Online Therapy for Panic Attacks

Looking for an Online Psychotherapist for help you overcome Panic Attacks and Anxiety through Mindfulness Therapy rather than relying on medications?

This service is for people who are highly motivated to change, who want to take charge of their life, but do not want to indulge in years of “talk therapy” or depend on medications.

Speak with a Psychotherapist Online via Skype for effective online therapy for Depression and Anxiety, Panic Attacks, Social Anxiety and Agoraphobia, Addictions, and other emotional problems, including PTSD.

Email me to find out more about this online counseling service and organize an online Skype counseling session with me

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online therapy for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks via Skype

All sessions are with Dr. Peter Strong via Skype
Schedule a session to see if Mindfulness Therapy is right for you
There are NO upfront payments. You make your payment via PayPal after each session and only if you are completely satisfied with the therapy session
You should expect to see significant improvements after 3-4 sessions

You might find this video helpful:

What is the best therapy for panic attacks?

Complete Video Playlist: Online Therapy for Panic Attacks

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I provide Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype for the treatment of anxiety and depression and other emotional issues that respond well to mindfulness therapy.

One of the questions I’m often asked is, What is the best therapy for panic attacks and severe anxiety in general? I recommend Mindfulness Therapy. It is, in my opinion, the best approach available for overcoming anxiety and providing lasting relief for panic attacks.

The reason why Mindfulness Therapy is so effective for working with anxiety and panic attacks is because it helps you change the underlying habitual process that causes your anxiety.

So medications are not effective in my opinion because they do not address that underlying cause, the psychological habits that create anxiety and panic attacks.

Conventional talk therapy is often not that effective either for the same reason. It doesn’t really get to the underlying mechanism that’s causing your anxiety. Mindfulness Therapy does.

It’s a way of changing the underlying habit that causes your anxiety, and anxiety and panic attacks are habits and all habits can be changed. So how does Mindfulness Therapy work for changing anxiety and healing anxiety?

Well the first thing that we must do is change the way that we relate to our emotions. So most people develop a great deal of fear around their anxiety and panic attacks. So the fear reaction is understandable when you have no other choices, that’s going to dominate.

But unfortunately, the reaction of fear will simply reinforce the anxiety. So the first thing we must do is develop a different relationship with our emotions that is not fear based. We need to overcome that habitual fear reaction itself.

We do this by learning how to meditate on our anxiety using mindfulness. So this means that we might look at a situation and replay it in the mind in order to get access to the anxiety so that we can then work with it and train with it using mindfulness to speed up the healing process.

The biggest problem is that we fall into reactive habits of avoidance and aversion towards the anxiety. This reactivity prevents healing.

So the object here is to be able to sit with your anxiety without becoming overwhelmed by it, without becoming overwhelmed by the fear reactions to the anxiety. And this is quite easy to do with the right guidance and with practice. You just have to know what you are doing, you need some guidance and you need some practice. But most people can achieve this first goal in a matter of a few weeks at the most. You just have to know what you are doing and you need guidance and encouragement, which is what I will be teaching you during our Skype sessions together.

So the first step is to be able to relate to the anxiety without reacting to it. The second step is to see that anxiety as being an object in the mind and not identifying with it, because that’s in many ways the main problem, besides those reactions of fear to the anxiety. The second main problem is the reaction of identification with the anxiety or the fear. When we identify with it we basically lose power and it becomes overwhelming.

So we need to see the anxiety the same way that we would look at an object. And even better to see the anxiety as being like a child or a visitor that gets triggered and comes to us for help. That’s a very good strategy.

So see the anxiety as being like a child. It can’t heal its own suffering. It has to go to its parents to get the help that it needs to heal. It’s very much the same with our emotions. They are helpless in themselves. They’re just the product of habit. In order to change, we have to develop a conscious relationship with them just the same as between a parent and a child. We have to see them as a child or as an object in the mind. And then we can be of help because we don’t just become overwhelmed through identification or fear.

So to see emotion as an object or a child is very important. So this is developing the relationship of compassion with your own emotions. Absolutely essential for healing anxiety and panic attacks.

Another way that we work with our emotions during our meditation on the anxiety is to work with its imagery. This may not be familiar to you, but rest assured after working on this for over ten years now, I can absolutely stand by this: that all emotions are based on imagery.

So how you see the anxiety in the mind is what really causes the anxiety. It’s the imagery, and typically the imagery is too big and too close. That’s why it is experienced as being overwhelming. It has to be very large to be overwhelming.

But again, the imagery of emotions is also habit based. There’s no particular reason why it has to stay that way. It’s just habit. Well, habits can be changed through mindfulness, through bringing conscious awareness to explore that imagery and then change the imagery.

When you change the imagery of an emotion you change the emotion. And this is actually a natural process by which emotions operate in the mind, and when they heal they almost always become smaller in size and more distant. This is part of the healing process that happens naturally.

In mindfulness meditation work we’re simply utilizing this natural process of image change and we are speeding it up because we can bring in consciousness. So working with the imagery of anxiety is very important.

So in this way we can begin to train the emotions to heal so that we don’t become a victim of our anxiety attacks. Then we go to the final stage of our work which is engaging with the triggers, whatever triggers the panic attacks, whether it is driving a car, or being in a public place, or whatever it might be.

We need to train for those very specific situations and then we do the challenge and then we might process any anxiety that comes up after the challenge. So we take a very strategic highly focused approach to managing the challenges and real-life situations. But if you train for it then you will get very quick results. If you don’t train for it then you risk simply being re-traumatized.

So this we call mindfulness-based exposure therapy, and it is by far the best approach, in my opinion, for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks and also other forms of emotional suffering too. The process is much the same. It all starts with changing the relationship to your emotions. Then exploring the reactive thoughts that feed the emotions, and changing those. And then looking at the imagery of the emotion and changing that. And then applying this in an exposure-challenge format.

If you would like to learn more about Mindfulness Therapy for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks, do please contact me and let’s schedule a Skype Therapy session. You will see changes even after the first session. Most people see significant improvements after three or four sessions with me. So please contact me if you would like help with panic attacks. Thank you.

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What is the best therapy for panic attacks?
Do You Suffer from Panic Attacks?
Symptoms of a Panic Attack
Introduction to Online Mindfulness Therapy for Panic Attacks
How Long does Online Therapy for Panic Attacks take before I will see Positive Results?
Mindfulness Therapy for Panic Attacks is very effective
Online Therapist for Panic Attacks via Skype
Online Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for Panic Attacks
How to treat panic attacks without medication through Online Mindfulness Therapy
Online treatment for anxiety attacks via Skype
How to Stop Anxiety Attacks through Mindfulness Therapy via Skype
Online Mindfulness-based Treatment for Panic Attacks via Skype
How to stop anxiety attacks through Online Mindfulness Therapy available via Skype
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Online Psychotherapy to Control Panic Attacks

Do You Suffer from Panic Attacks?

Panic Disorder affects between 3 and 6 million Americans, and is twice as common in women. We all experience panic at some time in our lives, but those suffering from panic disorder experience panic attacks on a daily basis, and this form of anxiety can severely reduce the quality of life, making even simple activities like grocery shopping unmanageable.

In its most severe form this crippling form, anxiety attacks can lead to agoraphobia, a very intense fear of going beyond the safety zone of one’s own home. In such severe cases, it is wise to seek help and this Online Counseling Service is one way to get the help you need.

One of the characteristics of panic anxiety is the intense fear of the panic attack itself. Sufferers are deathly afraid of the next panic attack and the sense of losing control, and the social embarrassment that will bring. Some times we feel afraid that the core anxiety is so powerful that it will literally suck us in permanently into a state of madness. Most panic anxiety sufferers recognize that the fear of fear is the biggest problem that they have to overcome and the main source of their emotional suffering.

The fear of losing control proliferates into endless worrying and catastrophic thinking, which intensifies and prolongs the original anxiety. This can lead to tertiary reactivity, which are all the feelings of depression and anger directed at oneself for not being able to cope and which lead to a loss of self-esteem and self-confidence.

Symptoms of a Panic Attack

Shortness of breath
Choking and gagging
Racing Heart
Dry mouth
Tunnel vision
Dizziness
Hot or cold flashes
Tightness in the stomach, chest or neck

If you answer “yes” to these questions then you, like thousands of others are probably suffering from a Panic Anxiety Disorder. But, you do not have to remain victim of your panic disorder because it is quite treatable using the well-respected methods of Mindfulness-based Online Therapy.

