Are you looking for online therapy to overcome agoraphobia? Contact me to schedule Online Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy via Skype.
Online Mindfulness Therapy for Overcoming Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without relying on medications.
Speak with a Psychotherapist Online via Skype for effective online help and therapy for overcoming Chronic Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder.
If you want to recover fully from agoraphobia you must treat the underlying conditioned anxiety reactions.
Medications don’t do this. Medications only provide a temporary relief from anxiety symptoms, but do nothing to change the underlying psychological cause of your anxiety.
During Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy (Mindfulness Therapy) we work on neutralizing these habitual reactions directly at the psychological level. This approach is very effective and most of my clients see significant improvements after 3-4 Skype sessions.
Online therapy works very well as long as you use Skype, FaceTime or Zoom so that you can see each other. Being able to see each other is essential for good communication and effective psychotherapy.
One of the most effective ways of overcoming the intense anxiety reactions of agoraphobia is through training in Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for Agoraphobia.
Effective strategies for the management of agoraphobia will involve some form of Exposure Therapy, but what make Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy particularly effective is that it involves training with the anxiety reactions before you do your exposure challenges.
Repeated exposures by themselves is not likely to have much beneficial effect, but if you train yourself to neutralize your anxiety reactions before each challenge then the results from each challenge will be very much better.
The method used to neutralize your anxiety reactions is called Focused Mindfulness Meditation, where you deliberately play through the challenge in your mind in order to access the anxiety and then neutralize that anxiety through changing your relationship to the anxiety through the techniques of Mindfulness Therapy that I will be teaching you during our sessions together.
Email me to learn more about this online therapy service and schedule a therapy session with me. Inquiries welcome!
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
Online Treatment for agoraphobia
Contact me to schedule a Skype therapy session with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in online mindfulness therapy for anxiety and depression.
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional online therapist offering online therapy as a way of helping you overcome your anxiety or depression or addiction. And it's much more convenient and much more comfortable for you. I really enjoy working with people over Skype. It is much more empowering than going to see a therapist in an office. This approach, I feel, is much more effective, especially if you're working with anxiety and particularly if you're struggling with agoraphobia.
So agoraphobia usually begins with a series of panic attacks often appearing for no particular reason but that are very distressing, very unpleasant. And what happens is that we tend to develop fear, reactive fear to the reoccurrence of these panic attacks, and that fear then converts into avoidance. So we try to avoid any situation in which that panic attack may reoccur. So these patterns of avoidance tend to proliferate and we start avoiding more and more things based on that fear.
The problem is that avoidance fuels fear, so the more you become wrapped up in patterns of avoidance the more fear you will experience and then that leads to more avoidance behaviors. And so it sort of spirals out of control and you become more and more limited and confined to a smaller and smaller space. Sometimes people are unable to leave their house. They're afraid of any kind of zone that is out of that immediate comfort zone of their house. So going to the grocery store, driving a car, even walking around the neighborhood may be way too challenging. And this is the result of this accumulation of avoidance and the fear that is fed by avoidance.
So the first understanding we must have if you want to beat agoraphobia, if you want to overcome agoraphobia, is that you must not accept these avoidance habits. Instead we must turn that around and start facing each situation. But we have to do this in a strategic way and with lots of training and that is what we find is usually lacking in classical exposure type therapy.
It is not enough to just force your way through a traumatic situation. That will simply reinforce the fear. It will not resolve it. So exposure therapy as it's usually taught is basically going to be mostly ineffective. You cannot expect yourself to habituate to that situation simply by repeating it over and over again. That could also simply repeat the fear, the trauma, over and over again.
In many ways agoraphobia is really a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. It's that reaction to the trauma of the panic attacks that you had originally.
So exposure therapy by itself is absolutely not enough. You must take a much more strategic approach, but it is, of course, a necessary part of your recovery. If you want to beat agoraphobia you must undertake progressive exposures. We understand that. But how do you do that? That's the question.
So in the mindfulness approach, what I call mindfulness-based exposure therapy, we will start by making a list of all of our challenges, those situations that we are currently avoiding. We turn that into a list and we train with each one of those challenges on that list and we do it thoroughly until we experience no anxiety whatsoever.
The way that we train is the vital component here. This is what makes the difference. You must train in a very thorough way before you do any of those challenges so that you can avoid that re-traumatization.
So we train through a process called mindfulness meditation. And this, basically, is where you would meditate on the challenge before you do it. So you play that challenge through your mind in detail and you look very carefully for any fear reactions and any thought reactions that get triggered as you imagine going into the grocery store, or whatever it may be.
So if you'd like to learn more about this approach then please contact me and we can discuss this further and we can set up some online therapy sessions via Skype.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional psychotherapist specializing in Mindfulness Therapy which I offer online via Skype for treating anxiety disorders including agoraphobia.
