Online Mindfulness Therapy through Skype for Agoraphobia


Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype for agoraphobia

Online therapist for agoraphobia
Online therapist for agoraphobia

Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for treating Agoraphobia Online

This online agoraphobia therapy service allows you to get help for your agoraphobia without having to leave home and without depending on medications.

Please CONTACT ME and lets schedule a Skype therapy session.

Contact me via email to learn more about Skype therapy sessions with me. During these Skype sessions of Mindfulness Therapy I will teach you how to apply mindfulness for facilitating recovery from all forms of anxiety, including agoraphobia and panic attacks, and other forms of emotional suffering using the well-tested techniques of Mindfulness Therapy.

This approach is very effective and you will see significant changes after the first 2-3 sessions with me.

Online Mindfulness-based Skype Therapy is very effective for stopping anxiety and depression without using drugs. It is always better to treat the root cause of your emotional suffering as opposed to just treating symptoms.

The main healing factors cultivated during Mindfulness Therapy are Conscious Awareness, which is essential for neutralizing the unconscious psychological habits that cause anxiety and depression, and Inner Compassion, which is what promotes healing and resolution of emotional pain.

Online Therapy for agoraphobia

“I had one Skype session with Peter Strong and it has helped me heaps in my recovery. I am now trying to apply mindfulness in my everyday, whether I go back to depressive or anxious states, or whether I am feeling normal, mindfulness helps you view life in an easier, more adventurous way.”

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online therapy for help overcoming your agoraphobia

Agoraphobia is characterized by intense anxiety reactions and panic attacks related to a change of physical location, such as leaving home or going into a public place like a mall or cinema or restaurant and movement into situations that trigger intense anxiety, often with panic attacks. There is typically a very strong sense of not being safe away from a “secure zone” such as your home. In its extreme form the agoraphobic becomes confined to their home and cannot leave the security of their house; they become house-bound.

One woman I worked with did not feel safe even leaving her bedroom and certainly not her home. But after applying the mindfulness-based methods that I teach she did finally overcome her extreme fear and was able to get married and live in a different city. She was able to drive again and go to college, which was not possible before therapy. She had been living as a prisoner of her anxiety for years. Talk therapy was either ineffective or not possible. Her doctor had prescribed prozac, but that didn’t seem to help much.

The fear of having a panic attack is a major concern for many people with agoraphobia, so much so that it progressively limits travel and social situations. It is this “fear of fear” that is the major driving force that leads to a downward spiral of ever increasing anxiety.

Online Mindfulness Therapy using Skype is an exciting new approach to help people imprisoned by this debilitating form of anxiety.

Online Agoraphobia Therapy allows people to work on their anxiety in the comfort of their homes and gradually develop the tools that will allow them to venture out and become more confident in themselves so that they can participate and get more enjoyment from life.

The Mindfulness Therapy approach that I teach has proven itself very effective for treating anxiety and panic attacks and when you start practicing the Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy protocol that I will teach you during our Skype therapy sessions together you will see rapid improvement.

Please contact me if you are committed to overcoming your agoraphobia and you are ready to schedule Skype therapy sessions with me.

Online counseling for overcoming agoraphobia

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online therapy for overcoming your agoraphobia

Online therapist for agoraphobia

Online therapy for agoraphobia

The 4 steps for overcoming agoraphobia

There are four key factors that you need to apply if you want to overcome agoraphobia:

  1. Break out of the “victim mentality” that keeps you imprisoned.
  2. Stop looking at agoraphobia as an “illness” but see it as the result of accumulated reactive habits.
  3. Stop avoiding your fear because that will only reinforce the fear.
  4. Take a strategic and disciplined approach to overcoming your habits and fear. This is called mindfulness-based exposure therapy.

If you approach your agoraphobia in this way you will break free from this terribly debilitating condition. It will take hard work and commitment on your part but it is totally achievable.

I will help you in your recovery approach if you would like to work with me. All sessions are one-on-one with me via Skype.

Online Therapy for the treatment of Agoraphobia

Online Psychotherapy for treating Agoraphobia

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional online therapist offering online therapy as a way of helping you overcome your anxiety or depression or addiction. And it’s much more convenient and much more comfortable for you.

I really enjoy working with people over Skype. It is much more empowering than going to see a therapist in an office. This approach, I feel, is much more effective, especially if you’re working with anxiety and particularly if you’re struggling with agoraphobia.

So agoraphobia usually begins with a series of panic attacks often appearing for no particular reason but that are very distressing, very unpleasant. And what happens is that we tend to develop fear, reactive fear to the reoccurrence of these panic attacks, and that fear then converts into avoidance. So we try to avoid any situation in which that panic attack may reoccur.

So these patterns of avoidance tend to proliferate, and we start avoiding more and more situations based on that fear.

The problem is that avoidance fuels fear, so the more you become wrapped up in patterns of avoidance the more fear you will experience and then that leads to more avoidance behaviors. And so it sort of spirals out of control and you become more and more limited and confined to a smaller and smaller space.

Sometimes people are unable to leave their house. They’re afraid of any kind of zone that is out of that immediate comfort zone of their house. So going to the grocery store, driving a car, even walking around the neighborhood may be way too challenging. And this is the result of this accumulation of avoidance and the fear that is fed by avoidance.

So the first understanding we must have if you want to beat agoraphobia, if you want to overcome agoraphobia, is that you must not accept these avoidance habits. Instead we must turn that around and start facing each situation.

But we have to do this in a strategic way and with lots of training and that is what we find is usually lacking in classical exposure type therapy.

Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia
Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia

Online Psychotherapy for recovering from Agoraphobia

It is not enough to just force your way through a traumatic situation. That will simply reinforce the fear. It will not resolve it. So exposure therapy as it’s usually taught is basically going to be mostly ineffective.

You cannot expect yourself to habituate to that situation simply by repeating it over and over again. That could also simply repeat the fear, the trauma, over and over again.

In many ways agoraphobia is really a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s that reaction to the trauma of the panic attacks that you had originally.

So exposure therapy by itself is absolutely not enough. You must take a much more strategic approach, but it is, of course, a necessary part of your recovery. If you want to beat agoraphobia you must undertake progressive exposures. We understand that. But how do you do that? That’s the question.

So in the mindfulness approach, what I call mindfulness-based exposure therapy, we will start by making a list of all of our challenges, those situations that we are currently avoiding. We turn that into a list and we train with each one of those challenges on that list and we do it thoroughly until we experience no anxiety whatsoever.

The way that we train is the vital component here. This is what makes the difference. You must train in a very thorough way before you do any of those challenges so that you can avoid that re-traumatization.

So we train through a process called mindfulness meditation. And this, basically, is where you would meditate on the challenge before you do it.

So you play that challenge through your mind in detail and you look very carefully for any fear reactions and any thought reactions that get triggered as you imagine going into the grocery store, or whatever it may be.

You want to get that reaction into consciousness, we want to see it consciously rather than have it operate unconsciously as a habit. That’s the difference. We bring consciousness to it and that is mindfulness.

The first aspect of mindfulness is developing a conscious relationship with your experience. So here we evoke the anxiety reaction but on our terms and with consciousness, which is quite protective in many ways.