Panic attacks typically last 10-20 mins and can be triggered by a variety of external situations or by intrusive inner thoughts that arise to torment us.

Panic anxiety is a combination of psychological and bodily processes. Anxiety, like anger and all emotions involve the whole body and mind.

Often, these physical sensations become quite frightening in themselves and it is not uncommon for sufferers to develop a compulsion around these sensations leading to repeated visits to the doctor. An excessive preoccupation with physical changes in the body is called hypochondriasis or hypochondria, a common feature of people who suffer from repeated panic attacks.

Of course, it is essential to talk to your doctor to rule out any underlying medical conditions, but at some point you may begin to see that you are a victim of a compulsive fear with no underlying physical problem. This is where it is appropriate to seek psychological help. Some well-respected forms of psychotherapy for Panic Anxiety include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) or the more modern Mindfulness Therapy, which has gained a lot of interest in recent years as an effective therapy for anxiety, depression and stress. Mindfulness Therapy is an excellent choice for the treatment of panic attacks.

Mindfulness Therapy, now available online via Skype is a very good choice for changing the underlying cause of your anxiety. It is possible to stop panic anxiety, and a skilled therapist can teach you specific tools for controlling panic attacks. There is no magic cure for panic attacks, but there are certainly some very effective treatments for panic attacks available.

Introduction to Online Mindfulness Therapy for Panic Attacks

Mindfulness Therapy teaches you how to work in a constructive way with the underlying fear and anxiety. Trying to convince you that your panic reactions are “irrational” and trying to change them into “rational” reactions seldom works. A person suffering from panic anxiety already knows that his reactions are “irrational.” When I work with people I prefer not to use such derogatory terms. What is much more constructive is to see the panic reaction as the rational product of an underlying process, and the key to successful therapy is understanding the structure of that process.

Change the underlying imagery and you can control panic attacks

Of course, panic attacks have a cognitive structure in the form of reactive habitual thoughts and beliefs, and the objective of good therapy is to help you change these thoughts and beliefs. But, to do this we need to understand that the cognitive structure depends on emotional energy. This is what gives meaning and power to the thoughts, the fuel that propels the engine or reactive panic thinking. This is what we need to change, and resolving the underlying emotions is the central focus of Mindfulness Therapy. When the emotional structure changes, then the cognitive structure changes and the reactive panic thinking and beliefs simply lose their power and cease to produce an anxiety reaction.

How do we change the core emotional energy that fuels the panic attacks? We need to look at the structure of the emotion itself…

All emotions have an inner structure at the sensory level – not as thoughts but as imagery: color, shape, movement, spacial position and size. When we can see the structure of this inner representation, this inner imagery, then we have something we can change. The rule here is:

Change the imagery and you change the emotion; change the emotion and you change the reactive thinking that sustains the panic attacks

Mindfulness is a very sophisticated awareness tool that allows us to see into the structure of our panic attacks, anxiety, depression, anger or any other emotions and produce a change where it is most needed – at the core of the emotion itself. This is why Mindfulness Therapy is so effective.

Here is a testimonial by a client in which he describes his experiences with Online Mindfulness Therapy for his anxiety panic attacks:

“When I first found Peter’s website I had been experiencing panic disorder… I couldn’t go to work and even trips to the corner store were a big challenge. I thought I was going crazy, and that I might lose my job and my fiance. After one meeting with Peter over Skype I already felt like I had hope, and within a few days of putting what I learned into practice I was making big steps towards recovery. After a few more meetings with him, four weeks later, my panic attacks had completely stopped, and have not resurfaced even when presenting to senior executives (public speaking is what originally brought on my panic disorder). I highly recommend Peter to anyone experiencing panic attacks or severe anxiety.” – Mike in Toronto.

How Long does Online Therapy for Panic Attacks take before I will see Positive Results?

The Online Mindfulness Therapy treatment for panic disorder that I developed in the 1980s is very focused on changing the underlying cause of your panic attacks and anxiety, that is, the reactive thinking and unresolved emotions.

We don’t spend an excessive amount of time talking about the panic anxiety, but rather we focus on the underlying process itself. This is why Mindfulness Therapy is so much faster than most traditional “talking therapies.” Typically, people see big changes after 3-6 sessions. You will know after the first session if this approach is right for you.

What Happens during an Online Therapy Session?

Online Counseling Therapy sessions are usually 60-90mins in length. Longer than typical counseling sessions because we need to make time for teaching you the principles of how to apply mindfulness and have plenty of time for doing practical work. Each session builds on the previous session giving you a greater understanding of how to work in a more positive way with your panic attacks.

During the practical work, you will learn how to focus mindful awareness on the underlying panic anxiety itself – without becoming reactive. This is a fundamental skill that you will develop in the first two sessions.

It is possible to look at the emotion without becoming overwhelmed by it and without getting lost in the worry thinking that only makes things worse. Instead of reacting, you learn to “sit” with the panic anxiety and this is the foundation for healing and for transformation.

It is like trying to help a friend in need.

You can’t help him if you become equally upset. You need to be able to provide a safe and non-reactive space in which he can express himself. This is what allows him to heal, and it is exactly the same for our emotions. We need to learn to be present with our panic anxiety, without becoming reactive – then the healing begins.

Will Mindfulness Therapy teach me specific techniques to stop a panic attack?

A primary focus in Mindfulness Therapy for Panic Attacks is to stop the underlying reactive processes and resolve the core emotions that cause panic attacks. To compliment there are also specific mindfulness tools that we can learn to manage our panic anxiety during a panic attack. Mindful Breathing is one very effective method for controlling a panic attack as is a technique that I developed called the “Expansion Response”.

The Mindfulness Breathing Response for Managing Panic Attacks

All emotions have a structure, that is they depend on certain automatic reactions in the body and mind. A typical physical reaction involves shallow breathing or panting. The point is that this type of breathing is required to maintain a panic attack – it is part of the structure of the panic anxiety reaction.

The theory is, and this is confirmed in practice, that if you deliberately change the way you breath then you are changing the structure of the panic emotion, and this will inhibit the emotion and diminish its intensity.

In the Mindful Breathing Response technique, you learn to pay very close attention to the full cycle of in and out breathing and experiment in changing each part of the cycle – making the in breath longer, softening the out breath, taking a deeper breath and holding it, etc.

With careful attention you can discover specific changes that you can make to your breathing that controls the panic attack. You can literally tune-down the intensity of the attack through modulated breathing.

A simple but effective mental technique for managing a panic attack in progress.

Panic attacks, like other anxiety reactions are experienced emotionally as an inner contraction, a closing in. In fact most people describe panic attacks as very claustrophobic. This sense of inner contraction is also very much part of the structure of a panic attack.

Change this structure and you change the intensity of the panic attack. The Mindfulness Expansion Response teaches us how to prevent this inner contraction of consciousness. We literally “explode” the panic impulse the moment it arises and imagine creating a very large space around the impulse. This technique can be remarkably effective when perfected.

There are many more techniques and methods that can help you overcome your panic attacks that you will learn during sessions of Mindfulness Therapy.

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME

Mindfulness Therapy for Panic Attacks is very effective

Now, in the last few years or so more and more people have been seeking Mindfulness Therapy for their Panic Attacks and General Anxiety over the internet using Skype, as I say, which works extremely well, and there are many studies that show it to be equally effective to in-person therapy. And in some ways, it is even better than in-person therapy, because the client feels more empowered and in charge of the process.

Any how, I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to describe to you a little bit about what Mindfulness Therapy is and some of the essential principles of how to work with your anxiety, and particularly with your panic attacks. Panic attack anxiety is very, very painful. It is one of the most painful forms of emotions that a person can experience. I know this from personal experience as well as from working with people. It is very distressing.

Our natural reaction to distressing emotions like this is, of course, to run away from them, or to avoid them, or to indulge in a whole range of secondary reactivity – Thinking about the fear, worrying about how you are going to cope if the panic attack should occur, what people are going to think about you, and so on – And this starts to spin out of control and people suffering panic attacks can literally just close down entirely.

When we work with panic anxiety here in the office or online through Skype sessions, the first and most essential principle of Mindfulness Therapy is learning how to sit with that emotion, with that feeling. The term, “sitting” is a very nice term and it describes the process very well. It’s like sitting with a friend or a child who is in pain, in which you are basically there, being very present with an open mind and an open heart. The attitude of friendliness is absolutely essential.

