me to keep going or that I could do it,” she said of confronting her fears. “If you don’t believe it’s possible, how can you believe it will ever get better?”
AIM has grown from 20 members in one Detroit-area chapter in 1983 to 600 members –500 of whom are in the Detroit area–in 12 chapters nationwide. Ten of AIM’s chapters are in the Detroit area. Illinois and Ohio each have a chapter. A chapter in Florida is being re-established, and another is scheduled to start in Philadelphia this month. (For more information, call the AIM central office at 1-248-547-0400.)
AIM is a non-profit group with an $18,000 annual budget gathered through donations, grants and a $6 fee per person at each weekly support group meeting.
Gogoleski, 47, said she would like to see AIM become “strong and large like Alcoholics Anonymous.”
More than 23 million Americans are affected with anxiety disorders, according to the Anxiety Disorders Association of America.
One of the most frequent manifestations of these disorders is a panic attack in which a sudden feeling of intense fear is accompanied by a number of symptoms, including sweating, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, light-headedness, nausea, and hot or cold flashes.
O’Neil says it became a way of life for her to avoid any situation that might cause a panic attack.
“I was always looking for a way out instead of staying and dealing with it,” she said. “My recovery came from facing whatever fear I had.”
Facing fears in a supportive environment is the premise behind a pilot 12-week program AIM launched in December. Program members–limited to 10 because of the focus on one-on-one interaction– participate in six weeks of classroom instruction on coping skills and six weeks of activities that expose them to situations that might make them uncomfortable, such as going out to dinner, spending an evening at a dance club or touring a hospital.
During the trips, members practice coping skills. It’s important to understand that facing a fear doesn’t have to be comfortable to be effective, O’Neil says.
“We tell them you don’t have to feel good to go on these trips,” she said. “Come with your anxiety.”
The participation group meets weekly and the program costs $82. O’Neil says the response has been so overwhelming that AIM will run it again this spring.
Program members ventured on a trip to Oakland Mall in Troy for holiday shopping three days before Christmas.
Jackie Panek, a resident of Redford, Mich., been an AIM member for 12 years. She said she joined the 12-week program because she was homebound for three years and never wants to go back to that point again.
