Online Psychotherapy for Agoraphobia

Online Psychotherapy for the treatment of Agoraphobia via Skype

Email me to schedule online psychotherapy with me if you would like to overcome your agoraphobia

During these Skype therapy sessions I will teach you how to apply mindfulness-based exposure therapy for promoting recovery from your agoraphobia.

This approach is very effective and most clients experience tangible changes after the first few online sessions with me.

Online Mindfulness-based Skype Therapy is highly effective for overcoming anxiety and depression without relying on anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants. Treat the psychological cause of your emotional pain rather than just suppressing symptoms.

The principle healing factors developed during mindfulness-based psychotherapy are Consciousness, which is vital for overcoming the reactive habits that cause emotional pain, and Inner Compassion, which is what accelerates healing and resolution of emotional pain. When you apply both of these factors to your anxiety you will rapidly make progress in overcoming your agoraphobia.

Online Therapy for agoraphobia

“Having visited with many-a-therapist in the past, Dr. Strong stands out as a genuinely good listener and offers pointed and intuitive responses in return, that are real, constructive, and compassionate. His caring, non-judgmental, nature is apparent and has aided me in the healing process.”

Go to my Contact Page to learn more about how to get started with online psychotherapy for agoraphobia

Online Psychotherapy using mindfulness for treating agoraphobia

Welcome! If you’re looking for online therapy for agoraphobia, then I invite you to go to my website and learn more about the online psychotherapy service that I offer for working with agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders over Skype.

So I offer Skype therapy for agoraphobia and anxiety. And it works extremely well. You don’t need to be in the same office with a therapist to receive good quality psychotherapy, but you do need to see each other and that is possible with Skype or similar video service where you can see each other. That’s really important. And if you can’t see each other, then there’s no difference at all between online therapy compared to meeting a therapist in person.

So the approach that I use for online psychotherapy for agoraphobia is called mindfulness therapy and specifically mindfulness-based exposure therapy.

So as you will be aware, in order to overcome agoraphobia, you will need to design a program of exposure challenges. This is very well understood as a necessary part of your recovery process. You must essentially learn how to work with your anxiety rather than trying to avoid it.

The biggest problem that I see with people suffering from agoraphobia is that they start avoiding those anxiety-producing situations and they start to retreat more and more into a smaller and smaller space.

Avoidance is a very bad way to work with anxiety in general, because avoidance itself is fueled by fear. So when you are giving into avoidance, you’re basically feeding the underlying anxiety and strengthening it even more.

So you must not all into the trap of avoiding anxiety-producing situations. Instead, we need to train with those situations so that you can break free from that anxiety.

All anxiety is basically composed of a series of conditioned, blind, habitual reactions. We become conditioned and these reactions operate subconsciously like any other habits.

So the way to work with agoraphobia and anxiety is to uncover these conditioned habits and then start changing them. And we do this by bringing them into full consciousness.

So habits require unconsciousness to work fully. But when you bring a habit into conscious awareness, when you become mindful of that habit, that begins to take the power away from that blind habitual reaction.

So in mindfulness-based exposure therapy, we would design a series of challenges. And then you train for each challenge very thoroughly using the principles of mindfulness therapy.

Typically, we would identify the first charge in our series of challenges and then we play it through in the mind. And then we watch specifically for the triggers and the anxiety reactions that get triggered.

When we find the anxiety reactions, we then start developing this conscious, mindful relationship with that anxiety and we start developing independence from that emotional reaction by staying as the observer.

So we’re training ourselves to observe the anxiety without becoming anxious. So this is often described as developing independence. We we can see the emotion, but we’re not overwhelmed by it.

So that’s the first step, is developing that independence. I also call that objective consciousness. We’re developing conscious awareness in which the anxiety is an object that we see in the mind but don’t react to. So objective consciousness is very important.

And that’s the first quality of mindfulness that we’re developing. The more that you develop this objective consciousness, the freer you become from the anxiety.

The second part of recovery from habitual anxiety is to then start developing a compassionate relationship with the anxiety. The best way to think about anxiety is to imagine it as being like a child. The child is scared and what it most needs is the conscious and loving presence of its mother or father. When it has that conscious presence, when that relationship is strong and conscious, then the child rapidly overcomes its fear.