So, when you are encountering panic anxiety, what really helps is if you can take a few minutes and start to explore how to sit with that feeling as you experience it in your body and in your mind as if it was a child in pain, crying for your attention. And in many ways, that is the function of mental pain or suffering.

It is there to attract our attention. It’s saying, “Look over here!” and the skillful response to anxiety of all kinds is to do just that. It is to take the time to look at the anxiety and sit with it without becoming reactive, without getting caught up in the story, the emotional drama, in all the secondary thinking about the pain that you are experiencing.

It is just to create a space inside in which you are sitting with that pain and being fully present. When you do this, you are creating the right internal conditions that allow that anxiety to begin to change itself. One of the second principles of Mindfulness Therapy is that we understand that our mind is more than capable of solving the problem of emotional anxiety.

Our psyche has the skills, the intelligence, and all that it needs to heal emotional suffering, in the same way that our body has the skills and bodily intelligence it needs to heal a physical wound – a cut or a graze.

However, in order for the psyche, that is the Big Mind, the intuitive mind, not the thinking mind, but the deeper intuitive aspect of our mind. In order for it to begin to start healing anxiety it has to have freedom; freedom in which to change. This freedom, which allows an emotion to begin its own transformation and healing is exactly what we are providing through mindfulness.

Mindfulness, as I define it in my book, ‘The Path of Mindfulness Meditation’ is engaged-presence, is that quality of being really, really interested and present for your experience, without getting caught up in reactivity and thinking about the experience, which is not the same as being present. So freedom to change equals presence equals mindfulness.

It’s hard, it’s a hard process, to literally learn how to face your emotions and emotional your suffering in this way. It is hard, but it is possible. It is a process that is guaranteed to lead to beneficial change. So, I invite you to experiment with this by yourself. Learning bit by bit how to sit with your pain and create the right inner conditions that will allow that pain to undergo transformation and healing.

If you would like more information or if you would like to talk to me about your panic anxiety, or other forms of anxiety, please send me an email. Visit my website to learn more.

Mindfulness-based Online Therapy for Panic Attacks Anxiety is now available online via Skype.

Online Therapist for Panic Attacks via Skype

Hello there! My name is Peter Strong of the Boulder Center for Mindfulness Therapy. Now, many of the people who seek my assistance here either in the office or online through Skype sessions come to me suffering from panic attacks and panic anxiety. This is by far the most common form of emotional suffering that people encounter in their lives.

online therapist for anxiety and panic attacks — **Get help from an online therapist for depression and anxiety**

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online therapy for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks via Skype

How to Stop Panic Attacks through Mindfulness Therapy

As a professional psychotherapist I’m often asked how to stop anxiety attacks, how to stop yourself from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety and anxiety producing thoughts. In my experience the most important approach that will help you stop anxiety attacks is to learn how to embrace your thoughts with mindfulness.

That means, essentially, developing a conscious and friendly relationship with your anxiety producing thoughts. So you must not fight them or avoid them. That will simply make them stronger. But once you start developing a friendly relationship to your thoughts, that will take that power away and it will also stop feeding those anxiety thoughts.

If you hold these thoughts in consciousness without reacting to it, long enough, that thought will always burn itself out. So we need to build mindfulness towards his thoughts. You are essentially teaching those thoughts to being themselves calm.

So that’s part of causing mindfulness therapy approach that I teach and there are many other aspects to mindfulness therapy that can be used to stop anxiety attacks and panic attacks, but that’s the principle, the central most important thing.

Another very common technique that I teach that really helps in this process of breaking free from the power of anxiety thoughts is to use visualization or imagery. We call this mindfulness based imagery reprocessing.

So this is where you take the image of the thought and you make it extremely small, perhaps as small as a grain of sand. And then you take that grain of sand and you place it on the ground.

If you make it small and you put it at a low level such as on the ground you will take away a great deal of its intensity because the key factor that causes thoughts to have emotional intensity is there size and their position, the imagery of the thought, itself.

So when we look at our thoughts with mindfulness, that brings in an element of choice where we can begin exploring ways of changing the size and the position of our thoughts. And the smaller they become the less intense they become, and if you put them at a lower level that will take away their intensity, as well. So that’s a simple technique using mindfulness based imagery reprocess that you can try for yourself.

If you find success with this method, please leave comments below. Do please contact me if you’d like to schedule Skype therapy sessions with me to learn more about how to stop anxiety attacks. Thank you.

Traditional talk therapy can be useful, but often common talk therapy does not alter the the underlying process that creates your depression or anxiety.

This also applies to the use of medications – medications may provide a short-term relief from anxiety and depression symptoms for a while, but medications are not able to transform the underlying cause that generates the anxiety or depression.

The school of psychotherapy that I offer is called Mindfulness Therapy, which can be extremely effective for overcoming anxiety disorders, including Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, Agoraphobia, OCD, Phobias and Panic Attacks and for treating depression and other emotional-psychological problems caused by habitual negative thinking.

Most clients see substantial changes after 3-4 weeks of Online Therapy with me.

Go to my website and email me to learn more about this online therapy service and to arrange for a Skype session with me.

So, if you are interested in online therapy, do please visit my site and e-mail me and then we can discuss whether this approach of mindfulness-based therapy is a good fit for your specific needs.

It has proven very effective for the vast majority of my clients and students. Most people see major improvements after 3-4 sessions once you start applying the mindfulness methods I will teach you.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online therapy for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks via Skype

Online Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for Panic Attacks

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist and I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy for overcoming anxiety and depression and addictions and other psychological problems that respond well to Mindfulness Therapy and mindfulness training in general. I work a great deal with anxiety and also with panic attacks.

So I’ve developed a system for working with panic attacks that is called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for panic attacks.

So what is mindfulness-based cognitive therapy? Well, mindfulness, the first part, is a way of developing more conscious awareness of patterns of reactive thinking. Typically our thoughts are reactive and habitual in nature and they get triggered by certain events, certain situations, certain experiences and this happens automatically without our awareness.

Mindfulness training is a way of developing that awareness so we can see the thoughts that get triggered much faster and before they simply take hold and start to grow and proliferate.

So mindfulness is about developing the skill of awareness of the activities of the mind. It’s also about developing a conscious relationship with the mind, with the thoughts and with the emotions in the mind, that is characterized by being non-reactive.

That is, that you can stay conscious with thoughts or with emotions without becoming overwhelmed by them, without becoming identified with them. So developing this non-reactive relationship is a very important part of mindfulness.

So that’s a little bit about mindfulness training. The cognitive therapy part simply means working with the thoughts that we become mindful of that seem to trigger our anxiety and panic attacks.

The way that we work with these thoughts is first developing this conscious relationship, which essentially breaks the habit that feeds the anxiety-producing thoughts.

You can sit with that thought and not react. Then you have neutralized that thought. So it’s quite powerful just developing mindful consciousness itself. It Is a very powerful way of breaking free from those habits that feed anxiety.

But there are many other ways we can work with reactive thoughts. And one of the favorite ways that I like to teach is to work with the imagery of the anxiety or the panic attack itself. Most people have never actually looked at their anxiety or panic attacks. They don’t know what they actually consist of.

They don’t know the structure of these very important parts of our mind, and that’s something we develop during mindfulness therapy, in general, is looking at the structure, investigating the structure of your anxiety. And the inner structure of anxiety is based on imagery.

So we look at the imagery of our anxiety and the more you learn about that structure the more that you can change the structure. If you change the imagery of your anxiety will reduce its intensity considerably. Or at least you can learn how to reduce the intensity of the anxiety by experimenting with changing the imagery.

Working with emotional imagery

One classic method that we look at is to change the size of the imagery. Obviously, if the imagery is very large then the anxiety will be very intense.

So if we try to make that imagery smaller, then the anxiety will become less intense. There are many other features of anxiety imagery that we can play with and change and this really promotes the resolution of the anxiety. It helps teach the anxiety how to resolve itself, how to break its habitual imagery and change to a different imagery that does not produce the anxiety.

So we might make it smaller. We might change the color of the image. We might change the position of the image, and so on, and these techniques are very, very effective indeed for anxiety and also for depression too.

I will teach you how to work with your anxiety attacks using these mindfulness-based cognitive therapy methods. I will teach you how to do this during our online therapy sessions together and you can then practice these methods between sessions.

You can develop a practice that will essentially neutralize those anxiety reactions. This approach is very effective. And most people see quite dramatic changes within the first few sessions.

