Agoraphobia support groups
Agoraphobia support groups online via Skype or Zoom
There are many online groups available where you can get support if you are suffering from agoraphobia. Meetup is a good place to start Visit: https://www.meetup.com/topics/agoraphobia/
I am happy to see you in an online group format or individually to help you overcome your agoraphobia through Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy and other Mindfulness Therapy techniques. I do charge a fee for online sessions, but I do offer a sliding scale and am happy to work with what you can afford. Of course, if you can organize an online group via Skype or Zoom then you can share the cost among all the members.
The main approach that I teach is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, which most people find to be very effective and a great improvement over general talk therapy or medication.
You can read more below, but do reach out if you would like to try Online Mindfulness Therapy
Main LinkedIn article: Online Therapy for agoraphobia
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Online Psychotherapy over Skype for agoraphobia with panic disorder
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy. This is a system of psychotherapy that works very well by Skype and it's extremely effective for the treatment of agoraphobia. People suffering from agoraphobia find it very important to work online because it's so difficult to leave the comfort of your home or secure place. This is the biggest feature of agoraphobia, this fear of having a panic attack if you leave a secure comfort zone, and it can become progressively worse over time. Many people I've worked with have had agoraphobia for sometimes as much as 10 years.
Agoraphobia is very debilitating and limits just about every aspect of a person's life. So it's very important to seek treatment. Mindfulness Therapy is a very good way of working with anxiety in general. It helps you change the underlying patterns of habitual conditioned reactions that feed and sustain your anxiety and panic attacks.
Panic attacks are simply a very acute form of anxiety. It's like a storm, an anxiety storm.
The best strategy, the best approach, to overcoming agoraphobia is a very systematic system of exposure therapy. But not classical exposure therapy, which is based on the idea of becoming familiar and habituated through repeated exposure to the stressful situation or area or other triggers. That can work but often it's very inefficient because it simply re-traumatizes you, it simply feeds that anxiety.
So what I have developed is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy. And this is a different approach. It certainly will involve exposure challenges in a systematic approach where you will set yourself goals each day and carry those out. But the key ingredient with mindfulness-based exposure therapy is the preparation and training before and after each challenge. That is what is vital and I feel is often missing in traditional, conventional exposure therapy.
So what do we do in mindfulness-based exposure therapy for agoraphobia? Well you set up a series of challenges. You then do what we call a rehearsal meditation before you do your first challenge. This is where you will play through that challenge in your imagination and specifically look for those triggers and the anxiety reactions that get triggered.
When you find the anxiety you then work with that and train with that anxiety using mindfulness. You build a relationship with that anxiety that's based on openness and friendliness. These are the two vital requirements for healing anxiety.
Very often people fall into reactive patterns of avoidance and self-criticism or hatred towards that anxiety, and that will not help the healing process. In fact, avoidance and aversion are the two main factors that feed the underlying fear.
So we build a different kind of relationship based on consciousness and compassion for the emotion itself. We learn to see the emotion as being an object in our awareness. We start to break the habit of reactive identification, where we become completely consumed by that anxiety, where we take on the identity of our emotions. Instead we learn to develop a conscious observing relationship where we observe our emotions but we don't become them. This process is very, very important because if you identify with your anxiety, then you end up feeding it. It is another reactive process like avoidance and aversion that simply feeds the fire of anxiety.
So if you would like to get started with me and you would like to do online psychotherapy for your own agoraphobia and panic attacks and you'd like to schedule some Skype therapy sessions and please go to my website and send me an email.
This approach, the mindfulness-based exposure therapy approach is very efficient and typically people see progress, tremendous progress, within the first three to four sessions. It's quite different than conventional talk therapy. It's much more practical. And of course it gives you a set of tools that you can apply yourself between the session, because that's where the real change happens as you gain more and more experience of applying mindfulness with your exposure challenges. So if you would like to get started with me please contact.
Online Help for Agoraphobia
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
How do I overcome my agoraphobia without medication?
Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia
Email me to schedule a Skype therapy session with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in online mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders, including agoraphobia, and depression.
Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional online psychotherapist based in Colorado and I offer online therapy via Skype to help people manage anxiety and depression more effectively using the techniques of mindfulness therapy.
This is a system of psychotherapy that I've been developing over the last ten or more years now that seems to be extremely effective for anxiety and also depression but basically is very effective for helping you heal the underlying anxiety itself directly. And it does this and a variety of ways one of which is by helping you work on those patterns of reactive thinking that feed the anxiety.
So with agoraphobia the typical situation is that we get obsessed with anxiety producing thoughts about what will happen to us if we leave our safety zone for example that's a common kind of thought pattern. You know the fear of having a panic attack in public. The fear of fainting or being sick or anything else like that. These are these are fed by a whole system of internal dialogue that is relentless and feeding that anxiety.
So I'm often asked how can I overcome my agoraphobia without using medication and to do this effectively you have to address this underlying psychological process of reactive thinking that's feeding your anxiety. Medications have their prey's place you know the selective serotonin uptake inhibitors you know these have their place but medications can change that underlying process. All the medication will ever do is reduce symptoms for a while. But that's not really healing the problem is not changing the essential underlying psychological habits that are creating your anxiety and fear.
So this is why it is recommended that you look into process oriented psychotherapy like cognitive behavioral therapy or exposure and prevention type protocols. Because these help you actually deal with that underlying reactive process.
I teach mindfulness based exposure therapy which is really great very effective indeed for agoraphobia specifically. It really helps you develop a strategic approach to overcoming your anxiety. So some of the exposure therapy models are OK up to a point but they don't really tell you how to process the anxiety itself directly. What to do with that emotion? In mindfulness work we work exclusively on reprocessing that emotion, that habit that gets activated.
If you'd like to learn more about the mindfulness approach for healing anxiety including agoraphobia then simply go to my website. Learn More and e-mail me with any questions you may have. Of course it's very convenient to be able to do your psychotherapy sessions online if you're suffering from agoraphobia, and that's one of the reasons why I specialize in Skype Therapy. It's very important that you can see each other. That's why we use Skype. This improves the quality of communication and makes the therapy sessions much more effective.
So during our sessions together I will teach you how to develop a strategy for overcoming your anxiety using mindfulness based exposure therapy. So what does this entail? Well it it entails designing a series of challenges that are manageable but that tend to produce anxiety. So it might be simply leaving the comfort of your own home and walking to a shop or going to a mall or any number of things. You will know what those triggers are that trigger your anxiety and panic attacks.
We design a series of challenges where we basically take one challenge and we prepare for it using mindfulness methods. This basically means playing the challenge through in the mind, visualizing going to the mall for example, and then watching for the anxiety reaction and all of the reactive thoughts that get triggered when that anxiety is triggered in the mind.
When we find those anxiety thoughts and the emotion itself we then start to build a different kind of relationship with it that is based on consciousness, on mindfulness, where we can become the observer of these thoughts and emotions but without becoming identified with them. In this way we break the habit that causes our anxiety.
Let me help you break free from your agoraphobia through Mindfulness Therapy.
Treating Agoraphobia from Home by Skype
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
Online treatment plan for agoraphobia using Mindfulness Therapy
Exposure Therapy is an essential part of the recovery process, but is not sufficient by itself. You have to engage in thorough training before you do each exposure challenge to prevent simply re-traumatizing yourself. Hence the development of Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, an approach that I developed several years ago and have found to be very effective when working with clients suffering from agoraphobia.
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.
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. That might be walking around the block or driving a short distance if you can still drive or even just stepping outside the front door. But 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.
So if you would like help with your agoraphobia, please contact me and let's schedule some therapy sessions over Skype and I will teach you exactly how to apply mindfulness to overcome your agoraphobia. So please contact me if you'd like to get started with the mindfulness approach to overcoming agoraphobia.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY
Online Agoraphobia support groups