It’s exactly the same with our anxiety emotions, our internal anxiety. It’s like that child. When we establish a strong conscious and compassionate or loving relationship with it, that greatly accelerates its rate of healing. So building that is also essential for recovery. When it’s very strong, then the anxiety starts to heal and become neutralized, effectively.

So this is very much part of the mindfulness therapy training that I will teach you during our online Skype therapy sessions together.

You do this training with the anxiety before you do the exposure challenge. Then when you do the challenge, you will essentially be putting your training into effect. You’ll be now translating it into practical experience. Experiential learning is by far the most important way to overcome anxiety.

If there’s any residual anxiety after doing your chance, you would then work with that, also using mindfulness.

Basically, what we’re learning to do here is learning how to meditate on our anxiety. This is the complete opposite of avoidance, and this is the proven path to overcome anxiety. It works amazingly well.

When people start to understand how to meditate on their anxiety, they recover very quickly. And I will teach you exactly how to do this during our sessions together. Most people suffering from agoraphobia will start to see improvements after the first two or three sessions.

It really doesn’t take that much work to start seeing improvements. You just have to know how to go about working with your anxiety effectively. That is the key ingredient here. If you work in a very systematic way using mindfulness, you will rapidly gain confidence and you will rapidly begin to overcome those anxiety reactions, those habitual anxiety reactions.

So if you’d like to learn more about online psychotherapy for agoraphobia using mindfulness, then please contact me and let’s schedule a Skype therapy session. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to learn more about how to get started with online psychotherapy for agoraphobia

Online Psychotherapy via Skype for agoraphobia with panic disorder

I’m a professional licensed psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy. This is a system of psychotherapy that works very well by Skype and it’s extremely effective for the treatment of agoraphobia.

People suffering from agoraphobia find it very important to work online because it’s so difficult to leave the comfort of your home or secure place. This is the biggest feature of agoraphobia, this fear of having a panic attack if you leave a secure comfort zone, and it can become progressively worse over time. Many people I’ve worked with have had agoraphobia for sometimes as much as 10 years.

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

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

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

Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for Agoraphobia

So what I have developed is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy. And this is a different approach. It certainly will involve exposure challenges in a systematic approach where you will set yourself goals each day and carry those out.

But the key ingredient with mindfulness-based exposure therapy is the preparation and training before and after each challenge. That is what is vital and I feel is often missing in traditional, conventional exposure therapy.

So what do we do in mindfulness-based exposure therapy for agoraphobia? Well you set up a series of challenges. You then do what we call a rehearsal meditation before you do your first challenge.

This is where you will play through that challenge in your imagination and specifically look for those triggers and the anxiety reactions that get triggered.

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

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

So we build a different kind of relationship based on consciousness and compassion for the emotion itself. We learn to see the emotion as being an object in our awareness.

We start to break the habit of reactive identification, where we become completely consumed by that anxiety, where we take on the identity of our emotions. Instead we learn to develop a conscious observing relationship where we observe our emotions but we don’t become them.

This process is very, very important because if you identify with your anxiety, then you end up feeding it. It is another reactive process like avoidance and aversion that simply feeds the fire of anxiety.

So we train with it. We train to sit with our anxiety during meditation, during rehearsal meditation. We learn to not identify with it. We learn to see it as a separate object. And then we start to explore the structure of that anxiety, how it works.

The first thing we look for is the external structure of the anxiety, which is in the form of reactive thoughts; all kinds of catastrophic thoughts that tend to feed that anxiety.

So we watch for those and in the same way, we work on developing a mindfulness-based relationship with those thoughts. We see them as objects also and break the habit of identification with those thoughts and beliefs.

We also work with the internal structure of our anxiety. The internal structure is in the form of imagery. That is what I have found through my research over the years, that emotions are structured around internal psychological imagery.

It’s how you see the emotion in the mind that actually holds that emotion together and also is responsible for the intensity of the emotion. So people very often feel overwhelmed, which tells you right there that the emotion is very large.

Its imagery is very large and very high in the visual field. That is a requirement for that emotion to be overwhelming. The larger the emotional image is the more intense the anxiety. So this is the internal structure.

Now when we’re meditating on our anxiety we explore this internal imagery. And then we explore changing that imagery because that is exactly what happens when an emotion loses intensity and when we heal.

