Get online counseling for agoraphobia

Online Therapist for help with Agoraphobia via Skype

Online Mindfulness Therapy for Stopping Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without relying on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.

See a Therapist Online over Skype for highly effective online help and counseling for overcoming Chronic Agoraphobia, Chronic Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Social Anxiety.

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

Prescription medications don’t do this. Medications only treat from anxiety symptoms, but do very little to change the underlying psychological cause of your anxiety.

During Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy (Mindfulness Therapy) we work on neutralizing these habitual reactions directly at the psychological level. This approach is extremely 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 essential for effective communication and good psychotherapy.

Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for Agoraphobia

Working with Inner Imagery – The secret to healing Agoraphobia

Internally, every emotion is structured around imagery – inner pictorial representations that resonate with the emotion. For example, anger is usually associate with the color red and anger is structured around imagery that is red in color and probably hot as well.

We can learn about the structure of our inner imagery by observing our emotions with mindfulness. From what we learn, we can intuitively see what changes in the imagery might be helpful. Change the imagery and you change the structure of the emotion.

People with agoraphobia typically have a great deal of inner imagery, very often based on the feeling of emptiness, an inner void or black hole that threatens to swallow up everything.

Discovering the structure of this imagery provides a very powerful tool for changing the intensity of the anxiety underlying agoraphobia. This approach is one of the most effective treatment for agoraphobia and was pioneered by Dr. Strong in the 1980s.

Email me to learn more about this online counseling service and schedule an online therapy session with me. Inquiries welcome!

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

“I have practiced working with difficult emotions with many wonderful Buddhist teachers, including Pema Chodron and Adyashanti. Peter taught me aspects and nuances that were completely new to me that are making a huge difference and allowing me to meet and heal these parts of myself more efficiently and actually with less distress.”

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

Get Help from an Online Psychotherapist for Agoraphobia

Online Psychotherapy over 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.

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

Agoraphobia Help from Home – Online Mindfulness Therapy

How to overcome agoraphobia without medications through Online Mindfulness Therapy

Email me to schedule a Skype therapy session with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in online mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders, including agoraphobia, and depression.

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional online psychotherapist based in Colorado and I offer online therapy via Skype to help people manage anxiety and depression more effectively using the techniques of mindfulness therapy.

This is a system of psychotherapy that I’ve been developing over the last ten or more years now that seems to be extremely effective for anxiety and also depression but basically is very effective for helping you heal the underlying anxiety itself directly. And it does this and a variety of ways one of which is by helping you work on those patterns of reactive thinking that feed the anxiety.

So with agoraphobia the typical situation is that we get obsessed with anxiety producing thoughts about what will happen to us if we leave our safety zone for example that’s a common kind of thought pattern. You know the fear of having a panic attack in public. The fear of fainting or being sick or anything else like that. These are these are fed by a whole system of internal dialogue that is relentless and feeding that anxiety.

So I’m often asked how can I overcome my agoraphobia without using medication and to do this effectively you have to address this underlying psychological process of reactive thinking that’s feeding your anxiety. Medications have their prey’s place you know the selective serotonin uptake inhibitors you know these have their place but medications can change that underlying process. All the medication will ever do is reduce symptoms for a while. But that’s not really healing the problem is not changing the essential underlying psychological habits that are creating your anxiety and fear.

So this is why it is recommended that you look into process oriented psychotherapy like cognitive behavioral therapy or exposure and prevention type protocols. Because these help you actually deal with that underlying reactive process.

I teach mindfulness based exposure therapy which is really great very effective indeed for agoraphobia specifically. It really helps you develop a strategic approach to overcoming your anxiety. So some of the exposure therapy models are OK up to a point but they don’t really tell you how to process the anxiety itself directly. What to do with that emotion? In mindfulness work we work exclusively on reprocessing that emotion, that habit that gets activated.

If you’d like to learn more about the mindfulness approach for healing anxiety including agoraphobia then simply go to my website. Learn More and e-mail me with any questions you may have. Of course it’s very convenient to be able to do your psychotherapy sessions online if you’re suffering from agoraphobia, and that’s one of the reasons why I specialize in Skype Therapy. It’s very important that you can see each other. That’s why we use Skype. This improves the quality of communication and makes the therapy sessions much more effective.