Better than medications

So this is a very different way of working with anxiety than you might be used to. It does not involve medications. Medications are not a suitable long term strategy because they do not change those underlying habits that create the anxiety.

They are psychological in nature and require psychological interventions to change the anxiety, to heal it. Talk therapy can be useful but it is seldom really strong enough to actually diffuse that anxiety. Talking about your fear is not as powerful as changing the imagery of the fear.

If you’d like to learn more about how to overcome your panic attacks and anxiety using mindfulness-based cognitive therapy then please contact me. You can ask any questions you may have about how this approach could help you. When you feel ready we can schedule a therapy session via Skype.

I recommend Skype so that we can see each other. That is an important factor for increasing the effectiveness of our communication so we can really develop these methods effectively. You need to be able to see each other. If you can see each other then really Skype Therapy is no different than meeting a therapist in person for the vast majority of cases.

Online therapy sites - Speak to a therapist online via Skype — **Speak to a therapist online to get help overcoming your struggle with panic disorder**

So if you’d like to get started with online therapy for your anxiety and panic attacks please go to my contact page and email me.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online therapy for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks via Skype

How to treat panic attacks without medication through Online Mindfulness Therapy

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I’m a professional psychotherapist based in Boulder, Colorado, and I specialize in mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety and depression and especially for the management of panic attacks.

If you’d like to learn how to overcome panic attacks without medication, please go to my website and learn more about the mindfulness therapy approach. This approach is very effective indeed for the treatments of anxiety and for overcoming panic attacks and any other common emotional psychological problems that don’t require medical intervention.

So the reason why we don’t want to use medications for treating panic attacks and also for treating anxiety is because they don’t change the underlying psychological cause of your anxiety attacks. They simply mask the symptoms. They may provide some temporary relief from the physical and emotional symptoms of anxiety attacks but medications do nothing to change the underlying cause of your panic attacks.

That underlying cause is primarily psychological in nature. It’s the result of a conditioned psychological habit that you have acquired, for one reason or another, and that is what we must change if you are to fully recover from panic attacks or anxiety.

***Online Therapy is very convenient and effective! Skype therapy service for anxiety and depression.***

So during the mindfulness therapy approach we do this by actually learning how to meditate on your anxiety and on the triggers that cause your panic attacks. The biggest problem that I see is that people fall into reactive habits of avoidance and aversion or self-criticism.

These reactions simply take awareness away from the panic attacks and the anxiety beneath them and that prevents them from healing. You must bring conscious awareness to them you must learn how to sit with your anxiety without reacting and without becoming overwhelmed.

This is absolutely vital if you’re going to break free from anxiety and panic attacks because if you don’t you simply end up feeding the underlying anxiety and you end up with re-traumatizing yourself.

So the first stage of mindfulness therapy is learning to sit with your anxiety without reacting. And the second stage is exploring the structure of your anxiety.

The structure is quite interesting and most people are never really investigated their anxiety deeply enough to see this structure. But the structure is primarily composed of of two factors.

The first is the habitual reactive thinking itself which feeds that anxiety. So thoughts do not cause anxiety or panic attacks but they do feed that underlying emotion.

So learning to see these patterns of reactivity is very important because when you see them clearly you can begin to break that habit using various mindfulness methods that I teach.

The second part of the structure of emotion involves looking at the imagery of the emotion. How you see it and the mind is absolutely critical to the emotion itself.

So when we say we feel overwhelmed by anxiety that is a clue right there that the imagery of the anxiety is very large very close and at a high level in your psychological field, it’s essentially above you and that’s what gives the imagery power to create that particular emotion.

So seeing the imagery is very, very helpful indeed because when you can see the imagery, yet again, you can change that imagery, and when you change the imagery you change the emotion. So that’s one part of mindfulness therapy.

The third part of mindfulness therapy for anxiety and panic attacks, and other emotions too like depression, is learning to form a non-reactive relationship with the emotion and responding to the emotion with compassion.

That is, developing a relationship that is interested in helping that underlying emotion heal. So developing a healing relationship with your anxiety is also very, very essential if you are to recover from anxiety or panic attacks.

Online therapy for anxiety and depression via Skype - TALK WITH A THERAPIST ONLINE — **Talk to a therapist via Skype – Skype therapy sessions for help with anxiety and depression**

So if you’d like to learn more about how to overcome panic attacks without medication or how to treat anxiety without medication, then please go to my website, learn more, and then email me to schedule a therapy session via Skype. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online psychotherapy via Skype for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks without medications

Online treatment for anxiety attacks via Skype

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional online therapist specializing in Mindfulness Therapy for the treatment of anxiety, including panic attacks and other anxiety disorders such as agoraphobia and social anxiety disorder that benefit from Mindfulness Therapy.

online therapy via Skype for anxiety and depression — **Online therapy via Skype for anxiety attacks and depression**

So I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy which is a system of work that I have developed over the last 10 to 12 years now that is proving very effective indeed for helping people overcome anxiety and panic attacks.

So if you’re looking for online treatment for panic attacks then I encourage you to read more on my website and please feel free to contact me with any questions that you may have and when you feel ready we can schedule a Skype Therapy session.

Skype Therapy for panic attacks is very convenient, of course, means you can have your sessions at home without having to travel to a therapist’s office. And Often for anxiety disorders in general the online format is typically much more comfortable for you much less intimidating, much less clinical in nature.

So Mindfulness Therapy is not a clinical approach to treating anxiety or depression. It’s a system that teachings, it’s a way of giving you practical methods that you can develop and apply yourself for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks.

Develop a friendly and conscious relationship with your anxiety

So one of the most important methods that I will teach you is how to change the relationship that you have with your anxiety. This is really quite important.

So from a mindfulness psychology viewpoint anxiety is regarded as a habit, a psychological habit, rather than an illness or a disorder. So the real problem with anxiety is that these habits become established and they operate automatically out of consciousness.

And the first training in Mindfulness Therapy is restoring consciousness so that you develop a very conscious non-reactive relationship with your anxiety, with your emotions. This is quite important. You really cannot expect those habits to change until you develop a conscious relationship with them.

Learn how to meditate on your emotions

So the way we do this is by, quite surprisingly perhaps, choosing to meditate on the anxiety or other emotions. We make them the object of meditation. This means that we focus a great deal of conscious awareness on the emotion itself. We might play through a scene in the mind where the anxiety may be triggered.

But then we work with that anxiety, restoring consciousness. So that means that you can observe the anxiety or any other emotion without becoming reactive, without becoming identified with that emotion, without becoming consumed by it, or overwhelmed by it, or lost in all of the related reactive thoughts that tend to feed anxiety and panic attacks.

So that’s a very important part of the training. Learning to sit with your emotions without becoming consumed by them. Then, when you have established that conscious relationship, then you can begin to change the emotion itself.

We can help it heal. So that’s the second primary theme in Mindfulness Therapy is teaching our emotions how to heal themselves. It’s about healing. One of the most important requirements for healing is that conscious relationship itself.

In essence you become like a parent to the anxiety, which is like a child. It’s a conscious relationship and it’s also based on love or friendliness, with an interest in the anxiety and helping it heal.

So that relationship gets fractured during anxiety disorders. We say there is a disconnect between your True Self and the emotion. That’s like separation between the parent and the child, and then the anxiety becomes isolated and it just becomes a source of reactivity, and it cannot heal without that connection with your larger and higher True Self.

So that’s what we established during meditation on the emotion. We re-establish the relationship between your True Self, which is the Observer, and the anxiety, which is the object observed in your meditation.

So that relationship is fundamentally important for healing, as it would be for a child that was in pain. It needs to reconnect with his parent with consciousness and love in order for the child to discover how to heal its own pain.

Change the imagery of he emotion to help it heal

So the way that we help the emotion heal also involves working on the imagery of the emotion. So any emotion has associated imagery, that’s what really keeps that emotion operating in the mind. And when we are meditating on the emotion we want to explore this imagery, because when you change the imagery of an emotion the emotion heals, it changes.

So we look at the position of the image of the emotion, that’s really important. So many people experience the anxiety in the body in the throat or the chest, that’s quite a common position, and that’s part of its structure, that’s part of its imagery. It needs to be in that place in order to create the emotional distress of anxiety or panic attacks.

So when we see his position we then start to explore moving it. And this is a very, very effective approach to working with anxiety and panic attacks, particularly, which are simply a very intense form of anxiety.

