Online Treatment for Agoraphobia via Skype

Online Mindfulness Therapist for Treating Agoraphobia without using medications

Speak with a Psychotherapist Online via Skype for highly effective online treatment for Agoraphobia, Panic Attacks and Anxiety.

Contact me to discover more about this online counseling service and organize a Skype session with me. Inquiries welcome.

Contact me if you would like to learn more about Skype Therapy with me. During these Skype sessions of Mindfulness Therapy I will teach you how to apply mindfulness for recovering from agoraphobia using the well-tested methods of Mindfulness Therapy.

This approach is particularly effective and you will notice noticeable reduction in the intensity of your anxiety or depression after the first 2-3 online sessions with me.

Online Mindfulness Psychotherapy is highly effective for controlling anxiety and depression without using drugs. It is better to treat the underlying cause of your anxiety or depression instead of just trying to manage symptoms.

The main healing factors developed during Mindfulness Therapy are Conscious Awareness, which is vital for breaking free from the reactive habits that cause emotional pain, and Inner Compassion, which is what facilitates healing and resolution of psychological suffering.

“After only three sessions my anxiety had greatly diminished. After five sessions I am now having days where I feel completely like my old self-again; it is complete Bliss! This teaching truly makes sense on such a spiritual level, I now know I am going to overcome this and am on the path to complete recovery. I am so grateful for finding Peter! Thank-you so much!”

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online treatment for agoraphobia via Skype using Mindfulness Therapy

Online Treatment for Agoraphobia without using medication

Online Psychotherapy for treating Agoraphobia

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I’m a professional psychotherapist and I offer mindfulness based online therapy for agoraphobic anxiety and panic attacks.

The mindfulness approach is extremely effective and during online therapy sessions I will teach you how to work with your agoraphobic anxiety using the techniques of mindfulness to help you prevent your becoming overwhelmed by the anxiety reactions.

We do this by actually meditating on our anxiety before we do any challenges. Meditating helps to change the relationship that you have with your anxiety and this is absolutely essential, because the biggest problem that I encounter is that people suffering from anxiety tend to become identified with their emotions. You tend to become consumed by your emotions. This causes you to effectively lose your identity and become the emotion itself, and this creates a very reactive place that is very difficult to escape from.

So with mindfulness training you can change this pattern and learn to develop a relationship with your anxiety whereby you do not become identified with it where you can see the anxiety as an observer. This is essential for change.

Once you begin to do this the rate of recovery from agoraphobic anxiety and panic attacks increases dramatically, and most people will see quite substantial changes after only four or five sessions with me once they start applying the mindfulness-based techniques.

So the basic idea is that you will schedule sessions with me and we will work on setting up a series of challenges that you can manage and then you prepare for these challenges using mindfulness meditation.

You do that challenge and you meditate on any anxiety that arose during that challenge. And each time we learn a little more about how to change our relationship to our anxiety so that we basically break free from the habit of identification and becoming overwhelmed by it.

And this approach is, from my experience, the most effective there is for overcoming agoraphobic anxiety. So if you’d like to get started with me simply go to my website and then email me to schedule a Skype therapy session with me. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online treatment for agoraphobia via Skype using Mindfulness Therapy

Treating Agoraphobia from Home

Agoraphobia treatment online via Skype

Nearly 3.2 million Americans (ages 18-54) suffer from agoraphobia according to the National Institute Of Mental Health…

Now, you can get Online Treatment for Agoraphobia from your home through Skype.
If you suffer from severe anxiety or other form of social anxiety or phobia then it is obviously very difficult to leave the security of your home to find a therapist to help you. This is why I offer this online psychotherapy service. Using Skype, you can have your therapy sessions at home.

In countries such as Australia the online therapy option is very actively promoted by the national health authorities because the distances are so large and the supple of therapists insufficient in rural areas. But, even in the UK, more and more people are turning to online therapy services and it is being supported and recommended by the National Centre for Clinical Excellence.

Treating Agoraphobia from Home via Skype

Online counseling for treating agoraphobia

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

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

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

So traditional exposure therapy, which relies on some degree of habituation and familiarization is really very ineffective. It’s much too unstructured, really, to achieve much effect. In the case of agoraphobia you have to really learn how to neutralize the anxiety before you do the challenge. The challenge is really putting that into action so that it becomes experientially relevant and becomes a learned experience. But you have to train for it ahead of time.

And we do this by meditating on our emotions and on our thoughts that get triggered when we imagine that particular challenge. It might be, for example, walking to the end of the street if that is a challenge for you that causes anxiety. Then we would meditate on walking to the end of the street in order to make those anxiety reactions conscious so we can really see them clearly and then start training with them.

Mindfulness training helps you break free from habitual anxiety reactions

The training is about really developing a separation from that anxiety reaction so that you become the observer and the anxiety becomes an object. This process is called “objectification” and it’s really the center of the training; it’s learning how to break free of the habits of becoming identified with that anxiety reaction.

