Online Therapy for agoraphobia

Overcome agoraphobia through Online Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy via Skype

I will teach you how to work with your anxiety in a way that neutralizes your anxiety and prevents you from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety.

Mindfulness Therapy is especially effective for the treatment of anxiety and online therapy makes the whole process of recovery both convenient and available for you, especially if you are struggling with agoraphobia and the fear of being in public places.

Most people come to me after trying traditional “talk therapy” and counseling and are looking for an alternative approach that focuses on transforming the underlying cause of your anxiety and that does not depend on medications for controlling symptoms.

I will guide you through the process and you will see significant improvements after each therapy session as you start to apply the methods that I will teach you. Most people see significant improvements after 3-4 sessions.

The online therapy option is essential if you suffer from agoraphobia and find it difficult to leave home, but it is recommended that you use Skype or Zoom so that you and your therapist can see each other to establish good communication.

Online Therapy for agoraphobia

Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia menu

Contact me to learn more about Online Mindfulness Therapy for agoraphobia and to schedule Skype Therapy sessions with me.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO LEAN MORE AND TO SCHEDULE A SESSION VIA SKYPE WITH DR. PETER STRONG

Online treatment plan for agoraphobia using Mindfulness Therapy

FAQ

What is the main cause of agoraphobia?

It is not clear what causes agoraphobia, but it often begins after experiencing a panic attack that is particularly traumatic. It is also common to have underlying issues with anxiety and depression that feed the agoraphobia. See: Agoraphobia Causes

What is the best therapy for agoraphobia?

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an important component of a successful treatment plan because you will need to learn how to manage reactive thinking and beliefs.

It is also essential to incorporate an appropriate Exposure Therapy plan such as Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy.

Can agoraphobia be treated at home?

Yes, with the right kind of psychotherapy delivered online via Skype or Zoom. Using a Skype-enabled smartphone, yor therapist can guide you through an Exposure Therapy program.

How long does it take to overcome agoraphobia?

This will depend on the type of psychotherapy you receive. Traditional “talk therapy” or counseling is usually insufficient. You need a very focused approach that must incorporate Exposure Therapy and effective strategies for managing anxiety and anxiety-producing thoughts and beliefs.

What happens if agoraphobia is left untreated?

If not treated agoraphobia often leads to progressive restriction in activities due to identification with avoidance thoughts and can lead to an inability to leave home. The “safe zone” becomes smaller and smaller.

Online Mindfulness Therapist for Controlling Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without relying on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications

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

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

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

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

Online therapy is just as effective as in-person therapy as long as you use Skype, FaceTime or Zoom so that you can see each other. Being able to see each other is required for good communication and effective psychotherapy.

Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for Agoraphobia

Working with Inner Imagery – The secret to healing Agoraphobia

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

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

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

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

Contact me to learn more about this online psychotherapy service and schedule a Skype therapy session with me. Inquiries welcome!

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

“I came across Dr. Peter Strong’s website when I was doing some research on the benefits of mindfulness for anxiety. I am so happy I took the next step and contacted him. I always looked forward to each session, he made my day lighter, made me feel stronger and happier.”

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA

Online Therapist for treating Agoraphobia via Skype

How to beat agoraphobia – Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia

Contact me to schedule a Skype therapy session with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in online mindfulness therapy for anxiety and depression.

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. 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 things 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.

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.

So if you’d like to learn more about this approach then please contact me and we can discuss this further and we can set up some online therapy sessions via Skype.

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

Online Therapy by Skype for Agoraphobia

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

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.

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.

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 online therapy approach for overcoming agoraphobia.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA

Agoraphobia Help Online through Skype

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional online therapist based in Boulder, Colorado, and I offer online therapy for anxiety, depression, and stress, including PTSD, and I also offer online help for agoraphobia.

So if you’re interested in seeking online therapy for agoraphobia, then please reach out to me by e-mail. Tell me more about how I can help you. What you’re experiencing. And then we can schedule a Skype Therapy session and I will teach you how to overcome your agoraphobia using the well tested techniques of Mindfulness Therapy that I have developed over the years and found to be very effective for all kinds of anxiety disorders including agoraphobia.

The essence of what I will teach you during these online therapy sessions is how to set up a schedule of strategic exposure challenges. That’s the first thing that we will need to do.

That might involve walking outside that house, or walking into a shop, or whatever it might be, but some challenge, basically, that triggers anxiety. We want to use these challenges as a way of training out of that anxiety reaction.

So we set up a series of challenges and then the most important thing is that we prepare for each challenge using mindfulness meditation, which means that we play through that challenge in the mind, we look for any anxiety reactions that occur and then we meditate on those anxiety reactions themselves.

We basically learn how to dis-identify from those reactions. We learn to overcome the habit of becoming overwhelmed or controlled by those anxiety reactions. You learn to sit with the anxiety without becoming overwhelmed. That is the second essential part of the mindfulness approach, and the third part of Mindfulness Therapy involves healing that anxiety that we find.

And this involves developing a very high quality conscious relationship with the emotion itself based on mindfulness and based on compassion or friendliness, and this approach works extremely well. The biggest problem that I come across is that people develop a fear of their anxiety and they try to escape it. They try to avoid it. They look for distraction behaviors. Anything to get away from it. And that will not work. You must learn how to form a stable non-reactive relationship with your anxiety and then respond with compassion in the way that I am advocating here, if you want it to heal. That is an essential requirement.

So if you would like to learn more about how to overcome your agoraphobia using Mindfulness Therapy, then please reach out to me by email and let’s schedule Skype Therapy session.

Mindfulness Therapy is very effective for all kinds of anxiety disorders and most people that I work with can expect to see significant improvements after three or four weeks, once they start applying mindfulness methods and executing them with these challenges that I’ve been talking about.

If you take this very strategic and systematic way of working with your anxiety then you will overcome your agoraphobia, and you’ll be able to extend your range and be completely comfortable in a wide range of circumstances that previously may not be possible for you.

Of course doing online therapy for Agoraphobia is very convenient, and sometimes it’s very necessary because it’s so difficult to go to see a therapist away from home.

So if you’re interested, please email me and let’s explore how Mindfulness Therapy can help you overcome your agoraphobia.

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Online Therapy for agoraphobia