When you can learn to see the anxiety clearly as an object and then move it from its habitual position in the chest or the throat, or wherever it might be, to a new position, typically outside of the body, that movement is a very important part of the healing process for the emotion.

It has to move. It has to change its position, and you can help it do that through meditation. That’s a primary function of meditation is to facilitate healing. That’s the primary purpose of meditation.

But we can also work with other components of the imagery of the anxiety such as its color or its size. What color is it? This is something that is really important.

Most people find that the color of the best resonates with their anxiety is usually red or orange and that color is part of its structure. It has to have the color in order to create the feeling of anxiety. But it is all habit based.

Now when we bring conscious mindfulness to the emotion we can investigate its color and we can begin to change his color. Because when you have consciousness you always bring with that consciousness choice.

You can begin to explore changing things. They are no longer in the habit realm. So we explore changing the color. Make the anxiety blue or green or any color that feels right. Explore what feels right, what helps that anxiety heal.

We look at its size. Clearly if it is very intense the emotion must be very large. So again its size is a product of habit. It simply takes on the form that is very large, with that certain color and certain position out of habit.

So the size we can change. You can shrink an emotion down. You can make it as small as you need to make it, and you experiment and you explore what happens when you shrink the emotion. Make it as small as a grain of sand. See how that affects the intensity of the anxiety or panic.

So there are many other components like that in the imagery of the emotion that we can work with quite effectively using Mindfulness Therapy.

If you would like to learn more about how to work with your panic attacks and anxiety using mindfulness, then please reach out to me by e-mail. Contact me and let schedule a Skype Therapy session.

So I see lots and lots of people who suffer from panic attacks and anxiety in general, and this approach is very effective. And most people see quite substantial improvements within just a few sessions.

It is much better than using medications. Medications will do absolutely nothing to change that underlying habitual process that causes your anxiety and panic attacks.

It only provides a temporary relief from symptoms, and we want to do better than that. We want to change the underlying cause of your anxiety, and that cause is, as I said, primarily a function of imagery and with the relationship that you have with the emotion itself.

So when you correct both of those things you produce very effective change in the anxiety and you will help it heal very quickly.

When you have shown the anxiety how to heal itself by changing its imagery and by creating that parent-child type relationship with it, then that becomes a new habit. It becomes automatic and the anxiety can heal itself once that new positive habit has been established.

That’s what’s so nice about this approach. It’s basically learning how to help your emotions heal and how to develop what we call resolution pathways that help them heal by themselves. And it’s very, very effective.

So if you’d like to learn more, please contact me. Tell me more about yourself and your needs and let’s schedule a session. You’ll see for yourself in the first session just how effective the Mindfulness Therapy approach can be.

And it’s one of the most enjoyable ways of working with emotions in general. It unleashes a lot of energy that gets trapped in those contracted emotions like anxiety and panic or depression, as well. So if you would like to get start with me please contact me. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online psychotherapy via Skype for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks without medications

How to Stop Anxiety Attacks through Mindfulness Therapy via Skype

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional online psychotherapist specializing in Mindfulness Therapy, which I offer via Skype for the treatment of anxiety, including panic attacks, also other common psychological emotional problems such as depression, OCD, addiction, etc.

So I’m often asked how can I stop anxiety attacks? They are very distressing for people. I’m sure you know this yourself if you’re suffering from anxiety attacks. They are quite crippling. They limit you tremendously in what you can do, and the fear of having panic attacks is often so strong that you tend to become more and more isolated and Agoraphobia is a very common endpoint for people who are struggling with chronic panic attacks.

So how do we stop these panic attacks? How do we manage anxiety in general? Well the conventional approach typically will prescribe some kind of anti-anxiety medication and sometimes talk therapy can be useful.

But in my experience these do very little to actually change the underlying mechanism that’s causing your anxiety and panic attacks. That’s what I try to address in Mindfulness Therapy.

This is a very different approach than conventional talk therapy or counseling. We’re trying to find out exactly what goes on in the mind. How do you actually create your anxiety in the mind? What triggers it, and then what happens in the mind? So mindfulness is a way of exploring the mind in detail.

I will teach you how to apply mindfulness to overcome your anxiety and panic attacks during our sessions together. But the principles are fairly straightforward and something that really does produce results.

So if you really want to get on top of your anxiety and panic attacks then I invite you to really think about Mindfulness Therapy.

Cultivate your True Self – The Observer

So the first principle is learning to change our relationship to our emotions and thoughts and other content that make up the mind. Now from a Buddhist point of view, and mindfulness, of course, has its roots in the teachings of the Buddha; we understand that we in essence have not the contents of our mind.

We are not emotions, we are not thoughts, we are not beliefs, we are not memories, and we are not perceptions. Those all constitute what we would call the content of mind and they are all described as being mental objects, and often we describe the combination of these mental objects as being how personality, our ego or our Little Self. That’s a term that I use a lot.

All of these mental objects are not who you really are. In essence who you really are is the consciousness that can see these objects. You can be the observer of anything that arises in the mind and the nature of that observer is quite different than the content of mind.

So by changing our relationship to the content of mind, these mental objects, thoughts emotions, etc., what we’re doing is learning how to become the observer, our True Self, as I call it. So the True Self is not the thoughts and emotions, it’s the conscious awareness of the thoughts and emotions and that is quite different.

The basic cause of our suffering is that we lose this objectivity you like and we become identified with the contents of mind we literally lose our perspective as the observer and we become contracted into the very small and limited consciousness of thoughts and emotions and other mental objects. We become the object.

So this is the primary operating force if you like that sustains anxiety and its more severe form as panic attacks. That’s when we contract into our anxiety or fear. That’s when we ignite this suffering. We feed it by becoming identified with our anxiety.

So our job is to change that habit, and that’s what it is. It’s a habit. It’s not a mental disorder, it’s a habit. Habits thrive on the absence of consciousness.

In Mindfulness Therapy we reverse this unconsciousness, we reverse this habit by really applying our conscious awareness to examine the objects of mind, in this case anxiety.

We look at it very carefully. We learn how to meditate on the anxiety. In that way you train yourself out of the habit of becoming consumed by the anxiety. You learn how to remain as the observer.

So that’s the first part of training in Mindfulness Therapy. We call this developing equanimity and that is the bedrock of mindfulness training and the bedrock of the process that leads to liberation from suffering, like anxiety.

So you can think of anxiety as being like a fire and when we are under the influence of the Little Self, or the habit mind, then that’s the equivalent of placing our hand in the fire and suffering the consequences.

But when we become identified as our True Self, the observer, we can see the cause of our suffering and we simply respond in a very natural way according to our own internal wisdom and we take our hand out of the fire. And that leads to the resolution of that suffering.

This is the same with anxiety. Anxiety, technically is not the problem, it’s our relationship to it that is the problem. So we become so identified with it and then we become so consumed with fear-based reactions to the anxiety, and that basically is what escalates the anxiety into a panic attack.

So we learn how to sit with our emotions without becoming identified with them, without becoming reactive to them. We learn to hold them in our awareness and that is the first essential state for liberation from anxiety and panic attacks.

Get mindful of the reactive thoughts that feed your anxiety

The second step is to explore all of the different parts of the reactive process; all of the thoughts, in particular that feed that anxiety. So we learn to see those in the same way as mental objects. We remain as the observer, or True Self, and the objects are just reduced to being objects. They have no power over you as long as you stay conscious.

So we explore all of the reactivity and in this way we train out of the habit of becoming lost in anxiety producing thoughts, lost in beliefs, lost in the emotional reactivity that feeds the anxiety.

Cultivate compassion towards your anxiety

The next stage in our mindfulness training is learning how to heal the anxiety by developing a compassionate relationship towards it. So the first training is in developing equanimity towards the anxiety. The second stage is really about developing compassion towards the anxiety, which we see has an object in pain.

So we learn how to heal the anxiety by making friends with it and learning how to comfort it in exactly the same way that you might do with a child. And the good news is you already know how to do that. This is part of your essential nature, your True Self, and the essential nature of who you are is incredibly positive and it is based on love.

That is his primary nature and also based on innate wisdom. These are innate properties of you would True Self. It is positive by nature and it is already in existence as part of your being. What we’re trying to do here is to awaken to our True Self and then bring that True Self where it’s needed to the assistance of the Little Self, the anxiety.

So we see the anxiety as being like a child and then we simply allow our innate wisdom to become active to produce action that will help heal that inner child. So we work with the anxiety in that way.