We look at the anxiety; we develop a relationship with the anxiety but as an OBSERVER. That is what consciousness allows. You can observe the anxiety or the thoughts without becoming identified with it, without becoming a prisoner of that thought or emotion.

Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia
Online counseling therapy via Skype for recovery from agoraphobia

So when you’re observing something you are the observer not the object that you are observing. So here we are learning to see the anxiety or those anxiety-producing thoughts as objects in the mind.

This is actually what they are and what they have always been. The anxiety is an object that is triggered and arises and the mind, stays there for a while and then usually disappears.

The problem is that we lose that perspective as observer and we become identified with the emotion or the thought or the belief, whatever it may be. We become identified with the object, the mental object. When that happens that also triggers fear. So it feeds the reactive fear that leads to more and more avoidance vs.

So the first part of our training is to be able to sit with the fear and not identify with it, to stay as the observer. That is an immense achievement when you can get there. It’s not that difficult. You just have to know what you are doing.

You have to approach this with an understanding of your the purpose of why you are imagining doing that challenge, why you are meditating on it. The purpose is to establish that new relationship of observer seeing the object, the emotion. That effectively separates you out from the emotion and stops that process of reactive identification, which is the major issue.

Then as we continue our meditation on the fear we can begin to explore how it works, its structure. And the structure is made up of two primary parts. The first is the constellation of other emotions, other emotional reactions and other thought reactions that become conglomerated into that fear.

So we begin to see the component parts that make up the structure of that fear. That’s very important because it’s easier to change each little part than it is to try and change the whole thing. So we look at the thought structure and the emotional structure of the anxiety of fear that you’re meditating on.

Change the imagery of the emotion

Then we also look at another part of that structure which is immensely important and that is the imagery of the emotion. The way that you see the emotion in the mind is what actually causes the emotion.

So thoughts do not cause anxiety; it is actually the other way round. Anxiety causes anxiety-related thoughts which then feed the underlying anxiety.

What causes anxiety is internal psychological imagery. So we look at this imagery and we then explore how to help that imagery change, because when the imagery changes the emotion changes.

So if you want your anxiety to diminish you have to change the imagery of the anxiety. That is how emotions heal naturally in the mind. Their imagery will change over time and in meditation we are just speeding this process up.

So this we call the response of compassion, which is a very important and vital part of mindfulness meditation. We respond to the anxiety that we have provoked in the mind, if you like, or invited into the mind.

We respond to it with compassion, which is, how can I help you heal? And that involves changing the emotional imagery and it involves seeing the reactive cluster of thoughts and other emotions and working with them in the same way, changing their imagery and changing our identification with them.

It’s all about training

So this is what I call training. So we train in this way, teaching the fear to basically resolve itself, so that we can imagine going to the grocery store without any fear at all. Then is the time to try the exposure challenge and then you go to the grocery store and you watch for any anxiety that may arise.

Often you’ll find that it will start to subside very much quicker than you usually do. Why? Because you’ve done the training beforehand. So that training begins to take over automatically and the anxiety begins to resolve itself in the grocery store if it ever gets triggered.

But that’s not all! So after the exposure challenge we then repeat our meditation. This is called a review meditation. We review any anxiety that may have gotten triggered during that fresh exposure challenge.

We work with it in exactly the same way. We help it resolve until we felt that it is completely resolved and that we can reimagine the challenge that we just did without any anxiety.

Then after a brief rest period we repeat the challenge again. We meditate before the challenge. You do the challenge. You meditate after the challenge.

So this is a very strategic form of training and it is because of that very focused quality of this work that that it will work much more effectively, and people typically see quite remarkable changes when they apply mindfulness-based exposure therapy, often within a matter of weeks instead of years.

This approach is very practical, very focused, and it’s something that you can do. And that’s very important.

So I do not advocate treatment-based approaches because that simply reinforces your identity as a victim, as an agoraphobic. That is not the way to go. I do not advocate medications because that reinforces your identity as a victim. That is the problem. So it simply reinforces the fear.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online therapy for agoraphobia

Online Support for Agoraphobia

Online Psychotherapy for Agoraphobia

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I’m a professional psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders, including agoraphobia.

So if you’re looking for online support for agoraphobia then this is a good service for you to consider. Just go to my website and read more about this online therapy service and the mindfulness therapy approach for agoraphobia, and email me with any questions you may have.

So mindfulness therapy is one of the most effective ways of treating anxiety disorders such as agoraphobia. What it does is it teaches you how to break free from this central problem that we call Reactive Identification. This is where we become overwhelmed by thoughts and emotional reactions that get triggered, and it’s very important to break this habit because every time we become overwhelmed and become identified with our thoughts and with our emotions we feed those emotions and they become stronger and this simply intensifies the anxiety.

So do please contact me through my Contact Page, if you would like to set up Skype Therapy sessions to talk to a psychotherapist online over Skype. This is a very effective way of getting the help that you need for overcoming your agoraphobia.

Typically, I see people once a week, but sometimes more frequently if you want to get involved with a more aggressive treatment plan for your agoraphobia.

So the mindfulness-based exposure therapy that I teach online is very effective for overcoming agoraphobia, and it works very well online. And typically you should be able to see dramatic improvements after the first couple of sessions.

The key is learning how to apply mindfulness to work with your anxiety and to train with your anxiety in a very strategic and focused way.

Just talking about your emotions is not really very effective for changing the underlying psychological process that causes your anxiety.

So to heal anxiety, you have to change the relationship that you have with your emotions, this is fundamental. The real issue is that we tend to have a reactive relationship with our anxiety. We react to it by proliferating anxiety-based thoughts.

So the emotion acts as a fuel source for producing anxiety thoughts, and these reactive thoughts feed the anxiety underneath. So a very important part of your recovery process will involve learning how to break free from these reactive thoughts so that you can sit with your anxiety without reacting. That’s the first part of the recovery process.

You have to learn how to stop feeding the anxiety and then we learn how to develop compassion towards the anxiety itself, seeing it as an object, seeing it as an object in the mind that we can respond to and interact with in a way that promotes healing.

And this is where we do a lot of work with the imagery of the emotion. When you interact with the imagery of anxiety, you have something much more tangible to work with and that you can help change.

For example, you can help it become smaller in size. When the imagery becomes smaller, the intensity of the emotion becomes less. Working with the emotional imagery will have a very profound effect on promoting the healing of that anxiety.

So this is all part of the mindfulness-based training that we do with our anxiety, as we go about training ourselves out of those blind habitual reactions.

So if you would like to talk to a mindfulness-based psychotherapist online over Skype for effective help with your agoraphobia, then do please contact me.

Online Therapy for Agoraphobia via Skype

Online counseling for agoraphobia

The approach to overcoming agoraphobia is one of mindfulness-based exposure therapy. It’s fairly straightforward.

Basically, you will design a number of challenges that you will prepare for each and every day. And you start with very simple challenges that you can do with very little anxiety. But nevertheless you prepare for that challenge, whether it’s walking outside into the garden or walking around the corner. That’s often a big trigger for many agoraphobics when they can no longer see their house. Whatever the challenge we practice for it beforehand. And that’s really what makes mindfulness-based exposure therapy for agoraphobia somewhat different than more conventional approaches.

We do this by playing through the challenge in our mind, we imagine ourselves doing the challenge, but we would then watch for any anxiety that gets triggered in the mind. And this is before we do the challenge.

