Find an online therapist for help with agoraphobia 

Find an online therapist for help with agoraphobia

Get Help from an Online Psychotherapist for Agoraphobia

Online Mindfulness Psychotherapist for Recovery from Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without using drugs.

Talk to a Therapist Online over Skype for highly effective online help and psychotherapy for Agoraphobia, Chronic Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Social Anxiety

Contact me to find out more about this online counseling service and book an online therapy session with me. Inquiries welcome!

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Online Therapy via Skype is available for the USA, Canada, UK & Western Europe.

Go to my main website to learn more and to schedule a Skype Therapy session: Online Therapy for agoraphobia

Main LinkedIn article: Online Therapy for Agoraphobia

Online Psychotherapy by Skype for agoraphobia with panic disorder

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional licensed 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 over Skype

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

Find an online therapist to treat agoraphobia

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Teletherapy for Agoraphobia by Skype

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I provide online therapy by Skype for the treatment of anxiety disorders, including agoraphobia. So if you're looking for teletherapy for agoraphobia, then I invite you to go to my website and learn more about the online therapy service that I offer. 

All my sessions are done via Skype. That is quite important. You must be able to see each other in order to have a successful psychotherapy experience. Being able to see each other means that the sessions will be much more effective in helping you learn how to work with your anxiety. So that's the primary focus of these teletherapy sessions. I will teach you very practical mindfulness-based methods that I have developed and found to be very effective for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks and basically allowing you to recover from the very debilitating effects of agoraphobia. 

The primary method that I will teach you during the online sessions is called mindfulness-based exposure therapy. And this is where we design a series of exposures that might be quite simple to begin with and then progressively more difficult that you then practice yourself at home between sessions. 

The mindfulness part of this practice is preparing before you do each challenge. So if it's, for example, walking to a local shop or going into a mall or even driving your car for a short period, then you basically, will run through that challenge in your imagination, you'll visualize doing that challenge and specifically look for any anxiety reactions that may occur. When you find those anxiety reactions you then start to work with them using the methods of Mindfulness Therapy, which I will teach you during these sessions. 

But primarily the idea here is that you train yourself to heal those anxiety reactions before you do the exposure challenge. That's the important principle here. You have to train with that anxiety to neutralize it before you do the challenge. When you've done that, when you've neutralized that anxiety reaction so you can imagine doing that challenge without feeling any anxiety, then when you do the exposure challenge that will reinforce this new perception, this new way of processing the particular triggers that are associated with that challenge. 

So, for example, one person that I worked with for a few months was not able to leave the house at all. She could not leave the front door, the thought of that was completely overwhelming. The anxiety was totally preventing her stepping outside the front door. 

So the mindfulness-based exposure therapy is about having her imagine her stepping out side the front door, whether it's one or two feet, it doesn't matter. But we designed that challenge. We then imagine doing it. We look for that anxiety and then we start to develop a mindful relationship with that anxiety that is based on compassion and is based on a very strong non-reactive relationship with the emotion itself. 

So the real problem is that when anxiety gets triggered it, it tends to proliferate. It triggers more anxiety through reactive thoughts and that simply feeds the anxiety and it stops it from healing. But when you can sit with that anxiety and not react, then you're not feeding that anxiety and it begins to diminish in intensity. The more that you can sit with it without reacting the less intense it beccomes. 

And when you've done this in a very focused way, by actually deliberately bringing your mindful attention to that anxiety, that rate of neutralizing the anxiety greatly increases. So this is what we do before we do the challenge. We work with the anxiety, learning to be with it without reacting and learning to relate to that anxiety with compassion. That is, how can you help that anxiety feel more comfortable? You learn how to comfort the emotion in the same way that you might comfort a child, for example, that was afraid. How would you do that? You would establish a conscious, non-reactive relationship with the child. This is what we need to do internally. We need to establish this quality of non-reactive, compassionate relationship with our anxiety. 

That is what will allow that anxiety to heal much more than any other methods and certainly more than trying to struggle through the anxiety. That approach tends to reinforce the anxiety yet again because it's providing evidence of how difficult it is to step outside the front door. 

We want to be able to imagine stepping outside the front door with no anxiety at all. Then once you do that, it now establishes a new experience that becomes learned and well established in the mind and in the brain as a new learned pathway, that stepping outside the front door is no longer a source of anxiety. 

And then you would move on to the next challenge, which might be walking to the street. And so on. So we work in is very focused and strategic way. This is what is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy and it's very, very effective. It's much more effective than traditional exposure therapy. It's completely different than talk therapy in the conventional sense. Trying to understand your anxiety and trying to convince yourself that you don't need to experience the anxiety, that it's irrational. That kind of approach, in my experience, is practically totally ineffective. 

What does work is when you gain the actual experience. First in the mind through imaginational exposure, if you like, and then in the actual exposure, afterwards. That experience is what produces the changes. 

So if you'd like to learn more about teletherapy for agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders using Skype, then do please look at my website and contact me if you have any questions. 

We can schedule a Skype therapy session and you can see for yourself how this works. Most people see quite substantial improvements after the first two or three sessions once you start learning and applying the mindfulness approach that I that I will teach you. It's very, very effective. So please contact me if you would like to learn how to overcome your anxiety and apply this kind of methodology. Thank you. 

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY

Online Therapy via Skype is available for the USA, Canada, UK & Western Europe.

Go to my main website to learn more and to schedule a Skype Therapy session: Online Therapy for agoraphobia