Change the emotional imagery to promote healing

One of the principle mechanisms by which anxiety heals is by changing its imagery. So we explore the imagery of our emotions during our mindfulness meditation on our anxiety.

We look at the imagery of that anxiety. We look at the position of the emotion. Where do we actually see it? Can we move it to a better position where it feels more at ease, where we can comfort the anxiety?

It is quite surprising the results you can see when you simply take the emotion and move it. This works extremely well in things like performance anxiety or driving anxiety.

You take the anxiety and you move it beside you. Put it in the passenger seat or put it on the table beside you or on a chair beside you if you’re giving a presentation. Giving it a better position than being stuck in your throat, for example, is very, very productive.

So we want to know about this imagery and that’s why we learn how to meditate on our emotions to see how they actually work to explore the position of the anxiety. It takes that position, of course, out of habit, and then we explore moving it. We might also explore making it smaller.

Changing its color, changing its temperature. If it feels very hot, can we cool it down? There are all kinds of ways we can interact creatively and skillfully with the imagery of the anxiety to help it heal itself.

So we’re basically teaching the anxiety how to heal itself by changing its imagery. All of this learning, of course, becomes automatic with time and the anxiety starts to automatically heal itself once it knows how to do that.

Online Mindfulness-based Skype Therapy service for Anxiety and Panic Attacks

So this is all part of Mindfulness Therapy and is what I will teach you in great detail during our Skype Therapy sessions together. It’s very, very effective and most people who use the mindfulness approach that I teach see dramatic changes within just a few sessions.

So if you’d like to get started with me and you’d like to learn more about the mindfulness approach for healing anxiety and for stopping panic attacks then please contact me and let’s schedule a session.

You’ll see straightaway within that first session the power of applying mindfulness skillfully for working with your emotions. So please contact me and let’s get started. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online psychotherapy via Skype for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks without medications

Online Mindfulness-based Treatment for Panic Attacks via Skype

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong and I’m a professional online mindfulness therapist. I offer online mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety, including panic attacks, the more extreme form of anxiety.

So online treatment is very effective as long as you use Skype. That’s the main requirement, really. You have to be able to see your therapist. You have to see each other in order for psychotherapy to be effective, and Skype makes that possible.

So online therapy is a great choice for many people. It’s certainly very convenient and it’s also very effective, especially if you are interested in an approach that teaches you skills on how to work with your emotions, in this case anxiety and panic attacks.

The goal of mindfulness therapy is to give you the tools to manage your anxiety and other emotions more effectively.

That’s much more important than taking medications or similar treatment based approaches medications. That is not going to change the underlying process that causes your anxiety and panic attacks. So it’s really important that you get to the root cause instead of just treating the symptoms.

And that’s the whole focus of mindfulness therapy. It Is to actually look at how our panic attacks are created in your mind. How does that work? What is the process here that’s causing those panic attacks?

Talk to a therapist online through Skype — **Speak with an Online Therapist via Skype**

So there are a number of ways we can go about working with panic anxiety, and I’ll explain to you in great detail during our Skype therapy sessions together, what these approaches are.

Stop avoiding your anxiety

So one of the first things that you really need to change if you want to overcome panic attacks is your relationship to your emotions. You must first of all not fall into the habit of avoiding anxiety situations.

You must not avoid those situations that trigger anxiety, because if you do engage in avoidance, that will have the effect of reinforcing the underlying anxiety. You would in effect be generating fear reactions to the anxiety itself.

So we have to take a very strategic approach that’s based on developing more conscious awareness of your anxiety. You have to develop a conscious relationship with your anxiety and that of course is what mindfulness training is all about.

It’s about seeing your emotions directly without reacting to them with fear or avoidance and seeing them as an observer.

So that’s another major principle in mindfulness therapy, is developing that quality of your consciousness where you are the observer, instead of just falling into the anxiety reaction itself which is typically what happens.

So the anxiety typically gets triggered by some external trigger or it could be internal triggers in the form of thoughts. But when it’s triggered we simply blindly identify with it. We become consumed by that anxiety and that’s the real problem that we need to address.

Overcome Reactive Identification

In mindfulness psychology I call this reactive identification, and this is the real issue. It’s not so much that the anxiety gets triggered is that you become identified with it and therefore you become imprisoned by that emotion. That’s the real issue.

So the first training is learning to see your anxiety as an observer. We call this developing objective consciousness as opposed to subjective consciousness, which is where you become consumed by the anxiety and overwhelmed.

The more that you can develop this independence as the observer seeing the anxiety as an object in the mind the freer you will become from that anxiety, and you will not no longer be feeding it through that subjective reactivity. So that’s really important.

Learn how to meditate on your anxiety

The principle way we go about doing this is by learning how to meditate on the anxiety.

So you would imagine the situation that triggers those panic attacks. You would play it through in the mind in order to access the anxiety so you can meditate on that.

Meditation in its most basic definition is about cultivating a conscious non-reactive relationship with experiences, in this case with your anxiety.

So we train with the anxiety. We train in a way that we can remain non-reactive, that we can remain as the observer. We develop that objective consciousness, and this effectively takes the fuel away from the anxiety; it stops feeding it.

Because when you react to anxiety with fear, avoidance, aversion or even just labeling it as “anxiety,” the very process of reactivity feeds it it and solidifies that anxiety.

But when you stop reacting to it then the anxiety begins to change and heal and resolve itself. So in effect you’re creating the right conditions for healing, and anxiety will always heal. The same applies to depression as well and any other form of emotional suffering.

The natural direction of change for any form of emotional suffering is to heal. This is the same principle that we see in the body. When you cut yourself, the body immediately starts to heal the wound automatically. The same process applies to emotional suffering too.

What stops healing is reactive identification. So we train with the anxiety, we train to sit with that anxiety without reacting and helping it continue its natural path of healing.

Develop friendliness and compassion for your anxiety

The second part of mindfulness training is developing this objective consciousness even further by bringing in the element of friendliness or compassion. This is a very essential part of mindfulness training.

Mindfulness can be defined as compassionate present-centered awareness. It has these two components: being fully conscious and present with experience and being compassionate with that experience or friendly or even have a loving relationship to the emotion. And love is a very very powerful force for healing. This is well established.

When you bring that quality of friendliness and love and compassion to your anxiety, that will accelerate its healing dramatically. So that’s another thing we we developed during our meditation on our emotions.

So we developed more objective consciousness and then we developed more friendliness and compassion.

Help change the imagery of your emotions

Also when we are working with panic attacks we look very closely at the imagery of the anxiety that gets triggered in that panic attack because emotions are 100 percent based on internal psychological imagery. For anxiety or other emotion to really have any power in the mind it has to be very large in size.

If it’s overpowering that tells you right there that it is probably high in your internal visual field. You see it above you. That’s why we say it’s overwhelming. Also to be overwhelming it must be very large. So this is all part of the imagery that makes anxiety and panic attacks work.

So we look very closely at this imagery, because when you see that imagery you can start to change it. And when you change the imagery of any emotion you will change the intensity of that emotion. You will help it heal.

So this is defined, in mindfulness terms, as developing compassion for the emotion itself. We are helping it heal. That is compassion. The way we help it heal is by helping to change its imagery, because that imagery is what causes the anxiety.

So we work a lot with imagery, and I will teach you how to do this in great detail.

So this approach works really well. So we replay the panic attack scene in our mind. We find the anxiety and then we develop a mindful relationship with it to help it heal.

So we’re teaching the emotion how to resolve itself how to decrease its intensity until we can imagine the situation and not feel that panic attack.

Make yourself a series of challenges

Then we go out and do a challenge to test how well our meditation work has been. So driving anxiety is a classic one.

So when you’ve done the work and reduced the anxiety by imagining going into that situation on the road or on a bridge or wherever, that triggers a panic attack, then you will go and challenge yourself. You go and put yourself in that situation and watch for any anxiety.

If there’s still anxiety there then we simply do more mindfulness meditation work on it after the fact and and help reduce the anxiety further, and then we go back and repeat the challenge until there is no anxiety.

So this is a very strategic way of working with panic attacks, which I call mindfulness-based exposure therapy.