When an emotion heals and is no longer a problem for us it is because it changed its internal imagery with or without our help. But during meditation we take the conscious path of helping that imagery change.

For example, simply making the emotion many times smaller in size can have a profound effect on the intensity of the anxiety. Moving the anxiety from being in a very high position, perhaps at head level, to being at a lower position, for example placing it on the floor, which you can do in your imagination during the meditation session. You can learn to move the anxiety and that can have a profound effect on the power of that anxiety.

So by interacting with the anxiety and changing its imagery we can help it heal. And that’s a very important set of methods and techniques that I will teach you, how to work with the imagery of the emotion.

Training is everything

So we do all of this beforehand until we can imagine doing the challenge without any anxiety. And then we do the challenge. During the challenge we simply stay mindful, that means staying awake, staying aware, and if anxiety appears we have already trained on how to respond to it skillfully. So we can help resolve it on the spot during the challenge.

But then we also do a meditation after the challenge, so we call that a review meditation. And this is very important and very useful because you may have fresh anxiety to work with and that is always better quality in many ways.

So we look at that anxiety that got triggered during the challenge, and in the same way we neutralized the external structure of reactive thoughts that feed it and we work on changing the internal imagery of that fresh anxiety until we feel that the anxiety is resolved.

And then after a suitable rest period we would do the challenge again. Do rehearsal meditation first then the active challenge and then a review meditation afterwards. And then some time for processing. And then repeat again.

So this is the systematic approach that I find works best. It makes the best use of that exposure challenge so that you’re not just re-traumatizing yourself but actually training out of the anxiety and fear reactions.

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

This approach, the mindfulness-based exposure therapy approach is very efficient and typically people see progress, tremendous progress, within the first three to four sessions. It’s quite different than conventional talk therapy.

It’s much more practical. And of course it gives you a set of tools that you can apply yourself between the session, because that’s where the real change happens as you gain more and more experience of applying mindfulness with your exposure challenges. So if you would like to get started with me please contact me via the Contact Form.

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

Talk to an online psychotherapist for help with agoraphobia

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist. I specialize in mindfulness therapy, which I offer online for the treatment of anxiety, depression, addictions, OCD, PTSD and also for work with agoraphobia.

So if you’re looking for online psychotherapy for agoraphobia and you would prefer not to take medications to treat your agoraphobia, then I invite you to go to my website, learn more about this online therapy service that I offer, and please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

And if you would like to go ahead and schedule Skype therapy sessions with me, then simply go to the contact page and send me an e-mail. Tell me more about yourself. And what you tried so far, and any questions you may have. And we can then schedule a session at a time that works for you.

I see people worldwide. Most of my clients are living in the USA, but I also see a lot of clients in the UK and Western Europe and as far away as Japan and South Korea. All you need is a good Internet connection and then you can conduct Skype therapy sessions.

We must use Skype. That’s quite important to understand. We need to be able to see each other in order for our online therapy sessions to be effective.

But if you can see each other using Skype or similar video platform, then the quality of psychotherapy is just as good as meeting in person. And for many people, it’s even better. Because it’s much more convenient and much more comfortable for you to have your sessions at home than in a therapist’s office.

If you’re suffering from agoraphobia or driving anxiety, which is often associated with agoraphobia, then being able to have online psychotherapy sessions becomes essential. And that’s one of the reasons why I developed this online therapy service to help people who cannot leave home for one reason or another.

Clearly, in the case of agoraphobia, it’s very, very difficult to leave home. The fear of having a panic attack or the fear of being out of control, of losing that security is so strong that it inhibits leaving home or traveling any distance from home.

Agoraphobia can take many different forms, but an underlying theme is this feeling of losing control, of not being able to get back to a safe place, or feeling trapped. There are many different forms that that can take.

The way of working with agoraphobia is really quite straightforward if you take a very focused and strategic and practical approach, and that’s what I offer during these online mindfulness therapy sessions.

The technique that I have developed and that works is called mindfulness-based exposure therapy. And this is where we work on specific situations that historically have triggered anxiety. We make sure that we make those a challenge that we work at in a strategic and focused way, perhaps undertaking daily challenges.

But we must proceed each challenge with training, and that is where the mindfulness part comes in. The typical way we go about this is that you imagine doing that particular challenge.