So by bringing more consciousness to it we can begin to separate out from that habit and overcome that habit. We then incorporate another very important part of mindfulness training which is developing compassion. That is, compassion for the anxiety itself. It is learning to see the anxiety much the same as you might see a child in pain or a frightened animal. You already know how to respond to a child or an animal in a compassionate way. That is part of your innate wisdom as a human being. You know what that means.

Inner compassion is essential for healing anxiety

We need to generate this compassion internally, not towards ourself because that’s far too abstract. What does that mean “towards myself?” What we must do is develop that compassion towards the emotions. That is actually what constitutes our conditioned self, the contents, the emotions, the thoughts, the beliefs, the memories, the trauma, whatever it might be. We need to develop a conscious and objective relationship with that content in which we can then bring compassion to it to help it heal.

So the mindfulness approach is very much engaged in a very active process of promoting healing and that is a central feature of mindfulness meditation, in the way that I teach it. It has a very strong purpose and that purpose is to heal suffering. This is what the Buddha taught and this is what I teach during these online therapy sessions.

So if you’re interested in home-based treatment for your agoraphobia using mindfulness, then do please contact me.

So after preparing for the first of your challenges until you can imagine walking to the end of the street without anxiety, then you do the challenge and you walk to the end of the street and all you have to do is stay conscious and let your training take care of any anxiety that may still get triggered.

Then after that challenge you meditate again. What we call a review meditation. So the first is a rehearsal meditation. Now we do a review meditation to work on any fresh anxiety that we have identified, and in the same way we develop an objective relationship with that emotion and we respond to it with compassion to help it heal.

And then after a suitable break we repeat the challenge and we work with any anxiety reactions that get triggered in this way in a very strategic, very conscious way, focused on healing. When we have finished that challenge and we can walk to the end of the street without any anxiety at all, then we move on to the second challenge in our list.

You can overcome agoraphobia quite quickly when you adopt the right training approach

And so if you take this kind of very strategic approach, then you will see changes very quickly and most of the people that I have worked with over the years see dramatic improvements within the first three to four sessions.

So I will teach you how to work with your anxiety using mindfulness meditation. It’s your job to practice on a daily basis between sessions and we keep building on your skills so that you have very deep skills on how to work with anxiety. And after a while you will have established such a degree of training that you no longer experience anxiety and then you can start to completely change your lifestyle.

And of course with agoraphobia, one of the biggest issues is the problem of avoidance, and we don’t want to become limited by avoidance reactions either. So we turn any kind of avoidance into simply another challenge that we train with until we have mastered that challenge.

So this kind of approach works. If you’d like to learn more about home-based training and home-based treatment for agoraphobia, then please contact me and we can schedule Skype therapy sessions at a time that works for you. I see people worldwide, mostly in the USA but also in the UK and Western Europe, rarely anywhere where you have a good Internet access. That’s all you need for Skype therapy. So please contact me if this interests you and you would like to break free from your agoraphobia. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online treatment for agoraphobia via Skype using Mindfulness Therapy

Mindfulness-based Treatment Therapy for Agoraphobia

Online exposure therapy for treating agoraphobia

Mindfulness Therapy (MT) is a form of therapy that develops your ability to form a therapeutic relationship with your inner core emotions; your fears, anxiety and depression in which you first learn to stop the proliferation of reactivity and then embrace the painful emotion with the healing space of mindfulness.

This is essential if you want to overcome anxiety and panic attacks. Most of the time, we avoid or resist our core anxiety and fears according to our learned patterns of habitual reactivity, but the truth is that nothing can change if we avoid or resist our emotions. We have to learn how to face our pain if things are to change.

Mindfulness is a very compassionate practice that teaches us exactly how to go about doing this. It is not easy at first, but with continued practice using the tools I will teach you during online sessions, you will learn how to “sit” with your emotions and create that therapeutic relationship that is so essential for healing and transformation.

When you have learned how to “sit” with your anxiety and the other emotions associated with your agoraphobia then the emotions begin to change, and since you are not running away from them you can actually participate in helping the emotions heal.

We learn to make friends with our emotions, a very important second step in the healing process. The age-old truth is that love heals. Reacting with hatred to your inner negative emotions can not help them heal, yet this is what we tend to do most of the time out of habit and wrong understanding.

Working with Inner Imagery – The secret to healing Agoraphobia

After you have learned how to form a therapeutic relationship with your core emotions, you can now explore the structure of these emotions. Every emotion has a structure, partly in the body and partly in the mind. When we get anxious and panicky, our breathing becomes shallow, our hands may start trembling, our mouth may become dry and we experience a knot in our stomach.

These are all part of the bodily structure of agoraphobia. These physical changes are actually required to maintain the emotion of panic and anxiety, and we can use this to our advantage, because if we make an effort to change these bodily structural components of the anxiety, then we can change the emotion itself. This is one reason why deep breathing can be a very helpful technique for managing the anxiety attacks that occur in agoraphobia.

