Online therapist specializing in agoraphobia

This Online Therapy Service for the treatment of Agoraphobia is available via Skype or Zoom.

During online sessions you will learn how to overcome anxiety and panic attacks through Mindfulness-based CBT and Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy and is a good choice for people who prefer not to rely on anti-anxiety medications.

Online Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy provides a very effective approach for overcoming the intense anxiety reactions of agoraphobia.

Online Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a recommended treatment for Agoraphobia because it teaches you how to overcome the negative thinking that feeds anxiety. Along with Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy this is the most effective treatment for agoraphobia.

Most people can expect to see significant improvements after 3-4 sessions once you start practicing the techniques that I teach.

This Online Therapy service is available online via Skype or Zoom, which is essential if you suffer from agoraphobia and find it difficult to leave home.

Online Mindfulness Therapy is available for all states in the USA, as well as for Canada, UK & Western Europe.

Online Therapy for Agoraphobia

Treating Agoraphobia from Home via Skype

If you want to recover effectively from agoraphobia you must treat the underlying habitual anxiety reactions.

Anti-anxiety medications don’t address this. Medications only treat anxiety symptoms, but do nothing to change the underlying psychological cause of your anxiety, which is habitual reactive thinking.

During Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy (Mindfulness Therapy) we work on healing these habitual reactions directly at the psychological level. This approach is very effective and most of my clients see significant improvements after 3-4 Skype sessions.

Online therapy works very well as long as you use Skype, FaceTime or Zoom so that you can see each other. Being able to see each other is required for effective communication and effective psychotherapy.

What Treatment Methods work Best for Agoraphobia?

In my experience, the best therapeutic approach for helping people overcome agoraphobia is a combination of Cognitive Therapy (CBT) and Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy (Mindfulness Therapy).

Cognitive-based therapy helps you identify the underlying habitual and reactive thoughts and beliefs that create anxiety. Developing awareness of these habitual negative thinking patterns is a very important first step in changing them.

Mindfulness Therapy helps you neutralize and resolve the underlying emotional panic anxiety and fear that fuels the thoughts and beliefs. Learning how to diffuse and resolve the underlying emotions is essential and mindfulness is one of the best awareness tools for doing this.

With practice, you begin to completely change your relationship to the emotions from being a victim to being aware. the more aware you are, the less reactive you become. As you become less reactive, you can begin to explore ways to heal the anxiety-fear directly. Instead of fighting your emotions or avoiding them, you learn how to be with them as a friend. Mindfulness training makes this possible.

The combined approach teaches you how to work with panic anxiety thoughts without becoming overwhelmed by them and this makes it possible to do Imaginal Exposure Exercises, where you imagine leaving your house or going on a journey or being in a crowded place. Through repetition you quickly learn how to process any anxiety reactions as they arise and you prepare yourself for an actual real-life challenge.

At first, we make the challenge small and manageable. We begin to build direct experience and confidence and build on what we have achieved. This very systematic process of preparation through guided Imaginal Exposure followed by real challenges is a proven and effective method for breaking free from agoraphobia and panic attacks.

Contact me to find out more about this online counseling service and book an online therapy session with me. Inquiries welcome!

Everyone that I have worked with really enjoys the mindfulness approach that I teach for healing emotional suffering…

“Dr. Strong provides a helpful mix of talk therapy and practical mindful meditation techniques. Our visits have led to a reduction in my anxiety and alcohol abuse, in a short amount of time.”

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA

Agoraphobia Help Online via Skype

Online Psychotherapy via Skype for agoraphobia with panic disorder

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional licensed psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy. This is a system of psychotherapy that works very well by Skype and it’s extremely effective for the treatment of agoraphobia. People suffering from agoraphobia find it very important to work online because it’s so difficult to leave the comfort of your home or secure place. This is the biggest feature of agoraphobia, this fear of having a panic attack if you leave a secure comfort zone, and it can become progressively worse over time. Many people I’ve worked with have had agoraphobia for sometimes as much as 10 years.

Agoraphobia is very debilitating and limits just about every aspect of a person’s life. So it’s very important to seek treatment. Mindfulness Therapy is a very good way of working with anxiety in general. It helps you change the underlying patterns of habitual conditioned reactions that feed and sustain your anxiety and panic attacks.

Panic attacks are simply a very acute form of anxiety. It’s like a storm, an anxiety storm.

The best strategy, the best approach, to overcoming agoraphobia is a very systematic system of exposure therapy. But not classical exposure therapy, which is based on the idea of becoming familiar and habituated through repeated exposure to the stressful situation or area or other triggers. That can work but often it’s very inefficient because it simply re-traumatizes you, it simply feeds that anxiety.

So what I have developed is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy. And this is a different approach. It certainly will involve exposure challenges in a systematic approach where you will set yourself goals each day and carry those out. But the key ingredient with mindfulness-based exposure therapy is the preparation and training before and after each challenge. That is what is vital and I feel is often missing in traditional, conventional exposure therapy.