You then watch for any anxiety reactions or anxiety-producing thoughts that get triggered. And then you begin to work with those emotions and thoughts mindfully so that you can break the habit of becoming identified with those thoughts or emotional reactions.

This is the biggest problem that we need to overcome. It is called reactive identification in mindfulness psychology. And is the process whereby we become completely identified and overwhelmed and consumed by the particular emotion or thought process that has triggered.

We need to learn to break that habit, because that’s the primary habit that feeds the anxiety and panic attacks in the first place.

So we need to change the relationship that we have to our emotions and thoughts. We need to start developing a mindful relationship with those objects of mind in which we remain as the observer. We can see those emotions and thoughts clearly as objects and remain not identified with those objects.

This is an essential opening that’s required for healing. If you become identified with anxiety, if you start reacting to the anxiety with fear, more anxiety, or aversion, or if you try to escape the anxiety through some method of distraction that will simply feed the anxiety.

So reactivity feeds, the anxiety; that reactivity is the primary problem. And that’s what we have to overcome.

So we do this by deliberately learning to meditate on our anxiety, we learn to sit with our emotions without becoming identified with them, without becoming overwhelmed, without reacting.

This way we start to re-establish a healthy balance with the mind. Thoughts in themselves are not a problem. Emotions are not a problem until we become identified with them and then become reactive, then they create suffering.

But when we can stay in an objective, mindful relationship, then we can begin to facilitate the process of healing. First, by not feeding the suffering. That in itself brings a tremendous relief. If we don’t make it worse by blind, reactive thinking and reactive emotions that just had happened in a conditioned way out of habit. Then when we stop doing that we take away the fuel that feeds that underlying anxiety.

So that’s a very important part of mindfulness training, it is learning how not to make it worse. And then the second part is how to actually make it heal. So mindfulness therapy is concerned with healing, healing anxiety in this case. And there we need to be able to sit with it as a compassionate presence.

If you react with hatred towards your anxiety, it cannot heal and it will not heal and it will simply get worse. But if you work on developing a friendly and compassionate relationship with your anxiety, then it will heal.

So that’s a very important part of mindfulness: developing compassion internally. This will also help you externally as well in your relationships and life in general.

Working internally is the foundation for mental health and well-being. Medications are not an effective treatment for anxiety because they do not address these underlying reactive habits that cause the anxiety. So I do not advocate medications; it is just another form of avoidance in my opinion.

It’s much better to spend your time and effort actually working on looking at your emotions and helping them heal and re-establishing balance in the mind by developing your True Self, which is that observer presence, the mind that can observe and not react.

That’s your True Self. That’s what is required for healing anxiety when you can bring that quality of non-reactive mind to anxiety it will heal. That is a given, that happens every time.

The real issue that stops anxiety healing is that reactivity, in which you are not present with your emotions, because when you react, you basically leave the emotion alone and you now become consumed by the reaction.

Whether it’s fear or whether it’s thoughts, worry thoughts, or whether it’s hatred for self-criticism. This takes you away from the anxiety, so the anxiety is now more isolated than it was to begin with. And under those conditions, it cannot heal.

So it’s only when you create this conscious, loving presence with your anxiety that it can heal and when you work on that, it heals very fast.

So this is a brief overview of the mindfulness approach to healing anxiety and for overcoming agoraphobia. You work with the specific anxiety that is triggered and then you help it heal.

When you’ve healed that anxiety, then you do the actual challenge, you do the live challenge. That becomes a way of then reinforcing this new in a confidence in which the anxiety is no longer operating.

Then you move on to another challenge and you work through your list of exposure challenges until you have freed yourself from anxiety in all of those challenges.

When you do this in a strategic way, it begins to gather momentum and it becomes easier and easier each time. And typically when you have managed successfully to overcome the anxiety in three or four of those exposure challenges you’ll find that it begins to become much, much easier to do the next challenge. And your confidence builds exponentially in this process.

The mind can see how to globalize this response to anxiety, whatever the trigger. And then we begin to reach sufficient momentum that we break free entirely.

So agoraphobia is treatable, completely. But you have to take a very detailed strategic approach of working at this mindful level, this experiential level. If you do that, you will see results very quickly. And most of my clients see dramatic changes within three or four weeks.

The key is to practice the methods that I will teach you. And do those challenges every day without fail. Then, like any other form of training, you will see the benefits.