There are many physical techniques like regulation of breathing, regulation of movement and posture and simple relaxation techniques that you will learn during mindfulness therapy for agoraphobia. These can be very helpful, but the most important way to control agoraphobia is to change the underlying emotions at the psychological level.

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 the 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.

Please feel free to contact me to learn more about using mindfulness therapy to treat agoraphobia.

Online treatment for agoraphobia with panic disorder

Online treatment via Skype for overcoming agoraphobia

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist specializing in Mindfulness Therapy and I provides online treatment for agoraphobia and panic disorder using Mindfulness Therapy.

So if you’re looking for an online therapist to help you overcome your agoraphobia and panic disorder, then please go to my website and learn more about my online therapy service and then contact me with any questions you may have about Mindfulness Therapy and online therapy and how to get started with this approach to help you overcome your agoraphobia.

The Mindfulness Therapy approach is very effective. It is a combination of exposure therapy, which is of course very important, whereby you construct a series of challenges that are manageable that you repeat on a daily basis.

But then it combines this with mindfulness training to work on the anxiety that you may anticipate or that may have occurred during one of these exposure challenges. And that’s what makes the mindfulness approach so effective. It is very strategic and it helps you actually learn how to process the specific anxiety that has triggered in your challenges, whether that might be just walking outside of your front door, or going to a mall, or some other place, whatever it might be.

You know what triggers anxiety and panic attacks. So it’s absolutely essential that you don’t avoid these triggers. That is the biggest trap that causes us to become trapped in a negative cycle of anxiety. You must not avoid your triggers, but by the same reasoning, you must not simply re traumatize yourself by exposure to these triggers.

You have to prepare for them very strategically and rehearse ahead of time using mindfulness techniques so that you are prepared when you are exposed to those particular triggers.

When you take this approach you will see benefits very quickly and indeed most of my clients who I’ve worked with over the years see dramatic changes within the first few sessions once you start applying the mindfulness methods that I will be teaching you.

So if you’d like to learn more about how to overcome agoraphobia and panic disorder then please reach out to me by email and et’s get started. Thank you.

If you are suffering from social anxiety, also know as social phobia or agoraphobia, which is the more extreme form of social anxiety disorder, then you know how challenging it can be to find a therapist to work with. The challenge of leaving the security of your home to attend your therapy session may be too difficult for you to contemplate. This is why I provide online therapy for social anxiety disorders.

If you would like to learn more about Online Therapy sessions for Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder, please visit my website and contact me.

The style of therapy that I provide for anxiety is called Mindfulness Therapy, which teaches you specific ways of working with your emotions so that you do not become overwhelmed by them. You can learn much more about this approach by visiting my website.

I welcome your inquiries and I look forward to meeting you and helping you break free from social anxiety, social phobia and agoraphobia. The methods I use are effective and you will see results after only a few sessions. The first session can be quite significant in getting you started on your road to recovery, so please contact me to schedule a Skype therapy session now. There is no charge unless you are completely satisfied with the first session.

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

Online treatment for agoraphobia without medication

Online treatment for overcoming agoraphobia

Medications only treat symptoms, but leave the underlying psychological process that causes your anxiety untouched.

So medications are not an effective long-term strategy for treating agoraphobia. To make a real change you must transform the underlying process, the underlying reactive habits that cause anxiety. These are subconscious conditioned reactions.

Mindfulness Therapy will help you transform the underlying cause of the anxiety and panic attacks that cause agoraphobia by making these habitual reactions conscious and allowing you to promote healing by developing a compassionate relationship with the emotions as objects.

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I am a professional online therapist. I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy for the treatment of anxiety, depression and other common psychological and emotional problems.

I work a great deal with agoraphobia, and one of the major questions that I’m asked is, “What is the best treatment for agoraphobia without medication?” And what I found through experience is that online mindfulness therapy is one of the best treatments for agoraphobia that doesn’t use any medications and doesn’t rely on medications.

Medications may have their place, but it’s important to understand that drugs only treat the symptoms of anxiety. They don’t change the underlying cause of that anxiety or panic attacks, and that cause is psychological in nature.

Anxiety is essentially a psychological habit that becomes unconscious and is triggered by internal factors (thoughts and physical sensations) and external factors (situational triggers, such as not being able to see your house). So, during these online therapy sessions, I will teach you how to change these habits using mindfulness.

Of course, being able to have your sessions at home is very important if you’re suffering from agoraphobia or any other form of extreme anxiety, and this is one of the big advantages of online therapy, and this is made especially effective by using Skype so that we can see each other. That is very important for establishing good communication and makes Skype Therapy just as effective as meeting in person.

During the therapy sessions I will teach you how to work with your anxiety, and this begins by you setting up a series of challenges. So, you will challenge yourself to walk around the block or whatever challenge works for you.