So during our sessions together I will teach you how to develop a strategy for overcoming your anxiety using mindfulness based exposure therapy. So what does this entail? Well it it entails designing a series of challenges that are manageable but that tend to produce anxiety. So it might be simply leaving the comfort of your own home and walking to a shop or going to a mall or any number of things. You will know what those triggers are that trigger your anxiety and panic attacks.

We design a series of challenges where we basically take one challenge and we prepare for it using mindfulness methods. This basically means playing the challenge through in the mind, visualizing going to the mall for example, and then watching for the anxiety reaction and all of the reactive thoughts that get triggered when that anxiety is triggered in the mind.

When we find those anxiety thoughts and the emotion itself we then start to build a different kind of relationship with it that is based on consciousness, on mindfulness, where we can become the observer of these thoughts and emotions but without becoming identified with them. In this way we break the habit that causes our anxiety.

Let me help you break free from your agoraphobia through Mindfulness Therapy.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Online Mindfulness Therapist for treating agoraphobia via Skype

Agoraphobia Help from Home – Online Mindfulness Therapy

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional psychotherapist and I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy, which I teach online over Skype.

I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy for anxiety disorders but I also treat depression and PTSD and many other emotional conditions that respond well to Mindfulness Therapy.

In particular, I offer online therapy for people suffering from agoraphobia. So if you’re interested in online therapy for your agoraphobia from home then please email me and ask any questions you may have about this service and I’ll be happy to explain to you how I can help you overcome your agoraphobia using Mindfulness Therapy.

This approach is very effective indeed, especially for anxiety disorders. Basically what we will do during these sessions is we will learn how to work with your anxiety in a very practical and very focused and very strategic way. That’s what makes the difference.

So this begins by establishing a routine of exposure challenges. So these are challenges that you can determine for yourself that you want to use to train yourself out of the anxiety habit, if you like. You want to find a whole range of challenges that you can go through one by one and develop more and more confidence and learn how to defuse that anxiety. So that might be as simple as walking to the end of your driveway. Or it could be going into a mall or some challenge like that.

Now the important thing with exposure challenges like this is that you prepare for them well, that you prepare ahead of time. It is not sufficient to just throw yourself into the challenge and hope that you will survive and overcome your anxiety. The chances are you will simply re-traumatize yourself and make that anxiety worse.

But if you train for it well, then the exposure challenges can become very effective indeed. So I call this mindfulness-based exposure therapy.

So if you are going to the mall for example, you would sit down and meditate on that scenario. You would play it through in the mind like a movie, watching yourself going to the mall, with all of the particular triggers that are there, and then you look for any anxiety that gets triggered as you play through this scene.

When you find the anxiety you then consciously build a mindfulness-based relationship with that anxiety. And this is based on compassion and friendliness, and really, learning how to comfort that anxiety as if it was like a small child that’s coming to you for comfort after being scared by something.

So we need to learn to approach our emotions in the same way. We need to see them as being visitors, if you like, that get triggered in the mind that really need our help to help them resolve their anxiety.

Technically speaking, you are not anxious; it’s the emotion itself that is anxious. so we learn to see it this way. We built this mindfulness-based relationship with the emotion and we help it basically heal so it can overcome its own anxiety.

Then we can rehearse them further with those triggers and we can imagine being in the mall and not feel any anxiety, because the anxiety has resolved itself. We have given it what it needs to resolve itself by being a friend to the anxiety, if that makes any sense.

So we do this in a very detailed strategic way before we do the challenge. Then we do the challenge and then after the challenge we might do another meditation where we replay the scene again, which will now be fresh and we’ll be even more contextualized, and we look for any anxiety that got triggered and we work with that in the same way.

So in this way we we progressively train the anxiety to resolve itself over and over again until basically it doesn’t arise. So this is what we mean by a strategic approach. And if you do this in this kind of strategic way you will see results in a very short time. And most people see quite significant improvements after the first three to four sessions of this mindfulness-based exposure therapy.

So if you would like to learn more, please go to my website and then contact me by email to schedule a Skype therapy session in which I will go through this process in great detail and help you learn how to build an exposure challenge routine and how to meditate on your anxiety yourself so that you can do this via self between sessions. So if you would like to learn more please email me.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE COUNSELING THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY

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