So that’s a brief overview. If you would like to learn more, please contact me and we can schedule a Skype therapy session and so you can see for yourself just how effective the mindful approach is for treating agoraphobia without medications. Thank you.

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

Overcome Agoraphobia through Online Psychotherapy

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders, including the agoraphobia. So if you’re looking for online psychotherapy to help overcome your agoraphobia, then to please go to my website and learn more about the mindfulness therapy that I offer online through Skype.

If you’re looking for an online therapist, it’s very important that you find someone who offers therapy via Skype or similar video platform so that you can see each other.

You must be able to see each other in order to have an effective psychotherapy session because you need good communication and you need to see each other in order to establish good communication.

If you are struggling with agoraphobia and you are looking for an online therapist, then do please go to my website and learn more about the mindfulness-based approach that I use for treating agoraphobia.

This system that I’ve developed over the last 20 years now is proving to be very effective. It’s called mindfulness-based exposure therapy and it’s a way of basically desensitizing those habitual anxiety reactions that keep you a prisoner.

You will learn how to set up a schedule of incremental exposure challenges and then how to apply mindfulness training in order to neutralize those anxiety reactions associated with each of those challenges.

The primary way that we do this is by learning how to meditate on the anxiety. So we play the scene through in our mind for that particular challenge. We watch for the anxiety reactions that may get triggered and then we work on totally changing the way that we relate to that anxiety.

The fundamental problem that people struggling with anxiety and depression have to deal with is the problem of reactive identification. This is a term that I coined some years ago to describe the way that we become blindly attached to that emotional reaction, to that habitual emotional reaction.

The emotion itself is not the problem, it is this reactive identification that is the problem because that basically activates the emotion, the anxiety and gives it the power to cause emotional suffering.

If you can overcome this reactive identification, then the anxiety basically will have no power to cause suffering. It just becomes an object that we can observe in the mind. And that we can help heal. If you react to that anxiety, of course, you will simply feed it. And if you identify with it, that is what really ignites all that reactivity, the reactive thinking that feeds anxiety.

So we train with the anxiety by meditating on it, by learning how to stay conscious, being totally present with that emotion, without becoming overwhelmed by it, without becoming identified with it, and without becoming reactive towards it.

This is a central theme in all mindfulness work. Mindfulness basically means being able to be totally present consciously with your experience with out reactivity.

Whatever the experience is, pleasant experiences included, in order to be mindful, you need to be able to be totally present without reacting, because if you react, you basically inhibit full connection with that experience and this will prevent healing in the case of anxiety and other forms of emotional suffering. You need to be totally conscious in order for suffering to heal.

So we learn to be present with our anxiety by meditating on it. You play through the particular challenge that we are working with in order to identify the anxiety. And then we learn to sit with that anxiety without reacting. This is very important indeed.

We can then move on to develop the second part of mindfulness work, which is developing a compassion and friendliness towards that anxiety. You see the anxiety as being in pain, as an object that’s in pain. It’s rather like a child coming to you in pain. It needs your help. It needs your conscious presence, it needs your friendliness and love and compassion in order to heal. And this is what we learn to do through mindfulness training and mindfulness therapy.

We learn how to develop this kind of relationship with our anxiety because that is the only thing that will effectively heal it.

So if you’d like to learn more about mindfulness-based exposure therapy for overcoming agoraphobia, you’d like to learn how to apply mindfulness for overcoming anxiety, then do please go to my website. And feel free to contact me. Tell me more about yourself, what you’ve tried so far. And tell me if you’d like to schedule some Skype therapy sessions with me.

Most people see really quite surprising results in relatively short time. And there’s one reason for that. And that is because you are learning how to directly engage with your anxiety. Talking about your feelings is not directly engaging with them, and that’s why that tends to be a slow process.

It may provide temporary relief but just talking about your feelings is not sufficient to heal the underlying emotional habits. The same goes for medications.

Medications may provide a temporary relief from symptoms, but they do absolutely nothing to heal those underlying psychological reactive habits that cause your anxiety.

So if you would like to learn more about mindfulness approach to healing agoraphobia and you’d like to work with an online psychotherapist like myself, do please reach out to me by email and let’s schedule a Skype therapy session so you can begin to experience directly how effective mindfulness therapy is for overcoming agoraphobia. Thank you.

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