We will prepare in great detail during our sessions for these challenges and I will teach you the mindfulness-based techniques that work for overcoming the anxiety that gets triggered during these kind of challenges.

The important thing is that we train with the anxiety before we do a challenge. Just jumping into an exposure challenge without this training is not recommended. Basically, you want to neutralize any anxiety first. Then when you do the challenge it will reinforce the training.

So we prepare for each challenge and then you practice the challenge yourself and then you may do some further mindfulness work on any emotions that were triggered during that challenge when you get back. And you repeat this over and over again until you have completely neutralized the habitual anxiety reactions.

So the combination of mindfulness training and exposure challenges is the way to overcome agoraphobia. With training, most people see significant improvements after a few weeks as you work through your list of challenges and gain more confidence.

At a certain point you will have established new habits, habits that resolve anxiety instead of feeding it. These positive habits will eventually replace the negative habits and you will be free of your fear. It takes discipline and effort, but it is totally possible to overcome agoraphobia, and without using drugs.

If you’d like to learn more, please go to my website and send me an email and then we can schedule a Skype therapy session at a time that works for you. Thank you.

Online treatment plan for agoraphobia using Mindfulness Therapy

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist and I offer online therapy, which of course, is very convenient and necessary if you’re suffering from agoraphobia or other anxiety condition that keeps you housebound.

So I’m often asked, “What is the best treatment for agoraphobia?” “What’s the best way to overcome the anxiety and panic attacks that accompany agoraphobia?” From my experience working with people suffering from agoraphobia, over the last ten years or so now, I find that the best approach is what I call Mindfulness Therapy.

This is a system of work that I’ve been developing for many years which really works at the underlying core level of your anxiety. It helps you break free from those patterns of habitual reactivity that cause your anxiety. It works by changing the anxiety directly so that it is not habitually triggered by the common triggers that you encounter in your agoraphobia.

Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for Treating Agoraphobia

We have to uncover these underlying anxiety habits and then work on changing them. And the best way to doing this is what I call Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy. So this means that you actively create a series of exposure challenges. Perhaps walking around the block or driving a short distance if you can still drive or even just stepping outside the front door. It doesn’t matter what the challenges are. But it is essential that you identify challenges that are accompanied by a degree of anxiety and then start working on those challenges and training yourself out of the reactive anxiety that has become habitual.

The way that we train ourselves out of the anxiety reactions is not by simply repeated exposure as is often taught. Repeated exposure is very inefficient and you risk intensifying the anxiety.

So in mindfulness-based exposure therapy we prepare for each challenge in a very thorough way before you do the challenge, and this preparation is called a rehearsal meditation. It’s all about training. So in a rehearsal meditation you imagine doing that challenge and then you look specifically for any anxiety that gets triggered. And then you start to work with that anxiety, working with its structure and helping change that anxiety directly.

Not through a CBT type model. It’s completely irrelevant whether your thoughts or anxiety is rational or irrational, that is not the point. The point is can you identify the fear, the emotion itself underneath those thoughts and can you help that fear heal. That’s the focus of Mindfulness Therapy. We focus on the emotional content much more than the thoughts. The thoughts are simply reflections of the underlying fear or anxiety.

So when we work with the anxiety that we can provoke by imagining doing the challenge we look at the imagery of the anxiety. That’s a very important feature. So this is called the Structural Theory of Emotions. This is a system of work that I have developed as part of Mindfulness Therapy. And the structural theory of emotions states that emotions have a structure in the form of internal psychological imagery. How you see the fear or anxiety in the mind is what actually causes that fear or anxiety. The intensity of that anxiety is determined by the imagery.

It’s all about changing the imagery of your emotions

So if you have very intense anxiety and perhaps so intense that it provokes a panic attack then you can be quite certain that that imagery will be very large in size and it will have the ability to consume you, to be overwhelming. It must be large to be overwhelming. It cannot be overwhelming unless it is very large in size. So that’s part of its imagery, and there are many other properties of that imagery that actually determine the intensity of the emotion.

So we investigate these properties. We look at how large the imagery is. We look at the position of the imagery. Where do you see it? Where do you see your fear or anxiety? You look at his color. Certain colors will provoke more anxiety than other colors. So all of these properties we investigate in great detail.

When we learn more about the imagery of our emotions we can then move to change that imagery. We begin to explore different imagery and see what changes help that emotion subside and when we interact skillfully with the imagery we can reduce the anxiety to a level where it is neutralized and no longer problematic.

So that’s all part of the preparation, the rehearsal meditation that we do before the challenge. And you might spend 15 minutes a day for two or three days before you actually do the challenge. It’s preparation that’s the important message here. You must prepare well for each challenge.

Then you do the challenge and what you have learnt during your rehearsal meditations begins to take effect in a natural spontaneous way like any other learning process. When you’ve trained well, that training comes into action quite naturally during the actual challenge.

Then we might meditate after the challenge as well so we can work with any fresh anxiety that arose during that challenge. We do the same thing. We look at the imagery of that anxiety; you look at changing that imagery to resolve that anxiety.