When we notice that anxiety that gets triggered by the thoughts of walking around the garden, or around the block or whatever it might be. Then we focus our conscious awareness, our mindfulness skills on that emotion with two purposes in mind.

The first purpose is to establish a relationship with that emotion which is conscious and in which you do not become overwhelmed, is not reactively identify with that emotion, you’re able to be with the fear but not become afraid. So that’s the first essential part of training and preparation before you do any of your challenges.

The second part of preparing for our challenge is to work with the emotion itself and help it heal, help it resolve, help it reduce its intensity, again before you ever do the challenge itself. And there’s a number of ways that we do this, but yet again the most effective first step is to establish a relationship with your fear in which you are not afraid. So you are effectively being with your emotion and not feeding that fear. So you, in that process, develop more and more freedom from that fear. You become stronger by sitting with that fear.

We also work with other factors which contribute to the anxiety such as the imagery of the fear, how you see it and the mind is absolutely central to how the motion works. And typically the fear is very large and very close and that’s what causes that fear to manifest. When we start to investigate this imagery we can change it because we have a conscious relationship with it.

When you change the imagery you most definitely change the emotion. So that’s another very important part of mindfulness therapy which is part of the training that you will do yourself before you do your challenge.

I will teach you how to do these two steps involved in preparation for your challenges. And when you practice this in this very strategic focused way and then you will most definitely diminish that anxiety until you feel completely confident and comfortable in doing your first challenge and then moving on to a harder challenge. And in this way we progress until we overcome the agoraphobia altogether.

So if you’d like to learn more about how to do all this simply go to my website and please send me an email and we can schedule some therapy sessions at a time that works for you. Thank you.

Online Psychotherapy for Agoraphobia

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I provide online psychotherapy for agoraphobia, sometimes called teletherapy, via Skype. So if you’re suffering from agoraphobia then Skype therapy can be a wonderful opportunity for you to get the help that you need to uncover these awful habitual patterns of reactivity that keep you imprisoned in your home or in a very restricted area.

So it’s very important to find a way of overcoming these habitual anxiety reactions and I have been developing an approach that’s called Mindfulness Therapy that’s very effective for agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders.

Whatever style of psychotherapy you select, it’s important that you find one that’s very practical, such as cognitive behavioral therapy or Mindfulness Therapy, which is my specialty, and whatever approach you use must include some form of exposure therapy that enables you to start pushing those boundaries out to start overcoming your habitual anxiety reactions.

So I’ve developed a system called mindfulness-based exposure therapy for agoraphobia, which works extremely well and is very easy to learn via Skype. I will teach you how to approach your anxiety using mindfulness techniques that you can practice yourself and start to push back those boundaries.

So typically I see people once a week and then they practice the methods that I teach between sessions, and you should expect to see significant changes and improvements after the first three or four weeks.

Once you start applying the methods I will teach you, you will rapidly overcome your anxiety and start to break free from the prison of habitual anxiety.

So the online therapy option, of course, is very beneficial if not completely necessary if you’re suffering from agoraphobia because it’s so difficult for you to leave home or travel to see a therapist in their office; it’s often impossible.

I’ve worked with people who have really not ventured outside their house for many years and often just find it impossible to go to a therapist’s office, or to go to any kind of social set setting like a mall or a cinema, or anything really, that’s outside of that very restricted secure zone that most agoraphobia live in.

So it’s possible to change all of that if you start applying a very strategic and focused approach like mindfulness-based exposure therapy.

Skype is a very good form of online therapy because it allows you to see each other and that’s really important for good psychotherapy. So make sure that whoever you work with offers therapy via Skype.

So in the first session I will start to explain to you how to set up a treatment plan, if you like, to overcome your agoraphobia.

The first part of that treatment plan is to set out a series of challenges. This is the exposure part. You must have a set of well-defined challenges that you can work on in a systematic way on a daily basis to start overcoming your habitual anxiety.

The approach to each challenge is one of training using mindfulness. This is essential. So I do not recommend exposure therapy by itself. That is not sufficient. It is not going to give you the tools to manage and overcome anxiety and often people are simply re-traumatized when they just throw themselves into a challenge situation.

So we train before we do each challenge and this involves rehearsal meditation. Mindfulness meditation is really about freeing the mind from those anxiety habits.

So the way we do that in mindfulness meditation is to meditate on the challenge itself. To find the anxiety reactions they get triggered and then to respond to those anxiety reactions in a way that leads to their resolution so that we can imagine doing that challenge without any anxiety at all. That’s essential. That’s part of the training, a rehearsal meditation that we would do before the challenge.

Then during the challenge you basically rely on your training to overcome any anxiety that might get triggered.

And then after the challenge you do another kind of meditation we would call a review meditation. Which is to play through that challenge that you’ve just done to look for any anxiety that may have still arisen. And then you work with that using the methods of mindfulness that I will teach you to help resolve that anxiety so that you can imagine the challenge that you’ve just done and not experience that anxiety; that you can feel greater confidence.

And then after that we would repeat the challenge in the same way. And we keep cycling through rehearsal meditation, challenge, review meditation, take a break and then repeat again until you can do that challenge without any anxiety.

Mindfulness Therapy is about healing anxiety. It is not about managing anxiety. There are other psychotherapists that take that approach. I do not. I’m not interested in managing anxiety; I’m interested in freeing you from those habitual anxiety-producing habits so that you do not experience anxiety. That’s the goal, freedom from anxiety. That Is very clear and that’s the purpose of mindfulness meditation, in my opinion, the way that I teach it. It is about developing more and more freedom from habits. Habits that cause suffering, habits that take away your freedom to enjoy life to the full.

So if you would like to learn more about Skype therapy for agoraphobia, then do please contact me. Just ask me any questions you have; anything that you want to discuss about this approach. I’m happy to answer questions.

When you’re ready though, let’s schedule a trial session. I offer a no risk policy. That is that if you don’t like the session, you don’t like this approach or it doesn’t feel right for you, then there’s no charge. There’s certainly no upfront charge for my sessions. The sessions are based entirely on your satisfaction with the results. So you pay after each session but on condition that you are happy with the results of that session. So it’s a no risk approach and I think that’s very important.

So if you would like to schedule a trial session with me and get started on a treatment plan that will help you overcome your anxiety and allow you to develop greater freedom from agoraphobia, then do please contact me and we can get started.

I see people throughout North America, but also in Western Europe as well. I am from the UK originally. I now live in Colorado but I see people all over the world and especially people who want to take a very practical and focused approach to working with their anxiety. In my opinion Mindfulness Therapy is one of the most effective approaches there is, followed by CBT. So please contact me if you’d like to get started.

Contact me to get started with online psychotherapy for agoraphobia via Skype

Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia

Online Psychotherapy for overcoming from Agoraphobia

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist, and I specialize in mindfulness therapy delivered over Skype for help with anxiety disorders including agoraphobia.

So during online therapy sessions I’ll teach you how to work with your agoraphobia, with your anxiety, with your panic attacks, using the very effective methods of mindfulness therapy.

So basically what we do is we start to design a series of challenges. These are manageable challenges that you can schedule and work on each day, extending the range of your comfort zone.