So I'm often asked if there is a cure for agoraphobia. Can agoraphobia be cured? And the answer is yes it can, as long as you take a very strategic and disciplined approach to overcoming the underlying anxiety of agoraphobia.
The biggest problem that I encounter is that people tend to get into patterns of avoidance. They tend to try to avoid any triggers that might create anxiety. But you have to understand that avoidance itself is a form of anxiety-based reaction and that simply feeds the underlying anxiety. So taking a disciplined approach that's against avoidance is very important. You must not avoid your anxiety. You will not help it heal or change if you do.
So we have to learn to work with our anxiety, but in a very skillful and effective way and that's where Mindfulness Therapy comes in. It's a very effective way of working with anxiety and reducing and eliminating anxiety so that you can restore your freedom to move that you had before the onset of your agoraphobia.
So the methods that I teach are basically mindfulness-based exposure therapy for agoraphobia. So this is where we set up series of challenges, progressive challenges of increasing difficulty that you work through in a very strategic and focused way using mindfulness. And I will teach you how to work with your anxiety using mindfulness during these online therapy sessions.
If you take this very strategic mindfulness-based approach to exposure therapy you'll see results very quickly and most of my clients see dramatic changes within a matter of weeks once you start applying these techniques yourself, that is what is most important.
I will teach you in great detail exactly how to do this. I will teach you how to apply mindfulness to overcome your anxiety. I will teach you how to set up a schedule of exposure challenges. I will teach you how to meditate and train with your anxiety. That's what we do during these sessions.
So if you would like to learn more about this approach for overcoming your anxiety and curing your agoraphobia, then please contact me and we can schedule some Skype therapy sessions. So please contact me now.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional online therapist and I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders including agoraphobia.
So if you're interested in seeing an online therapist for help with your agoraphobia then please do contact me. Go to my website. Learn more about the Online Mindfulness Therapy service that I provide and then reach out to me by email. Feel free to ask any questions you may have about online therapy and the mindfulness approach that I use.
Mindfulness Therapy is very effective indeed, and in this treatment plan that we will work out together you will basically learn how to apply mindfulness to progressively overcome your fear of leaving your home.
So the way we go about this is called mindfulness-based exposure therapy.
You then work using mindfulness to completely change your relationship to that anxiety to prevent it from overwhelming you and to prevent it from proliferating, but also to help it heal and resolve itself so that you can imagine doing the challenge with no anxiety at all before you go on to do the exposure challenge. So that's the secret.
Exposure therapy by itself is not sufficient. You must do some kind of training to neutralize the anxiety before you actually do the live challenge, and that's what makes the difference. So when you take this very strategic approach you will see changes quite quickly. I have worked with people who have suffered from agoraphobia for sometimes many years and they have been able to progressively expand their area of activity in the matter of a few weeks and usually within a month they are able to go to the supermarket, the mall and other places that would have been impossible before.
So anxiety is simply a habit. It's a condition reactive habit and we need to change these habits and the first way you change any habit is by bringing more mindfulness to it, more consciousness. Habits operate automatically, unconsciously. So you must make those habits conscious.
First of all we do that through this process of mindfulness meditation on the emotions and the triggers that form those habits.
We work on changing our relationship to that anxiety so that instead of just becoming overwhelmed by it we change the relationship to becoming the Observer. This is a critical shift. When you can observe your fear without reacting, then you are well on the way to changing that anxiety habit.
But the primary focus really is on developing a compassionate relationship with that fear. So the reactive habit is usually based on hatred, on fear itself. Fear of the fear is the real problem here. When you can change that relationship to one of compassion towards that fear that you're now observing instead of reacting to, then you can begin to help it heal.
You can think of the fear as being like a child. The child is not very capable of solving its own suffering. If it’s afraid it can't heal that fear very effectively by itself. It needs to make contact with the child's father or mother in order to make a connection between the fear in the child and the fearlessness in the parent. So when that bond is strong then the child is able to overcome his or her fear by absorbing the fearlessness of the child's parent.
It's the same process that we will be applying to work with our internal fear. We build a compassionate relationship with our fear, and in a sense, we become the parent to that fear. And when that fear feels the connection to that part of you that is not reacting, that is your observer self, your True Self, then that is what allows the fear to heal. So the fear learns how to heal itself through this internal relationship that you build through meditation on the fear.
This may be novel for you. It's a different way than is typically taught by other therapists, but it is very effective, and I have helped many people over the years now using this mindfulness-based exposure therapy.
If you would like to get started is on a treatment plan using mindfulness-based exposure therapy, then contact me and let's schedule a therapy session via Skype. I do all my online sessions using Skype and it works extremely well.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY
Online Treatment for agoraphobia
Linkedin: Online Treatment for agoraphobia
Also see:
Online treatment for agoraphobia with panic disorder via Skype
Online treatment for agoraphobia using systematic desensitization
Agoraphobia treatment by Skype