Are you looking for online therapy to overcome agoraphobia? Contact me to schedule Online Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy via Skype.
Speak with a Psychotherapist Online over Skype for effective online help and mindfulness-based therapy for Chronic Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder.
Email me to find out more about this online counseling service and organize 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
Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I'm a professional psychotherapist specializing in online therapy and I offer online therapy for agoraphobia.
So, agoraphobia online therapy is very effective for people who really can't get out of the house to work with a therapist in their local area.
So, during these sessions that I offer via Skype, I focus on teaching you very effective mindfulness-based methods of working with your anxiety and panic attacks.
The most important thing to understand here is that agoraphobia is really nothing more than a psychological habit. I prefer to call it a habit rather than a disorder because when you start labeling these psychological states as disorders that tends to reinforce your sense of helplessness as a victim, and we don't want to do that.
The actual mechanism that generates the anxiety and panic attacks of agoraphobia is a habit and habits can be changed. So during online agoraphobia therapy sessions I will guide you in how to work with the underlying emotions and thought patterns that supports that anxiety.
We do this in a surprising way. We actually learn to make friends with our fear. This is very, very important. You can't change the belief when it has a very strong emotional charge based on fear. No amount of rational arguments or persuasion that you don't need to feel this way is going to change that anxiety. You have to learn to work with the anxiety directly. And that's what you do during mindfulness therapy. We actually learn to meditate on your own fear as you imagine walking or traveling out of your safe zone.
So, we set up a series of challenges, exposures, if you like, where you choose to do a particularly difficult exercise but one that you can manage. But then we prepare for this by playing it through in the mind it might be walking around the block or just simply leaving the house for a few minutes, whatever it might be.
We design a challenge and then we prepare for it by meditating on it. We play it through in the mind and then we look for the fear reactions and we look for the thought reactions that feed that fear and then we develop a mindfulness-based relationship with these emotions and thoughts, and that relationship is based on friendliness.
You learn, essentially, to sit with your emotions and thoughts without becoming overwhelmed by them, without losing your balance. This is central. This is a central part of mindfulness training, that you can be with your thoughts and emotions but not be overwhelmed by them. When you can do dance then you start to break the habits that get reinforced by re-traumatizing, essentially, that fear.
So, we learn to sit with our emotions without becoming reactive and without identifying with those emotions. We learn to develop this other side of our identity, which we call the True Self, the Observer Mind, that which can be conscious of thoughts and emotions but is not identified with thoughts or emotions.
We then work with those emotions and begin to treat them very much as you might treat a child that's afraid. we learn to comfort the emotion itself, the fear. you build a strong relationship with it, rather like a parent to a child. And in this way the fear reaction, that we might call the Little Self is able to let go of its fear by proximity to your True Self which is fearless nature.
So, in this way we begin to build resolution pathways in the brain. You learn, basically, how to help the emotions resolve themselves, so that if they get triggered they simply resolve instantly, on the spot, through the training that you've done before you do the challenge And then you go out and walk around the block or whatever and put this training into action.
So, we repeat this process over and over again. Meditation before challenge and we do the challenge and we may come back and meditate some more and then we repeat the challenge until we no longer feel any fear in doing that challenge. Then we move on to a harder challenge. And in this way we gain more and more confidence in the process.
So, when you are able to neutralize these emotional reactions then the beliefs begin to change quite automatically. We don't need to try and change our beliefs. We simply need to change the emotional content that fuels those beliefs and makes them so powerful.
If you would like to learn more about agoraphobia therapy online do please send me an email and we can schedule a Skype Therapy session. Thank you.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
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 psychotherapy for agoraphobia, then I invite you to learn more by visiting my website and then simply e-mail me. Feel free to ask any questions you may have about online therapy and this approach that I specialize in for treating agoraphobia, without the use of medications. I'm happy to answer any questions you have, and if you feel comfortable with this approach, then we can schedule a Skype therapy session and you can evaluate for yourself if this is the right approach for you. It certainly is for the majority of people that I've worked with over the last 10 or so years.
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.
So many people that I've worked with suffering from agoraphobia feel very uncomfortable in public places where there are lots of other people around. The real underlying fear for most people with agoraphobia is the sense of being out of your comfort zone and worrying about having a panic attack in that environment and not feeling that you have an escape route. You feel trapped in that environment. That's very common.
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.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional licensed psychotherapist based in Colorado and I offer online therapy via Skype for treating anxiety disorders, depression, addictions, PTSD and other common emotional psychological problems. I specialize in the treatments of agoraphobia. So if you're looking for an online psychotherapist for agoraphobia then please contact me. Go to my website and learn more about the services that I offer via Skype and feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.
I really enjoy working with agoraphobia and the mindfulness-based treatment plan that I have developed for agoraphobia is extremely effective. It's based on what we call mindfulness-based exposure therapy. Exposure therapy is very, very important and generally always incorporated in a treatment plan for agoraphobia. But exposure therapy really works best when it's accompanied by some form of training with the anxiety, how to deal with anxiety reactions that occur during those exposure challenges. So that's where the mindfulness-based exposure therapy comes in. We use mindfulness training to work with any anxiety reactions any panic attacks that may get triggers.
So basically the approach is one of setting up a series of exposure challenges, first of all that's very important. You need to do this in a systematic way, in a regular way, in a disciplined way, doing exposure challenges every day in order to get on top of the anxiety reactions.
But we take his challenge and then we prepare for it by playing it through in the mind and watching for any anxiety reactions, any form of anxiety-based thinking that gets triggered when we imagine doing the challenge, when we imagine walking outside of our comfort zone or going to a shop or a mall or whatever it might be or driving beyond a certain distance from home.
Whatever form the agoraphobia takes, we set up a series of challenges and then we prepare for each challenge by playing through in the mind, finding the anxiety reactions and then responding to them with mindfulness, whereby we learn first of all to break free from that pattern of reactive identification which causes us to be completely overwhelmed by the anxiety reaction.
If you would like to learn more about online therapy for agoraphobia and you would like to work with an online psychotherapist who specializes in Mindfulness Therapy for treating agoraphobia, then please go to my website and please email me and let's schedule a Skype therapy session. You will see results very quickly with this very strategic mindfulness-based approach. Typically after two or three weeks you will notice significant improvements. And this approach gives you the tools that you can continue to develop to get over your agoraphobia completely. That's our goal. Not to tolerate it, not to manage it, but to heal it so we are no longer a prisoner of our anxiety.
So please contact me if this interests you. Lets schedule a Skype therapy session. Thank you.
GO TO 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
Find online therapy for agoraphobia