So what do we do in mindfulness-based exposure therapy for agoraphobia? Well you set up a series of challenges. You then do what we call a rehearsal meditation before you do your first challenge. This is where you will play through that challenge in your imagination and specifically look for those triggers and the anxiety reactions that get triggered.

When you find the anxiety you then work with that and train with that anxiety using mindfulness. You build a relationship with that anxiety that’s based on openness and friendliness. These are the two vital requirements for healing anxiety.

Very often people fall into reactive patterns of avoidance and self-criticism or hatred towards that anxiety, and that will not help the healing process. In fact, avoidance and aversion are the two main factors that feed the underlying fear.

So we build a different kind of relationship based on consciousness and compassion for the emotion itself. We learn to see the emotion as being an object in our awareness. We start to break the habit of reactive identification, where we become completely consumed by that anxiety, where we take on the identity of our emotions. Instead we learn to develop a conscious observing relationship where we observe our emotions but we don’t become them. This process is very, very important because if you identify with your anxiety, then you end up feeding it. It is another reactive process like avoidance and aversion that simply feeds the fire of anxiety.

So if you would like to get started with me and you would like to do online psychotherapy for your own agoraphobia and panic attacks and you’d like to schedule some Skype therapy sessions and please go to my website and send me an email.

This approach, the mindfulness-based exposure therapy approach is very efficient and typically people see progress, tremendous progress, within the first three to four sessions. It’s quite different than conventional talk therapy. It’s much more practical. And of course it gives you a set of tools that you can apply yourself between the session, because that’s where the real change happens as you gain more and more experience of applying mindfulness with your exposure challenges. So if you would like to get started with me please contact.

Online Mindfulness Therapist for treating agoraphobia via Skype.

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA

How to Overcome Agoraphobia Online Help via Skype

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I’m a professional online psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders such as agoraphobia. If you’re interested in learning more about how to overcome agoraphobia and other forms of panic disorder then do please go to my website and learn more about the mindfulness therapy methods, and feel free, at any time, to email me and ask any questions you have and I will explain to you in as much detail as I can how Mindfulness Therapy can help you overcome agoraphobia and other forms of severe anxiety.

The key to the mindfulness therapy approach is to give you practical tools that you can apply yourself between sessions. And the two major approaches that you will be practicing yourself after I teach them to you are a combination of a disciplined approach to exposure challenges, so that you will be setting up a series of manageable challenges to extend beyond your comfort zone. And that should be done on a daily basis and often repeating those challenges many times during the day.

So that’s one part, setting up that strategy of regular disciplined challenges. But that alone is not enough. So that’s one of the limitations of exposure therapy. Exposure itself is not enough. You can end up re-traumatizing yourself and making the anxiety worse. You must combine that exposure challenge strategy with adequate preparation and processing beforehand. So there’s a training element and this is where the mindfulness therapy comes in.

Basically, the way that works is that you rehearse the challenge before you do it. Many times you play it through in the mind, whatever that challenge might be. You imagine yourself walking to the edge of your comfort zone just sufficiently that you can access that anxiety. You then work on the most important thing of all which is changing your relationship to the habitual anxiety reactions that get triggered.

The real problem that prevents anxiety disorders from healing and changing is the way that we get lost in habitual reactivity. We simply identify with that anxiety and we become our fear. What we need to do is change our relationship to the anxiety so that we can see it consciously as it arises, and cultivate balance in relationship to your anxiety. It’s like learning to sit on the bank of the river and not fall in. That’s the key component of mindfulness therapy that makes it so effective.

Because anxiety arises is not the end of the story. It’s only because we become identified with that and anxiety reaction. And then, of course, we tend to feed the anxiety with catastrophic thinking and all kinds of cognitive reactivity, as well.

So by training with the anxiety reactions and thought reactions ahead of time you can basically disarm those habitual reactions before they get triggered. So, that’s the training phase that you would do before each of your daily challenges.

Then you do the challenge and during the challenge you basically just put into practice the training that you have perfected before the challenge. This is mostly about staying conscious staying awake, recognizing the reaction that arises, greeting it consciously and also with a degree of friendliness, which is very, very important in all mindfulness work, and not allowing that habitual reaction to take charge.

And then after the completion of a challenge you might meditate again on any fresh anxiety that arose during that challenge. And again help process that reactivity so you can neutralize it.

Then you can repeat the challenge again and each time the training gets stronger and stronger and stronger.

Most people can expect to see quite significant improvements, and that includes a reduction in the intensity of anxiety, within three to four sessions, three to four weeks of practicing in exposure challenges and training.

Eventually the training becomes so effective that the anxiety doesn’t arise at all and that is a remarkable experience for people who have often struggled with agoraphobia or other forms of extreme anxiety for many years.

So if you’d like to get started with online therapy for your agoraphobia or panic attacks, send me an email then we can schedule a Skype session and we can get started.