If you’d like to learn more about how to overcome your panic attacks without using medications but by actually learning how to work with your anxiety directly using mindfulness, then do please contact me and lets schedule a Skype therapy session.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online psychotherapy via Skype for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks without medications

How to stop anxiety attacks through Online Mindfulness Therapy available via Skype

It is like learning to gain balance. You know. Riding a bicycle or any other process like that. At first it’s a little awkward, but it’s surprising how quickly the body and mind learn how to keep balance in this situation, like riding a bicycle. And it’s the same with mindfulness training. With a little bit of practice and guidance you will learn how to keep balance in relationship to your emotions.

This is the key because once you can establish balance in relationship to your anxiety then you stop feeding it, you cut off the fuel supply to that anxiety.

Once you do that then the anxiety will begin to subside quite naturally and it will start to develop pathways that lead to its resolution, instead of reactive pathways that simply to feed it. So learning to sit with your anxiety without reacting is the secret to to lasting change.

We do this by actually learning to meditate on how anxiety attacks. We learn to stop reacting to our anxiety by choosing to bring the anxiety and the anxiety producing thoughts that accompany it into our space of consciousness where we can observe them mindfully.

The more that you observe your thoughts and emotions mindfully the freer you become and the more balanced you gain.

Of course, what people usually do is they fight their anxiety. They run away from it. They try to avoid it. They resist it. They struggle and usually that simply makes it worse. What really makes the change is when you develop tolerance in relationship to your emotions to your thoughts, to your mind.

If you’d like to learn more about how to stop anxiety thoughts and how to break free from anxiety attacks using mindfulness then please go to my website, learn more about the mindfulness approach to controlling anxiety and then email to schedule online therapy to help you overcome your anxiety attacks.

Most people see quite dramatic changes once they start applying the mindfulness techniques that I will teach you for managing anxiety.

You can expect to see significant changes after the first two or three sessions and even after the first session if you do the homework and you apply the mindfulness and you lean and apply mindfulness meditation on your anxiety and on the mind then you will see results quite quickly.

So please email me if you are interested in learning how to overcome anxiety attacks using mindfulness therapy. Thank you.

How to stop anxiety attacks – Try Image Reprocessing

How to stop anxiety attacks

Another very common technique that I teach that really helps in this process of breaking free from the power of anxiety thoughts is to use visualization or imagery.

We call this mindfulness based imagery reprocessing. So this is where you take the image of the thought and you make it extremely small, perhaps as small as a grain of sand. And then you take that grain of sand and you place it on the ground.

So that’s a simple technique using mindfulness based imagery reprocess that you can try for yourself. If you find success with this method, please leave comments below.

Do please contact me if you’d like to schedule Skype therapy sessions with me to learn more about how to stop anxiety attacks. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online treatment via Skype for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks without medications

Online treatment for panic attacks and anxiety

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist offering therapy via Skype for anxiety and depression, for addictions, for PTSD and for working with all other forms of emotional reactivity that are common and affect the quality of our life.

So we have to work at the level of those emotions, for example, anxiety and panic attacks. We have to learn to stop talking about our anxiety or panic and start to actually develop a different relationship with those emotions themselves.

This is a crucial part of the healing process. Just talking about what makes you afraid, what triggers panic attacks and trying to avoid those situations is not going to help you heal. You need to turn towards your anxiety and develop a conscious non-reactive relationship with it.

So that is part of the principle of Mindfulness Therapy, which is what I teach online. I will teach you how to develop that all-important relationship with your anxiety that will promote healing.

You have to learn how to become the observer that can observe the anxiety as an object and to maintain that relationship where you stay as the observer. Observing that object, the anxiety or other emotion. That is critical. That’s the first part of our training. It’s called developing the True Self. The True Self is defined as that observer, that quality of mind that can see experiences clearly as they are as objects.

Establish objective consciousness

Another term that we often use is developing “objective consciousness”, which is also that ability to see an object clearly as an object, rather than “subjective consciousness” where we simply react to that object with fear or anger or simply becoming overwhelmed by it.

The critical thing here is to establish this relationship, True Self as the observer seen the anxiety, or Little Self, as we often refer to it, as the object. When you have a stable relationship like that, True Self seeing Little Self, then you create the right conditions for healing that anxiety.

And this is crucial for working with panic attacks. You have to change that relationship, because what actually happens during a panic attack is that you lose that identity as your True Self, you lose that objective consciousness and you contract into the anxiety, and we feel it as a physical contraction as well as a psychological contraction.

That is the primary process that goes on during a panic attack. We lose our identity, we literally become smaller, and we become that Little Self. And then when we do that, when we contract into the anxiety, then that basically, takes away our freedom and it starts to ignite further reactivity, which feeds that anxiety.

So in mindfulness training we are learning to break that habit of reactive identification. That’s the whole point of mindfulness teaching and Mindfulness Therapy is to maintain your True Self identity and not lose it to the anxiety or the depression or the impulse to addiction or whatever it might be.

When you have that relationship, then you can start to help the anxiety heal. So we form a relationship based on compassion with that emotion, the Little Self, very much like a parent forming a compassionate caring and loving relationship with a child that’s in pain. Y

ou have to learn to love your anxiety. People say that’s impossible. I hate my anxiety. And I would say, yes that’s the problem. That is what is sustaining the anxiety. That emotional reaction of hatred feeds the anxiety.

Stop avoiding your anxiety

People also get lost in patterns of avoidance, trying to escape any situation that might trigger that anxiety or panic attack. So that’s a reaction of avoidance, also its effect is to strengthen the underlying anxiety. And that is counter to the teachings of mindfulness.

We want to build a relationship without anxiety because that is that is the only way that the anxiety can ever heal, is when you re-establish that connection between your True Self, The Observer, the non-reactive entity that is your true identity, with the Little Self, the emotional reaction.

You have to build an alliance between True Self and Little Self. This is what promotes healing.

Develop inner compassion

Then you can respond with compassion, which is about really seeing what little changes you can make to the emotion itself that help it heal.

So anxiety like any other form of emotional suffering is inherently unstable and trying to heal, trying to return to equilibrium to balance just like the body healing itself if it gets injured. It is the same process with emotions like anxiety.

You can think of them as being more like a wound in the mind. Its nature is to heal. That’s built in to the very structure of the emotion itself.

So the anxiety is trying to heal but the reactivity, the habits of reacting to that unpleasant emotion is the problem. That’s what prevents that natural healing from occurring.

So we established a good non-reactive relationship with the anxiety and then we help it heal. And typically the best way to help any emotion heal is to work with the imagery of the emotion.

Change the internal imagery of the anxiety

So all emotions are based around internal psychological imagery. That is what actually creates that emotion. That anxiety, that panic attack, that feeling will have a certain kind of imagery. Chances are it’s very large and very overpowering. That is, in fact, the reason that we say that the emotion is overpowering or getting on top of us or weighing heavily on the mind. It’s because it’s very large. That is a key ingredient that makes that anxiety work.

So changing the imagery is a central part of Mindfulness Therapy. Looking at the imagery of the anxiety and then changing it and helping it heal; because when any emotion heals it does so by changing the imagery of that emotion.

Now this often happens quite naturally by itself, but when we become reactive, that reactivity inhibits healing, which means it inhibits the spontaneous change in emotional imagery that’s required for healing.

Meditate on your anxiety

So during our mindfulness work we learn to meditate on the anxiety. That’s the critical part of the therapy process. We learn to hold that anxiety in the mind. We learned to build this relationship with it where we remain as True Self observing the Little Self, the emotion.

We then look at his imagery and we explore changing that imagery in a direction that helps that anxiety resolve itself. And so we’re essentially training the anxiety to resolve itself and freeing ourselves from those unconscious habits that cause that anxiety.

So panic attacks can be overcome quite easily as long as you take this approach of embracing that anxiety in the same way as embracing a child in pain. You must not avoid it. You have to start to learn to overcome the habitual reactivity to it. And then start to develop a compassionate relationship with it and look at its imagery and help that imagery change.

If you do that you will see dramatic changes and healing will ensue. Most people see quite dramatic changes when they take this mindfulness approach to healing anxiety and panic attacks. Typically, most people that I work with see significant improvements within the first three or four sessions.

All my sessions are done via Skype. I find that that is more than adequate. You do not need to meet with a therapist in person to learn these methods of how to work with your anxiety effectively.

So if you would like to get started with me. If you would like to schedule some Skype therapy sessions to work with your panic attacks more effectively, then please go to my website, contact me and schedule a Skype therapy session. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online treatment via Skype for anxiety and panic attacks

Online Counseling for Panic Attacks and Panic Anxiety through the application of Mindfulness Therapy

Learn how to manage anxiety and panic attacks more effectively through Mindfulness Therapy.

