Find online help for treating agoraphobia

Find online help for treating agoraphobia using Skype

Online therapist to treat agoraphobia from home

Online Mindfulness Psychotherapy for Recovery from Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without using antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.

Talk to a Psychotherapist Online via Skype for highly effective online help and mindfulness-based therapy for overcoming Agoraphobia, Chronic Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Social Anxiety.

If you want to recover fully from agoraphobia you must treat the underlying conditioned anxiety reactions. 

Anti-anxiety medications don’t do this. Medications only treat symptoms, but do very little to change the underlying psychological cause of your anxiety.  

We concentrate on neutralizing these habitual reactions directly at the psychological level during Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy (Mindfulness Therapy). This method is incredibly effective, and after 3-4 Skype sessions, most of my clients notice major improvements.

If you use Skype, FaceTime, or Zoom to see each other, online counseling can be highly effective. It is essential for good communication and psychotherapy to be able to see each other.

Treating Agoraphobia from Home

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 any type of social anxiety or phobia, it's understandably tough to leave the comfort of your own home to seek help from a therapist. This is why I provide psychotherapy via the internet. You can have your therapy sessions at home using Skype.

Because distances are so great and the supply of therapists in remote areas is insufficient, national health authorities in nations like Australia aggressively support internet therapy. However, internet counseling services are becoming increasingly popular in the United Kingdom, and the National Centre for Clinical Excellence supports and recommends them.

Email me to discover more about this online counseling service and arrange for a therapy session with me. Inquiries welcome!

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Online Therapy for 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

How to beat agoraphobia - Online Mindfulness Therapy for treating 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, and I'd like to introduce myself. I'm a licensed online therapist that can help you overcome anxiety, sadness, or addiction through online therapy. It's also a lot more convenient and comfy for you. Working with individuals over Skype is a lot of fun for me.

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 trouble is that avoidance feeds fear, so the more you get caught up in avoidance patterns, the more dread you'll feel, which will lead to even more avoidance behaviors. As a result, things spiral out of control, and you find yourself increasingly limited and confined to a smaller and smaller place. People are sometimes unable to leave their homes. They're terrified of any zone that isn't in their immediate comfort zone at home. So traveling to the supermarket, driving a car, or even walking around the neighborhood can be too difficult. And this is the outcome of a build-up of avoidance and the dread that avoidance feeds.

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's not enough to just get through a terrible event through force. That will only add to the worry. It will not solve the problem. As a result, exposure treatment as it is commonly taught will be largely unsuccessful. You can't expect oneself to become accustomed to that circumstance merely by repeating it. It's also possible that you're merely repeating the dread, the trauma, again and over. 

Agonaphobia is similar to post-traumatic stress disorder in many aspects. It's a reaction to the trauma of the panic attacks you had at the time.

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. 

Get Help from an Online Therapist for Agoraphobia from your home

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Agoraphobia Therapy Online by Skype

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I provide online therapy via Skype for the treatment of anxiety disorders, including agoraphobia. 

So, if you're interested in online agoraphobia psychotherapy, I invite you to learn more by visiting my website and then contacting me via e-mail. Please feel free to ask any concerns you may have regarding online therapy and this technique to treating agoraphobia without the usage of drugs that I specialize in. I'm delighted to answer any questions you have, and if you're comfortable with this technique, we can set up a Skype therapy session so you can see whether it's good for you. For the most majority of the folks I've worked with over the last decade or so, it is.

I see a lot of people who suffer from agoraphobia, not surprisingly, since it's very difficult to leave the security of home when you're suffering from agoraphobia. 

So the approach that I have developed over the years is called mindfulness therapy and specifically mindfulness-based exposure therapy. So you know already that you need to face your anxiety, you need some form of exposure therapy plan and protocol; that's going to be an essential part of your recovery process. But it's how you go about that that makes all the difference. 

So I do not advocate straightforward exposure therapy in its usual form, which simply means exposing yourself incrementally to your challenges until you develop more comfort with them through familiarization. I think that is a rather ineffective and crude approach to exposure therapy. 

It Is much, much more effective when you do a lot of detailed preparation and training before you do each of your exposure challenges, whatever that might be. 

Many of the agoraphobic people I've worked with feel quite uncomfortable in public locations where there are a lot of other people. For most persons with agoraphobia, the actual anxiety is being out of their comfort zone and worrying about having a panic attack in that scenario since they don't feel like they have an escape route. In that environment, you feel entrapped. That's a very common occurrence.

There are many different types of agoraphobia. A lot of people just feel very uncomfortable driving, for example. They can leave their house, but they just cannot drive on a busy road. That's a different quality of agoraphobia. But it's basically any situation where you feel trapped. 

So in the mindfulness-based exposure therapy approach we identify all of our challenges, all of our triggers. That's the first step. It's very good to write those down, make a list of your triggers. And then we set up a strategy of exposure challenges each day. And we make sure that we stick to that strategy. 

We do not skip the practical challenges because avoidance, of course, is one of the big problems with agoraphobia, and the more that you avoid anxiety-producing situations, the more you're likely to reinforce that anxiety. I also don't recommend medications, because, really, medications are simply another form of avoidance. They're not really equipping you with new ways of working with your anxiety that resolve that anxiety; it is just covering up the symptoms. And that's not really an effective treatment. 

The only effective treatment is to strategically and intelligently design an exposure protocol that you follow through, religiously. So how do we go about doing this in the Mindfulness-based exposure approach? 

Well, we choose one of those challenges that we're going to work on. It doesn't matter how big or small it is, something that you feel is a good challenge, not too stressful, but sufficient that it creates anxiety. 

We then prepare for that challenge by learning how to apply mindfulness to work with that anxiety. 

This approach is very effective and most people see very big changes within quite a short period of time. This is quite different than the classical talk therapy or counseling. It's actually working at the deep process level that creates your anxiety. It works at the psychological level directly. That's the important thing. 

So please contact me if you are struggling with agoraphobia and you are committed to overcoming your agoraphobia. 

Find an online psychotherapist to treat agoraphobia

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA

Online treatment plan for agoraphobia using Mindfulness Therapy

Exposure Therapy is an important element of the rehabilitation process, but it is not enough. To avoid re-traumatizing oneself, you must go through extensive training before attempting each exposure test. As a result, I developed Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, a technique I developed several years ago and have found to be quite beneficial when working with agoraphobic individuals.

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 need to figure out what's causing our anxiety and then concentrate on improving it. And the most effective method is what I refer to as Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy. As a result, you've created a series of exposure challenges on your own. It could be as simple as walking around the block, driving a short distance if you still have the ability to drive, or simply stepping outside the front door. But it makes no difference what the difficulties are. However, it is critical that you recognize obstacles that are accompanied by anxiety and then begin working on those challenges and training yourself out of your habitual reactionary anxiety.

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. 

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION 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