Online Counseling Therapy for Overcoming Agoraphobia
Learn how to start Online Counseling Therapy via Skype for Overcoming Agoraphobia through Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy.
I will guide you through the process of Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy during our Skype Therapy sessions together.
Online Therapy via Skype is available for the USA, Canada, UK & Western Europe.
Go to my main website to learn more and to schedule a Skype Therapy session: Online Therapy for agoraphobia
Online Therapy for Agoraphobia & Social Anxiety Disorder without medication
Online Mindfulness Psychotherapist for Recovery from Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without relying on medications.
Talk to a Therapist Online using Skype for highly effective online help and mindfulness therapy for overcoming Agoraphobia, Chronic Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Social Anxiety Disorder.
If you want to recover completely from agoraphobia you must treat the underlying conditioned anxiety reactions.
Medications don’t do this. Medications only provide a temporary relief from anxiety symptoms, but do nothing to change the underlying psychological cause of your anxiety, which is blind habitual negative 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 people see significant improvements after 3-4 Skype sessions.
Online therapy is just as effective as in-person therapy 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 good 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 therapy 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…
"I unreservedly recommend engaging Peter’s services in, what has been for me, an extremely effective method of learning about my inner self in ways that I’ve never been able to achieve before."
Find an online psychotherapist to treat agoraphobia
Agoraphobia Therapy Online via Skype
Email me to schedule a Skype therapy session with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in online mindfulness therapy for anxiety and depression.
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong and I provide online therapy via Skype for anxiety and depression and particularly for the treatment of agoraphobia. So if you're looking for agoraphobia therapy online I invite you to go to my website. Read more about this online therapy service that I offer hand please contact me if you would like to schedule some Skype Therapy sessions with me to help you overcome your agoraphobia.
So if you are suffering from agoraphobia it is essential that you are able to find an online therapist to work with simply because it's so difficult for you to leave home. And there are a number of services now offering online psychotherapy for the treatment of agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders too.
Whether you choose me or someone else, the important thing is that you find a therapist to work with who uses Skype or similar video platform because it's very important that you can see each other. That will improve the quality of communication and the quality of the therapy that you are getting.
The other thing is make sure that you feel completely comfortable with the therapist that you select. Make sure that they answer your questions about the therapist's approach and trust your own judgment, your own intuition. That is by far the best guide, much more so than how many letters the therapist has after his name. What's important is that you feel comfortable with the therapist and you like the approach that they are offering.
So in the style of agoraphobia therapy that I offer is based on the application of mindfulness. Mindfulness Therapy is a very effective way of working with anxiety disorders like agoraphobia. It also helps you manage panic attacks and any other aspect of anxiety that's causing you distress and that are limiting the quality of your life.
So in Mindfulness Therapy the primary approach that we take is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, and that is where you will basically design a series of challenges with my help so that you can begin to train yourself out of the anxiety habits.
So in mindfulness training we teach that suffering like anxiety and depression is basically an emotional habit. It is the result of conditioning. This habit formation gets started, often in childhood, and it never gets resolved. And this anxiety shows up in different forms different types of anxiety such as agoraphobia or social anxiety or a phobia or panic attacks or driving anxiety, etc.
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So the first stage is to set up a schedule of exposure challenges. And then what is most important is to train using mindfulness for each challenge that you schedule. Exposure therapy by itself is not sufficient. You must train with the anxiety beforehand.
So we do this by a technique called Rehearsal Meditation, whereby you imagine doing that challenge in order to find the anxiety and then you start working with that anxiety using mindfulness and compassion.
You look at the structure of the anxiety, you find out how it works. You look at the patterns of reactive thoughts that feed that anxiety and you begin to change your relationship to the anxiety formation. You start to break free from its influence by becoming more and more aware of it, more conscious of the thoughts and the emotion. The basic rule here is that the more you see, the less fear you will experience. That may seem counter-intuitive but it's actually the case. Fear is based on what you don't see much more than what you do see.
So we do this in great detail with the challenge in our imagination before we do the challenge. That's why it's called a Rehearsal Meditation. When you can visualize doing that challenge, whatever it might be, perhaps just walking around the block or driving in the car, if you can do that, whatever it might be, when you feel that you can do that with the complete absence of anxiety then you do the live challenge, the exposure challenge, and your training that you did in the Rehearsal Meditation will take effect and will effectively inhibit any anxiety reactions during the challenge.
And when you take this approach you'll start to see dramatic improvements in a very short time. Typically, most of my clients see quite dramatic changes after three to four weeks of doing this kind of progressive exposure challenge using mindfulness.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
How to Overcome Agoraphobia Online Counseling by 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.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
The best agoraphobia treatment without drugs
Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I'm a professional psychotherapist and I offer mindfulness based online therapy for agoraphobic anxiety and panic attacks.
The mindfulness approach is extremely effective and during online therapy sessions I will teach you how to work with your agoraphobic anxiety using the techniques of mindfulness to help you prevent your becoming overwhelmed by the anxiety reactions. We do this by actually meditating on our anxiety before we do any challenges.
Meditating helps to change the relationship that you have with your anxiety and this is absolutely essential, because the biggest problem that I encounter is that people suffering from anxiety tend to become identified with their emotions. They tend to become consumed by their emotions. They effectively lose their identity and become the emotions and this creates a very reactive place that is very difficult to escape from.
So with mindfulness training you can change this pattern and learn to develop a relationship with your anxiety whereby you do not become identified with it where you can see the anxiety as an observer. This is essential for change. Once you begin to do this the rate of recovery from agoraphobic anxiety and panic attacks increases dramatically, and most people will see quite substantial changes after only four or five sessions with me once they start applying the mindfulness-based techniques.
So the basic idea is that you will schedule sessions with me and we will work on setting up a series of challenges that you can manage and then you prepare for these challenges using mindfulness meditation. You do that challenge and you meditate on any anxiety that arose during that challenge.
And each time we learn a little more about how to change our relationship to our anxiety so that we basically break free from the habit of identification and becoming overwhelmed by it. And this approach is, from my experience, the most effective there is for overcoming agoraphobic anxiety.
So if you'd like to get started, then email me to schedule a Skype therapy session with me.