Essentially, whatever those challenges are that’s for you to determine. But what makes the mindfulness therapy approach so effective is that we do a lot of preparation before we do each of these challenges. And primarily the the mechanism, the the approach that I take is one of teaching you how to meditate on your challenge.

So you play that through in the mind you visualize doing that challenge. Perhaps it might be walking around the block or as simple as stepping outside the front door, whatever it is doesn’t matter. But we prepare for it by playing it through in the mind and then watching for any fear reactions that occur.

When you find that emotional reaction we then build a mindfulness based relationship to the fear itself. This is the key. We learn to hold that fear in the mind without becoming identified with it and without reacting to that fear reaction with more fear or with avoidance or with hatred or self-criticism or some kind of distraction.

We must not under any circumstances try to avoid the fear or anxiety. We have to build a conscious relationship with it. So that’s the first part of our mindfulness meditation on our challenge. You play that challenge through in the mind. We look for the fear reaction and then we build a conscious mindful relationship with it.

Online therapy for anxiety. How to overcome anxiety without medications.
Get help! Online therapy to help you overcome your agoraphobia

The second stage as we’re doing our preparation here, our training, is to help that fear resolve itself. We effectively teach the fear to resolve itself, and we do this primarily by building this conscious non-reactive relationship with the fear. That is what allows the fear to subside and resolve itself. And so we’re teaching the fear how to resolve itself.

You cannot resolve fear by arguing with it or by some form of rational thought process, trying to explain to the fear that it doesn’t need to be afraid. That kind of approach is not really very effective. What is effective is building this conscious non-reactive and also very compassionate relationship with the emotion itself.

Another part of our mindfulness training is to look at the imagery of the emotion, the fear. So all emotions are based around imagery, how you see it and the mind, and we can work with that imagery using mindfulness and compassion to help that imagery change. And when the imagery changes the fear diminishes. So again you are teaching the fear how to resolve itself by changing its imagery by working with imagery.

Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia
Talk to a therapist via Skype – Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia

So this is all part of the training, and you play it through in the mind over and over again before you do the challenge. You work on any fear reactions that might arise. When you have successfully resolved those fear reactions, then you do your challenge. And all you have to do is stay conscious and stay awake and if any fear arises you simply greeted with mindfulness.

You become aware of it. You make it conscious. And then your training will help it resolve on the spot in real time as it’s happening.

So that’s all we do during the challenge and then after the challenge we may meditate again on any anxiety that arose during that challenge. And we go through the same process, helping that anxiety resolve itself. So we’re training the mind out of habitual anxiety reactivity.

So this is what we call mindfulness based exposure therapy and it’s very, very effective and most people see quite incredible changes after just a few weeks of practicing this approach. Prepare for a challenge.

Do the challenge and meditate on any anxiety that came out of that challenge and then repeats until you can do each challenge with complete absence of anxiety. That’s our goal. We are not trying to manage anxiety. We’re trying to heal it so it doesn’t arise.

If you would like to learn more about online therapy for agoraphobia over Skype using the mindfulness therapy approaches that I have developed over the years, then please reach out to me by email and let’s schedule a session.

My clients really enjoy this approach. It gives them very practical tools that they can develop themselves and it makes you much more independent. And it also does not involve medication. I do not recommend medication for treating any anxiety disorder because it doesn’t allow you to change that underlying psychological habit that causes the anxiety.

Medications may provide temporary relief from symptoms but that’s not going to change the the mechanism that produces your anxiety. That is psychological in nature and needs to be addressed by a psychological process like mindfulness therapy.

So if you would like to get started with me, and you would like to really get over your agoraphobia then please contact me now.

Lets schedule a session at a time that works for you and for me. I see people throughout North America, Western Europe, the UK and as far away as Japan and Australia. So please contact me if you’d like to learn more about this approach. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to learn how to start online therapy via Skype for agoraphobia

Online Mindfulness Therapy for the Treatment of Agoraphobia

Online counseling for treating agoraphobia

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.

agoraphobia therapy online
Online Mindfulness Therapy for 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.

Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for Agoraphobia

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 really examine our anxiety and in great detail. We look at the structure of reactive thoughts and we start to break free from those thoughts by seeing them very clearly.

That’s the first job of mindfulness, is really seeing exactly what is happening in the mind, instead of blindly identifying with those habitual reactions.

So breaking free from the habitual basis of the reactions is at the center of mindfulness therapy; it is breaking free from that habitual tendency to react, which happens unconsciously.

So when you make these reactions more conscious you begin to erode that habitual reactive tendency and that’s how you train out of the habit of reacting with anxiety.

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.

If any anxiety still arises then you do a meditation after the challenge, which we called a Review Meditation, and the same process applies.

You identify the anxiety; you work on changing your relationship to it so that you don’t basically become blindly identified with that emotion and with its constellation of anxiety producing thoughts.

So you train with that fresh anxiety until you it resolves itself and you feel no more anxiety when you review that challenge that you just did.

Then after a rest period you will repeat the challenge again and you keep cycling through these challenges one at a time until you have completely mastered the challenge and you feel completely at ease with that challenge with no anxiety whatsoever.

Then you move onto the next challenge, and in this way using a very strategic approach with a lot of training before each challenge you will make the exposure therapy many, many times more effective.

You can expect to see changes after 3-4 sessions

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.

So I will teach you how to do this, how to do the Review Meditations and the Rehearsal Meditations, how to do your challenges, and then you do them between our sessions on a daily basis.

So most of the work you will do at home and that is, of course much more important than what you just do with me during the session.

So if you’d like to get started with me on this mindfulness based exposure therapy for agoraphobia and you’re looking specifically for agoraphobia therapy online then please contact me and let’s schedule a session.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online therapy via Skype for agoraphobia

Online Mindfulness Therapy for the treatment of Agoraphobia

Online exposure therapy for treating agoraphobia

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 place but medications cannot change that underlying psychological habits that cause your emotional suffering. All that a medication will ever do is reduce symptoms for a while. But that’s not really healing the problem, it 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.

The importance of challenges: Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for Agoraphobia

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 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.

Overcoming reactive identification

The real problem with all anxiety disorders is the problem of reactive identification. Thoughts are not the real problem. The problem is that we become identified with them. The same with the emotional reactions.

The anxiety itself or fear in itself is not a problem until we become identified with it. And this is where we basically contract into the thought stream or into the emotion and we become a victim of that mental state. We essentially lose consciousness and we become controlled by those reactive thoughts and the emotional reactivity.

However we can reverse this by training with those very specific thoughts and the emotion itself that gets triggered during one of our challenges. So we learn to build a conscious relationship and overcome this habit of reactive identification.

You can sit with the thoughts and the emotions without becoming overwhelmed by them, without becoming controlled by them, without becoming lost in that reactive process that simply feeds the anxiety.

So that’s the first part of the training, a big part of mindfulness training. Learning to see thoughts and emotions as objects in the mind and not becoming identified with them.

The Power of Inner Compassion

The second part of mindfulness therapy is really learning how to work with the emotion itself and help it heal. So we work with the anxiety that gets triggered in agoraphobia. We look at the past specific emotions and we start to build this conscious relationship with them but then we bring in the element of compassion.