So really the structural theory of emotions basically is telling us that the real problem is that the imagery of our emotions has become frozen or stuck and has not adapted and changed over time. And the purpose of our mindfulness meditation is to unstick or unfreeze that imagery and help it change in the direction of healing.

So that’s working with imagery, which is a very important part of Mindfulness Therapy. Mindfulness itself is really simply looking closely at the mind, at experience. It’s seeing what is actually there rather than making theories about what you think is there or reacting out of habit to what is there. It’s looking directly at what anxiety actually is, and when you do that from my experience, you will see it is primarily imagery.

So that’s a very important part of Mindfulness Therapy, and the other more conventional and ordinary part of mindfulness therapy is of course very important is to look at the habitual reactive thoughts that feed the anxiety.

So we learn to identify those thoughts and we learn to neutralize those thoughts by moving them, or changing our relationship to them so that they are no longer overpowering. And that will also involve working with the imagery that is provoked by those thoughts, the imagery of the fear or anxiety that accompanies those reactive thoughts.

So we work in this way with the mind, training of the mind to resolve anxiety itself and these new pathways that we establish in that training become automatic and the end result is that we do not experience anxiety. So that’s the mindfulness-based approach to treating agoraphobia.

It’s very effective and people usually see quite substantial changes within three or four sessions once you start applying these principles and working with your fear in this very strategic way. You’ll soon start to see big changes and of course like any training process or learning process the more success that you gain the faster the rate of change and improvement.

So very quickly you start to gain momentum and you find yourself breaking free from the prison of your fear, and Agoraphobia is in many ways best described as a prison of fear.

Agoraphobia Treatment Plan

Therapy via Skype

The most important thing to understand is that you must take a strategic and well-constructed approach for working with agoraphobia effectively. I have developed an online therapy program called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy which has proven to be extremely effective and often produces better results than CBT or other approaches based on simple repeat exposure strategies. What make MBET effective is the emphasis on training BEFORE you do a challenge.

Talk to an Online Therapist via Skype to Overcome Anxiety and Depression and for the treatment of agoraphobia — ***Talk to an Online Therapist via Skype to Overcome Anxiety and Depression***

My name is Peter Strong. I’ve been offering online therapy for treating agoraphobia for many years now and if you’re looking for an online treatment plan for agoraphobia, then I do invite you to go to my website and learn more about this online therapy service that I offer. All my therapy sessions are done via Skype, which means that we can see each other. But of course you can have your sessions at home and this is extremely important if you’re suffering from agoraphobia.

Mindfulness-based exposure therapy

So the treatment plan is based on a system that I’ve developed over the years which is called mindfulness-based exposure therapy. You will undoubtedly be aware that any successful treatment for agoraphobia must involve some form of exposure therapy. However, the classical approaches tend to be really one of trying to overcome your anxiety by just re-exposing yourself over and over again until you develop some sort of confidence in the fact that you will not suffer panic attacks if you go into the challenging situation. However it is equally possible that traditional exposure therapy will simply aggravate anxiety.

So I have developed a rather more strategic approach called mindfulness-based exposure therapy, and this really involves training before you do each exposure. So we actually run through the scenario, the particular challenge in the mind. We imagine going into that situation in order to find any habitual anxiety reactions that may be present. When we find these anxiety reactions we then use the various techniques of Mindfulness Therapy to neutralize those reactions, to effectively heal the anxiety so that you no longer experience anxiety in that situation.

So we do this beforehand. We train with the anxiety and anticipatory anxiety. One of the techniques involved is breaking the habit of reactive identification. This is the primary problem in all anxiety disorders whereby we become blindly identified with the anxiety reaction. We have to train with the anxiety so that we do not fall into the anxiety and become the anxiety. Instead what we’re training to do is develop a mindful presence of the anxiety where you are independent from the anxiety, where you are the observer of the anxiety. When you can train to be the observer then you are much less likely to be overwhelmed by the anxiety.

So it’s rather like watching a movie on a screen. You can watch an anxiety scene on a movie but not become anxious as the observer in the audience. So this is the kind of training that we do. We learn to see the anxiety without becoming overwhelmed by it.

We then develop another very important part of mindfulness training which is essential for the effectiveness of this treatment plan and that is to develop compassion for the anxiety itself, seeing it of course first of all has an object and not who you are. You are the observer not the object being observed. So when we get to that place we can then start to respond with compassion for the anxiety emotional object itself. We can help it heal. We can start exploring ways of working with its structure to help it heal.

Work with the imagery of the emotion

Very often this involves working with experiential imagery, the imagery of the emotion itself. For example, where do you see the image? What is its position in the body or the mind? This is very important. This is part of its imagery and is part of what makes the anxiety work. You would also want to explore how large the image of the anxiety is. You would want to explore the color of the imagery and many other properties like that.