Agoraphobia Help Online via Skype.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Teletherapy for Agoraphobia over Skype

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I provide online therapy by Skype for the treatment of anxiety disorders, including agoraphobia. So if you’re looking for teletherapy for agoraphobia, then I invite you to go to my website and learn more about the online therapy service that I offer.

All my sessions are done via Skype. That is quite important. You must be able to see each other in order to have a successful psychotherapy experience. Being able to see each other means that the sessions will be much more effective in helping you learn how to work with your anxiety. So that’s the primary focus of these teletherapy sessions. I will teach you very practical mindfulness-based methods that I have developed and found to be very effective for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks and basically allowing you to recover from the very debilitating effects of agoraphobia.

The primary method that I will teach you during the online sessions is called mindfulness-based exposure therapy. And this is where we design a series of exposures that might be quite simple to begin with and then progressively more difficult that you then practice yourself at home between sessions.

The mindfulness part of this practice is preparing before you do each challenge. So if it’s, for example, walking to a local shop or going into a mall or even driving your car for a short period, then you basically, will run through that challenge in your imagination, you’ll visualize doing that challenge and specifically look for any anxiety reactions that may occur. When you find those anxiety reactions you then start to work with them using the methods of Mindfulness Therapy, which I will teach you during these sessions.

But primarily the idea here is that you train yourself to heal those anxiety reactions before you do the exposure challenge. That’s the important principle here. You have to train with that anxiety to neutralize it before you do the challenge. When you’ve done that, when you’ve neutralized that anxiety reaction so you can imagine doing that challenge without feeling any anxiety, then when you do the exposure challenge that will reinforce this new perception, this new way of processing the particular triggers that are associated with that challenge.

So, for example, one person that I worked with for a few months was not able to leave the house at all. She could not leave the front door, the thought of that was completely overwhelming. The anxiety was totally preventing her stepping outside the front door.

So the mindfulness-based exposure therapy is about having her imagine her stepping out side the front door, whether it’s one or two feet, it doesn’t matter. But we designed that challenge. We then imagine doing it. We look for that anxiety and then we start to develop a mindful relationship with that anxiety that is based on compassion and is based on a very strong non-reactive relationship with the emotion itself.

So the real problem is that when anxiety gets triggered it, it tends to proliferate. It triggers more anxiety through reactive thoughts and that simply feeds the anxiety and it stops it from healing. But when you can sit with that anxiety and not react, then you’re not feeding that anxiety and it begins to diminish in intensity. The more that you can sit with it without reacting the less intense it beccomes.

And when you’ve done this in a very focused way, by actually deliberately bringing your mindful attention to that anxiety, that rate of neutralizing the anxiety greatly increases. So this is what we do before we do the challenge. We work with the anxiety, learning to be with it without reacting and learning to relate to that anxiety with compassion. That is, how can you help that anxiety feel more comfortable? You learn how to comfort the emotion in the same way that you might comfort a child, for example, that was afraid. How would you do that? You would establish a conscious, non-reactive relationship with the child. This is what we need to do internally. We need to establish this quality of non-reactive, compassionate relationship with our anxiety.

That is what will allow that anxiety to heal much more than any other methods and certainly more than trying to struggle through the anxiety. That approach tends to reinforce the anxiety yet again because it’s providing evidence of how difficult it is to step outside the front door.

We want to be able to imagine stepping outside the front door with no anxiety at all. Then once you do that, it now establishes a new experience that becomes learned and well established in the mind and in the brain as a new learned pathway, that stepping outside the front door is no longer a source of anxiety.

And then you would move on to the next challenge, which might be walking to the street. And so on. So we work in a very focused and strategic way. This is what is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy and it’s very, very effective. It’s much more effective than traditional exposure therapy. It’s completely different than talk therapy in the conventional sense. Trying to understand your anxiety and trying to convince yourself that you don’t need to experience the anxiety, that it’s irrational. That kind of approach, in my experience, is practically totally ineffective.

What does work is when you gain the actual experience. First in the mind through imaginational exposure, if you like, and then in the actual exposure, afterwards. That experience is what produces the changes.

So if you’d like to learn more about teletherapy for agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders using Skype, then do please look at my website and contact me if you have any questions.

We can schedule a Skype therapy session and you can see for yourself how this works. Most people see quite substantial improvements after the first two or three sessions once you start learning and applying the mindfulness approach that I that I will teach you. It’s very, very effective. So please contact me if you would like to learn how to overcome your anxiety and apply this kind of methodology. Thank you.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY

Online Therapy for Agoraphobia via Skype or Zoom

This online therapy service focuses on teaching you how to overcome your anxiety and panic attacks through guidance in Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy via Skype or Zoom.

This is a very effective approach and most people see significant improvements after 3-4 online sessions.

It is recommended that you use a video platform like Skype or Zoom because being able to see each other greatly improves the effectiveness of online therapy.

This online therapy service is based in Colorado and available worldwide, serving the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom (UK), Ireland, and Western Europe.

Online Therapy for Agoraphobia

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