This is where we basically learn how to comfort that emotion itself, seeing it as an object, really saying and like my child. The child cannot escape its own fear very easily because it doesn’t have a lot of consciousness. The parent comes and comforts the child when the child is afraid and the child is able to absorb that that comfort and confidence from the parent and that’s how the child is able to overcome its fear and a particular situation.

So there’s a tremendous healing effect that happens through this relationship. And in that case between the child and the parent that allows the child to overcome its fear. We cultivate the same kind of relationship with our emotions.

We treat our emotions in the same way. We develop a conscious and non-reactive presence, that’s like the parent, with the anxiety, that’s like the child, and when the anxiety, if you like, feels the presence of your non-reactive bigger self, what we call your true self, then that allows the anxiety to resolve itself, to let go of its own fear.

So establishing this kind of internal relationship is essential to healing the anxiety and overcoming the anxiety reactions.

There are other things that we do during mindfulness therapy for agoraphobia and I’ll explain all of this to you in much more detail during our sessions. But that’s the basic idea. We pick out a challenge or series of challenges. We rehearse for those challenges and we take care of any emotions that get triggered as we imagine doing the challenge.

Then we go and execute the challenge. And then we would work on any emotions that are still triggered during the challenge. So we will do that afterwards. So we train with those emotions and those thoughts in the same way.

And then we repeat the challenge and we do this in a systematic way until you develop desensitization to the situation. Basically, you’re healing the anxiety reaction. You are neutralizing it so going to the mall, or whatever it might be no longer activates it.

When you take this systematic approach you’ll see results quite quickly and most people that I work with seem quite remarkable changes within three or four sessions. You have to do the work, of course. You have to be committed to prepare and carry through these challenges in a systematic way every day until you build more and more confidence. But it works. This approach works.

Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia is, in my opinion, the most effective approach there is out there. I believe it’s more effective than CBT because it works at the emotional level as well as working at the cognitive level.

So you have to heal that the fear underneath in order to be able to break free from the thoughts that are created from that fear. Working with thoughts alone is not going to heal the fear directly.

So if you would like to get started with me and overcome your agoraphobia without using medication then please simply email me and let’s schedule a trial session.

You’ll see even after the first session you’ll get some idea of how this works. And when you start practicing the methods that I teach he will get results quite quickly as I say. And we build on your challenge protocols each week.

We work on them. I will guide you through this and then your practices at home and then we move on to new challenges and we build out our challenges taking in more and more limiting behaviors until eventually you have no anxiety at all. That’s our goal, and it is totally possible if you take a systematic approach.

So please call me and let’s schedule a session. Go to my website and contact me and we can discuss recession at a time that works for you. I see people all over the world, specifically working on anxiety disorders and agoraphobia.

So please contact me if you’d like to learn more about online therapy for agoraphobia that does not use medication. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to learn how to start online therapy via Skype for agoraphobia

Online Mindfulness Therapy for overcoming Agoraphobia

Online exposure therapy for agoraphobia

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders and depression and addictions and many other emotional problems that respond well to mindfulness therapy. One particular anxiety disorder that I work with a great deal is agoraphobia.

So if you’re interested in overcoming agoraphobia without the use of medications but through learning the strategic methods of mindfulness training and therapy then do please contact me and tell me more about your condition and I will be happy to answer any questions you have.

When you feel ready you can schedule a Skype Therapy session with me and I will teach you how to overcome agoraphobia without relying on medications but through applying the well-tested methods of Mindfulness Therapy.

It’s important to understand that medications are only a temporary solution. They do not and are not designed to change the underlying psychological habitual process that generates anxiety.

Medications simply reduce symptoms but really they are not really a good choice in the long run because they leave you vulnerable to those underlying psychological habits that create the anxiety.

You want to change those habits and that’s the focus of mindfulness therapy. I will teach you how to neutralize those underlying habits that create anxiety.

online therapy and help for agoraphobia
Online therapy and help for agoraphobia

So what triggers anxiety in agoraphobia? Well is generally triggered by thoughts and beliefs and anticipation and rumination whereby you get trapped in cycles of fear-based thinking.

What will happen if I have a panic attack away from home? How will I get home? The fear of being trapped, the fear of not being able to get back to a secure zone, basically.

So agoraphobia is characterized by being a prisoner of a comfort zone which often gets smaller and smaller as the disorder progresses. So we have to work on building strategies to get you out of that prison, and we do that by working on those emotional habits directly.

Typically we are not really aware of our anxiety producing habits. They operate unconsciously like most habits and we just blindly accept them. We identify with these habits and we suffer because of that.

So the first thing that we do when starting mindfulness therapy for agoraphobia is identify those thought reactions themselves that trigger the anxiety. We then work in a very specific way with those thoughts reactions and beliefs using various techniques.

The first and most important one is learning to overcome this habit of identification so that we can hold the thought in our mind whatever it might be. The fear of fainting, the fear of being out of control, the fear of having a panic attack, whatever it might be.

We learn to hold that thought in our mind and not become identified with it and not feed that thought with further reactivity. It is that identification and reactivity that is the real problem. It feeds the anxiety and this keeps the anxiety alive and accentuates the anxiety and it also, of course, prevents that anxiety from properly resolving. All anxiety will resolve by itself if you don’t feed it.

So learning to sit with your anxiety thoughts without identifying with them and without reacting in any way to them is the first part of mindfulness therapy.

We do this by meditating on those thoughts. We make every effort not to avoid those thoughts. Avoidance is one of those habits, one of those reactive habits that have the unfortunate effect of strengthening the anxiety. So we immediately work on reversing avoidance.

We do not avoid those fear-based thoughts. Instead we meditate on them and in this way we are training ourselves to be with that thought consciously and not react.

So that’s very important. That is the first part of training. We call this mindfulness-based exposure therapy. We are exposing ourselves to those thoughts; those triggers and we train ourselves out of the habit of blindly identifying with them and feeding the anxiety.

So when this begins to develop and you are able to develop your freedom in relationship to your anxiety then that makes it possible for the anxiety to continue its natural process of healing. It will essentially burn itself out if you don’t feed.

The second way we work with the anxiety thoughts is to work with their imagery. We look at the imagery of the thoughts, how we see the emotion in the mind that gets triggered by these reactive thoughts is very important.

That imagery is what actually creates the identity. And we work with that imagery in a way that neutralizes the anxiety.

For example many people feel overwhelmed by their anxiety and that is because the imagery of the anxiety is very large in size. That’s what is the defining factor that causes the emotion to become overwhelming. It is too large.

But that imagery is produced by habit. That habit can be changed and when you change the imagery of the anxiety you change the anxiety.

So in this case we would try to explore making that imagery smaller. When you make the imagery smaller it loses its intensity. There are lots of creative ways we can work with the imagery of emotions.

Now the next part of our approach to overcoming agoraphobia that doesn’t require medication is to design a schedule of daily challenges. So this is where we will expose ourselves to a particular situation that would tend to generate those reactive anxiety-producing thoughts.

But we prepare ourselves for the challenge. This is essential. You must do this and it’s often not done. We do not just throw ourselves into the anxiety-producing situation.

We train for it and we overcome the anxiety before we do the challenge. So we imagine doing the challenge, we isolate the anxiety and those anxiety-producing thoughts.

You work with them with mindfulness and with meditation to neutralize the anxiety. Then we do the challenge and we might process any anxiety that arises during that challenge after the challenge using mindfulness meditation.