The image structure of emotions is what makes those emotions work. So when we see the imagery more clearly we can begin to experiment with changing that imagery and this is how we can help the anxiety heal. So we are training the anxiety to change its imagery and heal in the process.

So this is the kind of thing we do before we do the exposure challenge. After we have trained with it we can imagine doing the challenge without anxiety, then we go ahead and do the live challenge to test out our training. If there is still anxiety present then we would repeat the process and train with that fresh anxiety and the particular triggers that trigger that anxiety.

Skype counseling therapy for the treatment of agoraphobia — ***Skype therapy for anxiety and depression***

So in this very strategic way we reinforce the pathways that lead to the resolution and healing of those habitual anxiety reactions. So we train with the anxiety until it heals. If you follow this kind of strategic treatment plan then you will see changes very quickly, and indeed most of my clients are able to see significant improvements within the first three or four sessions, because I’m giving you tools, I will be teaching you practical mindfulness-based tools that you can apply yourself at home on a schedule that works for you. And that’s what is most important.

So if you’d like to learn more about the mindfulness therapy approach for treating agoraphobia and you like the idea of being able to work with a therapist online, then do please read more about this online therapy service on my website and do please contact me and let’s schedule a Skype therapy session.

Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy is a very effective online treatment for agoraphobia

What make this approach so effective for overcoming the habitual anxiety reactions of agoraphobia is the combination of taking a very strategic approach to your exposure challenges combined with the unique qualities of non-reactivity and compassion that are the hallmark of mindfulness.

Old style talk therapy can certainly be a great help, but often talking about your feelings does not look at the underlying process that reinforces your depression or anxiety.

This also applies to the use of prescription meds. – prescription medications may provide a temporary relief from anxiety and depression symptoms for a while, but medications are not effective for changing the underlying process that causes the emotional suffering.

What I’ve found, and numerous others in the area of Mindfulness Therapy have discovered, is that what really accelerates emotional healing is when we train ourselves to keep the difficult emotion in our conscious awareness without reacting to the emotions with fear and aversion.

When you are doing so you are learning how to effectively be with the emotion without becoming reactive and without becoming overwhelmed by it. This trains the mind a totally different way of processing that experience, and this allows the emotion to change, to heal also to transform itself.

What makes this approach so powerful is sustained training. Mindfulness therapy promotes freedom. You are, in effect training your dysfunctional emotions how to resolve themselves.

All emotions are habitual and have become established through repetition and through becoming subconscious. Mindfulness therapy reverses this, making those habitual reactions conscious and then training in becoming non-reactive to the anxiety.

This has the effect of taking away the primary fuel source that feeds that anxiety. This allows the natural resolution pathways to gain strength and become established as new pathways in the brain. The effect is that the anxiety becomes less intense over time.

When you combine this cultivated non-reactivity with compassion, the other key quality of mindfulness, then the process of establishing healing pathways in the brain becomes greatly accelerated.

Online Therapist for anxiety and Panic Attacks and for overcoming agoraphobia — **Online Therapist for anxiety and Panic Attacks**

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist based in Colorado. And I offer online therapy over Skype for the treatment of anxiety and depression and addictions and also for the treatment of agoraphobia.

So I get a lot of requests for online treatment for agoraphobia. Not surprisingly, since it’s so difficult to leave home to see a therapist in their office.

So being able to see a therapist online using Skype is a great advantage if you’re suffering from agoraphobia, and from my experience, it’s just as effective talking to a therapist online as it is talking to a therapist in person.

The most important thing is that you can see each other because that’s necessary for effective communication. But if you can see each other using Skype or similar video platform, then there’s really no difference between Skype therapy, or meeting in person.

So the way that I go about helping people overcome agoraphobia is by teaching them how to apply mindfulness for working with the severe anxiety that’s associated with agoraphobia and, specifically, using a plan that we call mindfulness-based exposure therapy.

So in order to overcome any form of phobia or extreme anxiety, it’s necessary to work with that compulsive habitual anxiety reaction skillfully, using some form of exposure therapy.

You can’t expect to get over your agoraphobia by avoiding situations or trying to escape your anxiety. Avoidance and any form of distraction away from the anxiety or simply feed it.

So it’s really important that you engage in some form of exposure therapy. But what really makes exposure therapy work is when you have a very well planned and systematic approach.

It’s not sufficient to simply throw yourself into challenging situations and then hoping that that will lessen your anxiety. That seldom works. But if you approach it in a very systematic way, preparing well before each exposure challenge, then exposure therapy does indeed work.

Skype counseling therapy for treating agoraphobia — **Talk to a therapist via Skype – Online Mindfulness-based Skype Counseling Therapy**

So in the mindfulness approach, we prepare for our exposure challenges. And in a variety of ways, the first thing that we do is that we learn how to meditate on the anxiety beforehand. So we call this a rehearsal meditation. We meditate on the imagined challenge and watch for any anxiety reactions that arise out of habit.