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist based in Colorado and I offer online therapy and online counseling via Skype worldwide to help you manage anxiety and panic attacks, as well as depression and other common psychological problems.

So panic anxiety is really an example where we become highly contracted into the emotion itself. This process of emotional contraction we refer to as reactive identification.

It is where you become so identified with the emotion that it basically consumes you. You lose your perspective and your identity as your True Self and become trapped inside the intense emotions of anxiety.

So this process of contraction is a key feature of panic attacks. And indeed, that’s how it feels when we have a panic attack. It literally feels like the world, the walls are closing in and we contract into it is very narrow, confined space. So it’s very scary.

Panic attacks are really terribly stressful and cause a lot of emotional suffering.

So how do we work with panic attacks? Well, the methods that I have developed that I will teach you over Skype during our sessions together is called Mindfulness Therapy, and it’s a very, very good way of working with the mind.

Mindfulness is a way of developing conscious awareness of the mind, of learning how to become the observer and develop objective consciousness to see the emotions and the thoughts and the memories and the traumas and other contents of mind without becoming identified with them, without losing that perspective as your True Self.

In Mindfulness Therapy and psychology we define the True Self, as the observer mind, that which can see the content, but is not identified with the content.

So the way to overcome this emotional contraction that occurs during intense anxiety attacks and panic attacks is to develop this perspective as your True Self, as the observer. And we do this by training in mindfulness, and the training method is called mindfulness meditation.

So this is where we are meditating on the anxiety itself and other emotions associated with the anxiety; on any emotions that have this contracting effect in the mind. These we must meditate on. Some people think meditation means escaping the mind. That is not true, it is not a very good form of meditation if it is about escaping the mind because you have to live with your mind.

So mindfulness meditation is about meditating on the mind. It’s about changing the relationship so that you can see the contents of the mind objectively and not become controlled by the contents.

So we meditate on our emotions. We at first may become reactive. Of course we will. But we remember our mission and our mission here is to return to that state of being the observer. In this way, we gradually train out of reactive identification and we develop our True Self, which is greatly expanded by its very nature. And it does not suffer. Only the Little Self, the contracted, the Little Self suffers.

So we meditate on our emotions. We develop this objective consciousness or equanimity, as it’s also called in Buddhist psychology. And then we work on responding to that emotion itself as if it was a child or something in need. It needs our compassion. It needs our help to heal.

When we stop reacting to it, that’s the first step in helping it heal. That’s the first step in the response of compassion, which is a major part of mindfulness.

But we can go much further than just stopping the process of reactive identification because we can then start to work without emotion to promote its healing. In Mindfulness Therapy, as I have developed over the years, I find working with the imagery of the emotion to be particularly effective.

So when we’re exploring the emotion as the objective True Self, the observer, we will notice that the emotion is made up of imagery. This imagery is actually what creates the emotion.

So when we get to see the imagery we’re investigating the real internal structure of the emotion. And we can help change that imagery because when you are conscious, you have choice that is almost the definition of consciousness. It is different than reactive, habitual consciousness. It’s pure unconditioned consciousness. That’s the nature of the True Self.

So we can help that imagery change. Now when the imagery changes, the emotion changes, and when the imagery has changed enough, the emotion heals, it resolves itself. The anxiety goes away. The panic attacks stop.

So working with anxiety involves learning how to meditate on the anxiety, learning how to work with the imagery of the anxiety and then helping that heal.

So that is a brief introduction to the Mindfulness Therapy method that I have developed for working with anxiety and panic attacks. If you would like to learn more, please contact me via the contact page.

Tell me more about yourself and what you’re struggling with and I would be happy to answer your questions and we can set up a Skype therapy session. So please contact me and let’s get started on your path to recovery. Thank you.

Online Psychotherapy to Control Panic Attacks

Panic attack anxiety is made up of primary reactions and beliefs that form the core of the emotion and a whole superstructure of secondary reactions, which are all the cognitive and emotional reactions of avoidance, resistance and proliferation.

The cause of the primary reactions can be due to chemical imbalance or a severe emotional trauma that produces changes in the brain that result in a very primitive “fight or flight” type reflex reaction.

Whatever the cause of the primary reaction, the mind is left with the job of trying to process this intense emotional energy, which leads to layer upon layer of secondary reactivity. The mind begins to proliferate beliefs about what is safe and what is a threat, resulting in avoidance behaviors, which can become very complex and convoluted. This is what we work on changing during sessions of Online Therapy.

Besides causing so much suffering, all these forms of secondary and tertiary reactivity have another harmful effect in that they prevent the core primary reactions from healing. The fear of the fear is like throwing salt onto an open wound, stopping it from healing, or throwing wood onto a bonfire, keeping the flames alight.

The action of reactivity actually causes the primary fear to become rigid. In Buddhist Mindfulness Psychology, we say that the core anxiety loses its emotional plasticity. It becomes hard like ice, unable to change, unable to resolve itself, unable to heal.

The main reason for this inhibitory effect is that worrying about our panic attacks has the effect of distracting our conscious awareness away from the core emotions and we become dissociated from them.

One of the most fundamental insights of mindfulness psychology is that conscious awareness is essential for any emotion to heal itself. Without that direct conscious awareness, suffering can never heal and will remain frozen in place, and will remain there indefinitely until we are able to bring consciousness back to the emotion.

The common saying amongst mindfulness-based therapists is, “reactivity inhibits healing; mindfulness promotes healing,” and this is certainly the case for panic anxiety. It may seem strange, but the best way to cure panic attack anxiety is to learn how to hold the emotion in our mindful awareness and to learn to be present with the emotion without becoming reactive or lost in the anxiety.

Changing Habitual Reactive Thinking

So how can we change the patterns of reactive thinking that keeps the whole process locked in place? Mindfulness Therapy offers a number of practical insights and solutions, but one of the most effective approaches is to change the way we respond to our fears and anxieties.

When we are in the grip of anxiety, we don’t respond to our negative emotions at all; we react to them with some form of resistance, aversion or avoidance.

This, of course, simply makes things a lot worse for the reasons described above. The art of responding, instead of reacting, is learning how to recognize the emotion as it arises and then respond to it purposefully, on our terms, rather than becoming a hapless victim, which is what happens when we become reactive.

When I work with panic sufferers, I encourage them to actively greet the emotion as it arises, with:

“Welcome. I see you. Please take your place, and I will take mine, and we will sit together for a while.”

This may seem strange, since we don’t normally feel welcoming towards our anxiety and fear and all those negative feelings and thoughts, but the effect can be very dramatic when we really get into the feeling of welcoming the emotions instead of resisting them, ignoring them or running away. For starters, you will begin to regain your power and position when you actually welcome the emotion.

You become the host instead of the frightened victim. With practice, aided with some inner visualization and guided imagery, most people find that they can really develop this art of “being the host” and are amazed at the transformation that results. The intensity of the fear begins to loosen as they develop and cultivate this inner relationship with their emotions.

In Mindfulness Therapy, we talk about establishing the “fertile ground” of a mindful-relationship with emotions. This inner space of non-reactive conscious awareness allows emotions to regain their plasticity, which allows them to change and heal.

The emotions start to melt, just as ice melts in the warmth of sunlight. Mindfulness is like the warm healing rays of the sun, and it melts the frozen emotions that have been abandoned through reactivity into the deep recesses of the mind.

Eventually, we get down to the primary reaction itself and can learn to sit with the primary fear that powers the whole process. With sustained mindfulness, this dark and frightening ice monster cannot resist the healing power of mindfulness, and over time it also become plastic and begins to resume its natural process of healing and resolution.

We know from experience how reactivity inhibits this process of natural inner healing and we see for ourselves how mindfulness is the opposite of reactivity. It is only logical that mindfulness promotes healing. Therefore, cultivate mindfulness and watch the changes unfold.

If you would like help in learning how to control your anxiety and panic attacks, you might consider Online Mindfulness Therapy. This approach has proven highly effective for many people over the years, and it is available online via live face-to-face Skype video sessions with Dr. Peter Strong.

Looking for an online therapist for the treatment of anxiety and panic attacks?

Does this interest you? Send me an email now. Tell me about yourself and how I can help you. Schedule a trial session via Skype now.

CONTACT ME NOW

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Online Psychotherapy to Control Panic Attacks

Changing Habitual Reactive Thinking

Looking for an online therapist for the treatment of anxiety and panic attacks?

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