We then repeat this process until the anxiety is completely neutralized and you’re able to go for a drive, go for a walk around the neighborhood, whatever your challenge is, without any anxiety at all.

That is our goal. We are not trying to manage anxiety we are trying to eliminate. We are trying to neutralize it.

And with the mindfulness-based exposure therapy that I’ve been describing, you can expect to see really effective progress within a few sessions.

Usually after the first three or four weeks of applying the mindfulness techniques that I will teach you, you will notice significant reduction in anxiety and the ability to now start extending your range out of that prison.

So if you’d like to learn more about how to overcome the agoraphobia without using medication, then please email me and lets schedule a Skype Therapy session.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online therapy via Skype for overcoming agoraphobia

Online Therapy via Skype for Agoraphobia

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I’m a professional mindfulness therapist specializing in mindfulness therapy which I offer online via Skype for the treatment of anxiety and depression, and also for agoraphobia.

So if you’d like to learn how to overcome agoraphobia without medication do please go to my website and read my pages on the treatment of agoraphobia using mindfulness therapy.

It is important to understand that medications don’t actually treat agoraphobia. They treat the symptoms of anxiety and they simply mask those symptoms. They reduce them, but only in a temporary manner. The underlying cause of your anxiety, your panic attacks, your agoraphobia, remains untouched by medications.

online therapy and help for agoraphobia
Online therapy and help for agoraphobia

If you want to really overcome agoraphobia you have to change those underlying psychological patterns, those emotional habits, that create the anxiety in the first place. So this is essential and this is what we focus on during these online mindfulness therapy sessions for agoraphobia.

You don’t need medication, you need instead to develop a very positive and conscious relationship with your anxiety. When you do this you actually teach the anxiety how to heal itself by being present with it without becoming reactive. The best analogy here is a parent and child.

So the child is afraid. What does it need? What it really needs is to be in contact with its parent, who is not afraid. The fearlessness of the parent is absorbed by the child and that allows the child to release his or her fear. So this connection between child and parent is extremely important for healing the underlying cause of the child’s fear.

The same goes for our anxiety, our emotions. They tend to become isolated in the mind, they become cut off from our true self, the bigger aspect of who we really are When they are isolated they cannot heal and then they become reactive and create the symptoms of anxiety and panic attacks that you are familiar with.

Online therapy for anxiety. How to overcome anxiety without medications.
Get help! Online therapy to help you overcome your anxiety.

When we build an internal relationship between your true self and your emotions, that allows those emotions to change. And when that relationship is strong and based on consciousness and friendliness, the two key features of mindfulness, then that healing process becomes very strong and very fast. Most people can expect to see big changes after 3-4 weeks of mindfulness therapy and practice.

So this approach of bringing mindfulness to the emotional reactions that underlie our agoraphobia is very effective in deed and produces results in very few sessions compared to conventional talk therapy, and certainly better than medications.

Online Therapy via Skype for Agoraphobia
Online Therapy via Skype for Agoraphobia

So if you’d like to learn how to overcome agoraphobia without medication but by applying the methods of mindfulness therapy that I teach, then please email me and let’s schedule an online therapy session. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to start online therapy via Skype for overcoming agoraphobia without medication

Agoraphobia Therapy Online

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I’m a professional psychotherapist specializing in online therapy. I offer online therapy for agoraphobia.

So, agoraphobia online therapy is very effective for people who really can’t get out of the house to work with a therapist in their local area.

So, during these sessions that I offer via Skype, I focus on teaching you very effective mindfulness-based methods of working with your anxiety and panic attacks.

The really important thing to understand here is that Agoraphobia is really a psychological habit. I prefer to call it a habit rather than a disorder because when you start labeling these psychological states as disorders that tends to reinforce your sense of helplessness as a victim, and we don’t want to do that.

The actual mechanism that generates the anxiety and panic attacks of agoraphobia is a habit and habits can be changed. So during online agoraphobia therapy sessions I will guide you in how to work with the underlying emotions and thought patterns that supports that anxiety.

We do this in a surprising way. We actually learn to make friends with our fear. This is very, very important. You can’t change the belief when it has a very strong emotional charge based on fear. No amount of rational arguments or persuasion that you don’t need to feel this way is going to change that anxiety.

You have to learn to work with the anxiety directly. And that’s what you do during mindfulness therapy. We actually learn to meditate on your own fear as you imagine walking or traveling out of your safe zone.

So, we set up a series of challenges, exposures, if you like, where you choose to do a particularly difficult exercise but one that you can manage. But then we prepare for this by playing it through in the mind it might be walking around the block or just simply leaving the house for a few minutes, whatever it might be.

We design a challenge and then we prepare for it by meditating on it. We play it through in the mind and then we look for the fear reactions and we look for the thought reactions that feed that fear and then we develop a mindfulness-based relationship with these emotions and thoughts, and that relationship is based on friendliness.

You learn, essentially, to sit with your emotions and thoughts without becoming overwhelmed by them, without losing your balance. This is central. This is a central part of mindfulness training, that you can be with your thoughts and emotions but not be overwhelmed by them. When you can do dance, then you start to break the habits that get reinforced by re-traumatizing, essentially, that fear.

So, we learn to sit with our emotions without becoming reactive and without identifying with those emotions. We learn to develop this other side of our identity, which we call the True Self, the Observer Mind, that which can be conscious of thoughts and emotions but is not identified with thoughts or emotions.

We then work with those emotions and begin to treat them very much as you might treat a child that’s afraid. we learn to comfort the emotion itself, the fear. you build a strong relationship with it, rather like a parent to a child. And in this way the fear reaction, that we might call the Little Self is able to let go of its fear by proximity to your True Self which is fearless nature.

So, in this way we begin to build resolution pathways in the brain. You learn, basically, how to help the emotions resolve themselves, so that if they get triggered they simply resolve instantly, on the spot, through the training that you’ve done before you do the challenge And then you go out and walk around the block or whatever and put this training into action.

So, we repeat this process over and over again. Meditation before challenge and we do the challenge and we may come back and meditate some more and then we repeat the challenge until we no longer feel any fear in doing that challenge. Then we move on to a harder challenge. And in this way we gain more and more confidence in the process.

So, when you are able to neutralize these emotional reactions then the beliefs begin to change quite automatically. We don’t need to try and change our beliefs. We simply need to change the emotional content that fuels those beliefs and makes them so powerful.

If you would like to learn more about agoraphobia therapy online do please send me an email and we can schedule a Skype Therapy session. Thank you.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME

Looking for online help to overcome agoraphobia?

Mindfulness-based Online Help for Agoraphobia

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist based in Boulder Colorado, but I offer online psychotherapy via Skype for anxiety disorders and for the treatment of depression and also for the treatment of agoraphobia. So many people like the idea of working with an online therapist to overcome agoraphobia. It means that you can have your sessions at home, which is an important consideration if you are afraid of leaving home in the first place.

So online therapy for agoraphobia is a way of getting the help that you need to overcome this anxiety disorder.

So I offer mindfulness based help for agoraphobia, and this is very different than conventional talk therapy and it actually helps you work with your emotions directly yourself. It teaches you how to change that habit of becoming identified with your emotional reactions, with your fear, anxiety or panic attacks.