When we notice the anxiety, we then cultivate a mindfulness-based relationship with that anxiety. This is essential. This is what makes the difference, when you can learn how to stay with the anxiety without becoming identified with it and without proliferating that anxiety with further emotional reactions and further cognitive reactions.

So learning to stay with the anxiety in the rehearsal meditation is the way of training yourself out of that compulsive habitual reaction.

Also, during the rehearsal meditation, we work with that anxiety, helping it to resolve. So we’re training in the anxiety to resolve itself before we do the challenge, this training is so essential.

We keep playing through the scene of the exposure challenge working with the anxiety reactions until they are completely neutralized and that we feel no anxiety anticipating the exposure challenge. Then is the time to do the challenge, not before.

We might also look at any anxiety that occurred after doing a challenge, and we work on that fresh anxiety in the same way. Building a non-reactive relationship with the anxiety.

Now, what helps anxiety heal is, first of all, not reacting to it. So this is like taking the fuel away from a fire. If you stop feeding a fire with fuel, then the fire will extinguish itself, that’s built into the system, and it’s the same with emotions like anxiety. They are kept alive by reactivity that feeds that anxiety, but when you stop feeding it, it starts down a path of self-extinction; it starts to burn itself out.

So during this stage of just sitting with the anxiety without reacting, you’re actually establishing a new pathway in the brain that leads to the extinction of that anxiety. And after practice, it becomes completely neutralized.

So the real problem with anxiety when it becomes habitual is that there’s no escape for the emotion. It cannot extinguish itself because there is no resolution pathway that’s been established, so the only thing it can do is proliferate. So this is a very, very important part of the healing process.

The second part of the healing process is learning how to develop compassion for the emotions that get activated out of habit. So this is forming a compassionate relationship with the anxiety.

We learn to see the anxiety not as ourselves, but seeing the anxiety as an object in the mind. Seeing it as a visitor and even better still, starting to change our relationship to that anxiety to see it as if it was a child in pain.

That helps us develop compassion and compassion greatly accelerates the process of healing. The more compassion you can establish internally towards your anxiety, the faster it will heal and extinguish itself.

So compassion accelerates healing. And that’s why we work on it. Developing compassion means helping that anxiety heal itself. This very often would involve working with the imagery of the anxiety and other emotions that might be associated with the anxiety.

So all emotions are based on internal psychological imagery. That is what actually creates the emotion. The imagery is what creates the anxiety and that imagery is what gets triggered in the habitual reactive process.

So we work with this imagery and we help it change. This is part of the response of compassion, because when the imagery changes, the emotion changes. This is how emotions heal. This is how the brain processes emotions; it’s by changing the imagery of the emotion. So when do we do this consciously, again, we greatly accelerate the process of healing.

Talk to a therapist online through Skype for the treatment of agoraphobia — **Speak with an Online Therapist via Skype**

So if you’d like to learn more about online treatment for agoraphobia using mindfulness-based exposure therapy, then do please contact me and let’s schedule a session.

This systematic approach has proven to be very effective indeed and most of my clients see significant improvements within three or four sessions. So if you’d like to get started with me, then do please contact me. Thank you.

This Skype psychotherapy service is available world-wide, including the USA, UK and Europe. All you need is a good internet connection and you are ready to start online therapy with me.

Treat agoraphobia with online therapy

If you’re struggling with agoraphobia, then I invite you to go to my website and learn more about the online treatment that I provide for agoraphobia via Skype.

So agoraphobia is a condition that often keeps a person homebound, making it very difficult to go and get the help that you need from a therapist because it’s difficult to leave home. So having access to an online therapist for treatment is very essential in many cases.

So online treatment works best when you use Skype or similar video platform. You need to see each other. You don’t need to be in the same room, but you do need to see each other for psychotherapy to be effective. And we want the best possible therapy to help you overcome your agoraphobia.

So if you’re looking for online treatment for agoraphobia, then please feel free to contact me and ask any questions that you may have. And tell me more about your own particular situation and also what you’ve tried so far.

So I offer Mindfulness Therapy and specifically Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy as the treatment for agoraphobia. The primary concepts behind mindfulness-based treatment is that you work on completely changing the relationship that you have to your anxiety and to the reactive, habitual thoughts that feed that anxiety.

The main problem that stops people recovering from anxiety is that they become completely identified with the anxiety and with the accompanying reactive thoughts that feed that anxiety. This has the effect of continually feeding that anxiety and preventing it from resolving and healing.

So in the mindfulness-based treatment for anxiety, we learn how to change our relationship to our anxiety, where we do not become identified with that anxiety. Instead, we learn to observe it. We stay as the observer and we cultivate that state of awareness as the observer that sees the object, which is the anxiety.

So we turn the emotion into an object. This is crucial. If you can do that effectively, you will take away the fuel that keeps that anxiety alive. When you turn the emotion into an object you make it conscious. This effectively neutralizes the anxiety. And if you stop feeding the anxiety, then that anxiety will automatically start on a process of resolution, of healing.