The biggest problem that most people suffering from anxiety or depression have to deal with this problem of habitual reactive identification. This is where we simply become consumed by the emotion, we become overwhelmed by it, we become a prisoner of that emotional reaction. And this is a habit. This is a psychological habit. We become conditioned to identify with the emotion in that way and it operates unconsciously.

So in mindfulness therapy we work on making it conscious. We actually work on making the anxiety much more conscious so that we can build a conscious relationship with the anxiety and learn to break this habit of reactive identification. So you can hold the anxiety in the mind as an object and not become identified with it and not become consumed by it. That is very important, if not is totally essential part of recovery from any anxiety disorder, including agoraphobia.

One of the things that we look at in great detail also, is the imagery of your emotions. So the imagery is what actually creates the emotion, the anxiety. This imagery typically is going to be very large, is going to be very close and probably all consuming. It is going to be overwhelming because it is very large in size.

That imagery, the size of the emotion, is what actually makes the emotion work. When we actually get to see the imagery consciously using mindfulness we can then exercise choice. We can begin to explore changing this habitual imagery.

And the rule is when you change the imagery you change the emotion.

The other very important principle of mindfulness based therapy is learning how to hold the anxiety and overcome the habit of reacting to the anxiety.

So we usually react with aversion. You do not like the unpleasant feelings associated with anxiety so we try to push it away. We try to avoid it. We try to distract ourselves from it in any way we can. But the rule here is, any form of reactivity will simply feed the anxiety. It will not help it heal or resolve itself.

The other part of the mindfulness based approach to healing Anxiety and Agoraphobia is to take on deliberate challenges. Exposure therapy, in a sense. But mindfulness based exposure therapy is much more effective than classical exposure therapy.

So this is where you will set up a schedule of small challenges that typically would create anxiety but then you work on training yourself ahead of each challenge using mindfulness to find the emotion that gets case triggered and then to help it heal by doing things like changing its size, changing its imagery and changing your relationship to that anxiety that gets triggered in that situation.

So if you’d like to learn more about the mindfulness based approach to healing anxiety and you’d like help with your agoraphobia then please contact me by email and let’s schedule a therapy session via Skype.

The mindfulness based approach is very, very effective and very focused in its approach. And generally people see quite noticeable changes in a relatively short time. I usually say you should expect to see changes within three to four weeks when you start applying the mindfulness based techniques that I will teach you during the sessions and that we will practice together during sessions.

So if you would like to learn more please go to my website and then please contact me. Ask any questions you may have about online therapy for agoraphobia.

Go to the Contact Page to learn more about how to start online psychotherapy for agoraphobia via Skype

Online Agoraphobia Therapy over Skype

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 with me simply go to my website and then email me to schedule a Skype therapy session with me. Thank you.

Treating Agoraphobia from Home via Skype

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I provide online therapy via Skype. So treating agoraphobia from home is very important because it’s so difficult for you to leave the security of your home or secure area, and being able to get the help you need is really important and it’s very difficult, obviously, if you can’t leave home.

So that’s why I’ve developed this online therapy program for treating agoraphobia from home, and it involves Mindfulness Therapy, which is what I specialize in and have been teaching for many years now for working with anxiety disorders, panic disorder and agoraphobia.

So the real basis of mindfulness-based treatment for Agoraphobia is setting up a very systematic set of exposure challenges. Mindfulness-based exposure therapy is a very effective method because it’s very strategic and structured in its approach. It starts off by setting out a series of challenges. Those are the exposures, but you must train for each challenge before you do them.

So traditional exposure therapy, which relies on some degree of habituation and familiarization is really very ineffective. It’s much too unstructured, really, to achieve much effect. In the case of agoraphobia you have to really learn how to neutralize the anxiety before you do the challenge.

The challenge is really putting that into action so that it becomes experientially relevant and becomes a learned experience. But you have to train for it ahead of time.

So this kind of approach works. If you’d like to learn more about home-based training and home-based treatment for agoraphobia, then please contact me and we can schedule Skype therapy sessions at a time that works for you.

I see people worldwide, mostly in the USA but also in the UK and Western Europe, rarely anywhere where you have a good Internet access. That’s all you need for Skype therapy. So please contact me if this interests you and you would like to break free from your agoraphobia.

Agoraphobia Therapy Online via Skype

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist based in Boulder, Colorado, and I offer online therapy via Skype.

So if you’re looking for online therapy to cure agoraphobia or other anxiety disorder, then please go to my website, learn more about the online therapy service that I offer and feel free to contact me via e-mail, through the contact page. Tell me more about yourself and what you’ve tried so far and feel free to ask any questions you may have about this online therapy service for overcoming agoraphobia.

If you’re looking for an online therapist, it’s very important that you find someone who uses Skype so that you can see each other. This is really an essential requirement for good psychotherapy.

You must be able to see each other. But if you can see each other through Skype, then there’s really no difference in the quality and the effectiveness of the psychotherapy. So being able to see each other is critical.

The style of therapy that I find works best for overcoming agoraphobia and for really neutralizing those severe anxiety reactions that you will be struggling with is mindfulness therapy.

So I teach people how to work with their emotions using mindfulness. And this is by far more effective than just talking about your feelings. You really need to work at a very practical and structural level, really seeing how your emotions work, what actually triggers that anxiety and the nature of that process that gets triggered.

So this we explore in great detail during mindfulness therapy, and we do that by learning how to bring mindful awareness to see the anxiety that gets triggered.

We want to understand how it works. We want to look at the various patterns of conditioned reactivity and particularly reactive thinking that feeds that anxiety. The more you see of the process that causes your anxiety, the better. And this is the key path that leads to freedom from anxiety. You really need to see those underlying blind habitual reactions that trigger your anxiety.

The real problem is that we don’t see them. We experience the anxiety, but we don’t really see the underlying reactive process at work.

So in mindfulness therapy, we focus a great deal of conscious awareness on our anxiety reactions to see exactly how they work. And when you bring conscious awareness to those habits, you begin to neutralize them. They begin to lose power. The more conscious you become, the less power those habitual anxiety reactions will have.

So the process by which we do this is called mindfulness-based exposure therapy, which I talk about on my website, and it’s one of the most effective approaches for overcoming anxiety and for dealing with agoraphobia.

So you play through a particular challenge that you have identified. That could be walking to the end of the road. It could be going into a shop, it could be driving a short distance from home. Whatever it is, these are the challenges that you must start to work with in order to overcome those anxiety reactions.

So we play it through the mind. We look for the anxiety that gets triggered and then we begin to develop this mindful, conscious awareness of that anxiety. And as I said, the more conscious you are of those specific emotions that get triggered, the freer you become. You overcome that blindness, that is the real problem behind her emotional reactivity.

So we see clearly the anxiety, and then we start to develop the other important quality of mindfulness, which is compassion. We start to develop compassion for the emotion, for the anxiety reaction that we’ve just identified.

Compassion is a very, very strong force for healing. And the more compassionate you are towards your emotions, essentially towards your self, then the more healing that will occur.

So we develop compassion for the emotion itself and we learn to interact with it in a way that helps it heal in very much the same way that you would interact with a person who is suffering. You, first of all, establish a conscious relationship. You listen, you watch, you learn. And then through that, you begin to discover ways of interacting with that person that helps them heal.