It is the reactivity that is the problem, the reactivity inhibits healing. So mindfulness is learning how to overcome reactivity in general, how to stay completely present with your emotions, with your anxiety, with your thoughts, without becoming reactive, without becoming identified with them, and without blindly falling into the trap of propagating more thoughts and more emotional reactions to that anxiety.

The method that we use to do this is called mindfulness meditation. The way that I teach it is quite different than is presented in the popular media. Mindfulness meditation for me means meditating on the mind. It means learning to be present with your anxiety and your reactive thoughts instead of becoming blindly identified with them.

So we meditate on our anxiety. We meditate on those difficult, reactive thoughts. You train with them in order to gain freedom from them. You cannot expect to get free if you just ignore those reactive habits.

Anxiety is a habit. It’s based on a series of conditioned habitual reactions. We need to make those conscious so that we can re-establish balance and re-establish control and re-establish perspective and basically develop freedom.

But you cannot develop freedom by ignoring the mind. You have to develop freedom in relationship to the mind. That’s the fundamental difference here. So mindfulness meditation is the means by which you establish freedom from the mind.

Now, mindfulness-based exposure therapy is the process whereby you systematically work through those challenging situations, whatever it might be, whether it’s walking around the neighborhood or driving a car or going into a public place like a cinema or a shop, or whatever it might be. We turn these into challenges and we work through them systematically.

Again, the key is not to avoid them. Avoidance is the biggest trap in agoraphobia. People fall into the trap of trying to avoid anxiety producing situations. And all that does is feed that underlying fear. Avoidance is a form of fear, it is another reaction to the anxiety, a fear-based reaction. So our path is one of non avoidance.

So we design a series of challenges and then we take each challenge and we train before we do the challenge. You train with it by meditating on the challenge.

We play it through in the mind. We learn to be the observer watching that particular scene of going into a shop or walking down the streets, or whatever it might be.

You look for this specific reactive processes that get triggered when we imagine doing the challenge. You look for the anxiety reactions. We look for the reactive thoughts. And when we see those, we then start working on changing our relationship to those habitual reactions.

You learn, in fact, to welcome the emotions and to welcome the thoughts. We become the host and they are seen as visitors, which is actually a much more accurate way of describing the mind and how it works.

Anxiety arrives in them in the mind, rather like a visitor. It exists for a while and then it goes away. It may return again, but it arises and exists for a while and then resolves itself. It has a life cycle. So our job as meditator is to train with that emotion so that we maintain our objective perspective as our true self, the Observer. That is essential.

Now we’re beginning to break the blind unconscious habits that feed the anxiety. And when you stop feeding it, it will start a process of change and a process of healing. You can also help it heal by bringing in the element of compassion. This is really taking that consciousness to a higher level.

If we can be compassionate towards our anxiety, we are certainly developing a higher level of consciousness and that makes us much more free from identification with the emotion.

So compassion is a very powerful and important part of the healing process. So mindfulness is developing consciousness and compassion for those emotions that are in pain. Those emotions need our help to heal and that help is provided by mindfulness.

There are lots of different aspects of Mindfulness Therapy that I’ll teach you during our Skype therapy sessions together, but that’s a taste of the approach and it’s very, very effective.

So we train before we do each challenge. We play through the challenge in our mind until we have completely neutralized those habitual anxiety-producing reactions, then is the time to do the challenge, and that will then reinforce our training.

After a suitable break, we might repeat that same challenge again. That’s fine. You can do it as many times as you need to do until you feel completely free from anxiety. Then you move on to the next challenge on your list of exposure challenges and you work through that in the same way.

You trained first through mindfulness meditation on the challenge, you then to the challenge and you repeat the challenge and you keep cycling through until you have neutralized all of the anxiety reactions, and so you move through your list of challenges. And each time you gain considerably more confidence, quite naturally.

In fact, that rate of growth in confidence and the rate of decrease in anxiety will tend to increase exponentially as you do each of these challenges. It is not a linear process.

Confidence building gains momentum quite naturally after three or four exposure challenges. When you’ve done that well and thoroughly you’ll find that your confidence to do the next challenge will be at a much higher level. And the rate of healing increases each time.

So mindfulness-based exposure therapy is a very strategic approach that has proven to work over and over again. Most people see dramatic changes within a matter of couple of weeks.

The secret is learning how to meditate on your anxiety, how to do these exposure challenges, and then ensure that you do it consistently every day to build that strength and confidence.

As with all processes that involve habits, it is training that makes the difference. Conscious, deliberate training. And that’s the focus of mindfulness-based exposure therapy. It’s a very good treatment for agoraphobia.

So if you’d like to learn more and you like to schedule a Skype therapy session with me to get started on your treatment plan for overcoming agoraphobia, then please email me and let’s get started. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page and schedule online treatment for agoraphobia via Skype using Mindfulness Therapy

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