Well, it’s exactly the same with our emotions, with our anxiety. We we must, first of all, establish that conscious and non-reactive relationship where we can be totally present with our anxiety.

Then we are not feeding it. But the second part of helping it to heal is to discover what will help it heal, how you can comfort that anxiety.

And there’s a great deal of practical methodology here that I will teach you during our sessions together about how to do this, how to develop compassion towards your anxiety and other emotions.

When you do this consistently before you do your exposure challenge, then you will see very positive results.

So we identify a challenge. We meditate on the anxiety and neutralize it through mindfulness. And then we do the challenge and then we might meditate on any anxiety that arose during the challenge. And then we repeat the challenge again. And so doing it in this mindful way, the exposure therapy becomes greatly enhanced and becomes very much more effective.

And then we move on to the next challenge and you process it in the same way with mindfulness.

So if you’d like to learn how to do this, how to cure your anxiety and how to cure your agoraphobia using mindfulness, then please contact me and we can schedule some Skype therapy sessions.

Most people see dramatic improvements in it in the first couple of weeks once you start applying these techniques that I’ll be teaching you during the sessions.

So please contact me if you are looking for help in overcoming your agoraphobia and you like the idea of working with an online therapist. Please reach out to me. Go to my website. Email me through the contact page and let’s schedule a Skype therapy session. Thank you.

Contact me to get started with online agoraphobia therapy via Skype

Teletherapy for agoraphobia

Online Therapy via Skype for the treatment of Agoraphobia

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 will become.

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 is 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 the Contact Page to learn more about how to start online therapy for agoraphobia via Skype

How to overcome agoraphobia without medication

Welcome, so as an online therapist, I am often asked for help with agoraphobia and I’m often asked is it possible to overcome agoraphobia without using medications? And it is entirely possible. In fact, it’s necessary that you learn how to overcome your anxiety without medications.

Medications may provide temporary relief, but they do nothing to change the underlying psychological process that causes your anxiety.

So until that is healed, until that is changed fundamentally, then the anxiety will persist and eventually the medications lose their effectiveness and you have to change the dosage or try different medications, and it goes on and on forever without really changing anything at the core level.

So it’s understandable that people want to escape their emotional pain. That’s quite human. It’s quite natural. But you have to understand, that’s not a good long-term strategy. You must heal things, the psychological level.

So during the online therapy sessions that I offer for agoraphobia, we focus very closely on the underlying habitual reactivity that creates that anxiety. We learn how to bring mindfulness and conscious awareness to look at the anxiety and see how it works.

So the primary method that I’ll be teaching you during these Skype Therapy sessions, if you choose to work with me, is to learn how to meditate on your anxiety.

Again, we don’t use meditation to try and escape anxiety. That would be futile, like taking medications. We learn instead to use meditation as a way of bringing conscious awareness and compassion to our anxiety.

We have to start seeing that anxiety as a part of ourselves, but not who we are fundamentally. We need to cultivate our True Self, which is the observer that can see the anxiety and other emotions without becoming blindly identified with it.

This is essential, this is part of the the core process of healing, emotional suffering. You have to be able to separate out from the anxiety so you can see it clearly as an observer.

Then you begin to look at the structure of the anxiety. And of course, a big part of the structure is in the form of habitual reactive thinking. We tend to react to the anxiety by producing lots of anxiety-based thoughts and worry thoughts. What if? type thoughts and so on. And that reactivity is a part of the structure of the anxiety.

The reactivity has the effect of feeding that anxiety. So we need to see that very clearly. We need to see those thoughts and in the same way begin to break free from their influence by cultivating and training in being an observer, seeing the thoughts as more objects in the mind.

Training to be the observer is how we overcome the habit of reactive identification, which is really the foundation of our suffering.

Once you break free from reactive identification, then you can start to respond with compassion. This is a natural property of your True Self. We all have this natural capacity for compassion, it is part of our fundamental nature. We may lose sight of it, but it’s always there, ready to be rediscovered.

So bringing compassion to your anxiety is like a parent caring for a child that is afraid. That is what promotes healing. Building that compassionate relationship promotes healing.

Reactivity feeds anxiety because the reactivity itself is usually, if not always fear-based. So reactivity such has avoidance or aversion towards the anxiety, seeking external ways to make it go away, which is a form of avoidance and aversion like taking medications are all fear-based.

So there you’re developing more fear in relationship to the fear you already have. So that is why reactivity feeds anxiety. And if you identify with the anxiety of you become that anxiety, then you feed it even more.

So we have to watch for all forms of reactivity. We don’t have to beat ourselves up and be self-critical. We’re not trying to say,”I should not be reactive.” That is silly and pointless. What we’re trying to do here is to simply awaken to that fear that is motivating us to become reactive, to see the reactions clearly as the observer. This is what produces real change.

So we do this by meditating on our anxiety. We actually take the initiative here. Rather than living in fear of our anxiety, we actually seek it out. We might do a series of exposure challenges in order to find that anxiety so we can then start to work with it mindfully.

So this is part of the mindful approach that I call Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, which is what I have found to be the most effective approach available. It works extremely well, even for a very extreme forms of agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders.

You have to learn to build a conscious mindful relationship with your anxiety. You can explore all of the reactive thinking that feeds it. And you learn to develop a conscious and compassionate relationship with those thoughts, as well.

The more you do that, the more you’re training to become your True Self again, that which is free from anxiety, that which is free from reactivity.

So that is the benefit of doing this kind of approach. It helps the anxiety heal. So you’re teaching the anxiety how to heal itself by being present with it as a compassionate and larger True Self. And in that process, you are also growing as your True Self.

So you get both benefits in this process of Mindfulness Therapy.

So in in the exposure therapy part, we simply set up a series of challenges and you work through each challenge using mindfulness.

This means that you learn to meditate on the challenge, you play it through in the mind. You imagine doing that challenge. You watch for the anxiety that may get triggered out of habit and then you start to work with that anxiety using mindfulness to help it heal.

You look for the reactive thoughts that tend to blindly proliferate. You watch to see those and you neutralize those simply by seeing them clearly. If you don’t identify with those thoughts, then they have no power to feed the anxiety.

So we train with it. We train with the anxiety. We train with the mind. This is how we gain real freedom. Medications do not allow this process to happen.

But when you start to take charge and work with your anxiety, you can train yourself out of any anxiety until you feel complete freedom again, which is your true nature, your True Self.

So if you would like to learn more about this process, simply contact me and let’s schedule some Skype Therapy sessions.

You’ll see very quickly just how effective this approach can be for overcoming agoraphobia with our medication.

Please contact me. Tell me more about yourself and what you’ve tried so far. Ask any questions you may have. And when when you feel ready, we can schedule your first Skype Therapy session.

And after three or four sessions, you will start to see dramatic improvements and you will start to feel that there’s a very strong possibility of actually overcoming your agoraphobia.

So please contact me if you would like to get started with online therapy with me. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to learn more about Therapy for Agoraphobia Online via Skype

I am based in Colorado, USA, but I provide online therapy for agoraphobia world-wide

Send me an email now. Tell me about yourself and how I can help you. Schedule a trial session via Skype with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in Online Mindfulness Therapy for Anxiety Disorders.

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