Are you looking for online therapy to overcome agoraphobia? Contact me to schedule Online Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy via Skype.
Online Mindfulness Psychotherapist for Overcoming Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without using medications.
Speak with a Therapist Online over Skype for highly effective online help and therapy for Chronic Agoraphobia, Chronic Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder.
Email me to discover more about this online counseling service and book a Skype session with me. Inquiries welcome!
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
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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.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME 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.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
Through progressive challenges and mindfulness training you will soon make progress in overcoming your agoraphobia. Email me if you would like online help for your agoraphobia.
Welcome. My name is Peter strong and I'm a professional psychotherapist and I offer online help for agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders that may be affecting the quality of your life. I offer online therapy, which is of course very convenient if you're suffering from agoraphobia.
The style of therapy that I offer is called mindfulness therapy and this is a very practical hands-on approach that gives you tools that you can use between therapy sessions to progressively overcome your agoraphobia.
So, mindfulness therapy consists of a combination of two important aspects. The first is designing a series of progressive challenges. That's very important, of course, that you try to face your fears and not simply give into them. But you need to do this in a progressive way starting simple and then progressing to more difficult challenges.
The other part of this approach is to do training before you do any kind of exposure challenge. You need to prepare yourself so that if anxiety gets triggered, that you will have trained such that that that anxiety will dissipate or resolve itself on the spot in the presence of the particular triggers that trigger the fear, anxiety or panic attacks. So we train beforehand.
We do this by developing a very different quality of relationship to our anxiety and this is the hallmark of mindfulness therapy. The real problem is not so much the anxiety itself but our reactions to that anxiety. We tend to develop patterns of fear-based reactions to our anxiety and other emotions that tend to feed that underlying anxiety and stop it resolving itself.
So, during the preparation step before a challenge you actually will be learning how to meditate on your anxiety. So you will play through the scene of perhaps walking around the block or whatever challenge you decide to start with. You look for the anxiety that gets triggered in your mind and then you change the way that you relate to that anxiety. And the most important thing is not to become identified with the anxiety; to see the anxiety as if it was a visitor or simply an object in the mind. Then we can learn to develop balance in relationship to that object. So you can sit with your anxiety without becoming anxious. That's the most important first step in the training before you do any challenges.
The second step is to respond to that anxiety with a quality of friendliness and compassion. This also is a vital part of the mindfulness approach. Mindfulness is this combination of consciousness and friendliness.
Friendliness is immensely powerful in overcoming fear. So you could think that of the fear emotion itself as being like a child. It feels isolated. It's scared. And what does it need? The most important thing it needs is to feel a connection with its parent. The parent is not afraid. During meditation on our anxiety we establish this kind of internal parent which we call our true self. It is not afraid it is able to establish a relationship with the anxiety that is not based on fear based on compassion. This is exactly what the fear needs in order to resolve itself. And that is what we call the True Self-Little Self Alliance.
So when people are stuck in patterns of anxiety it's because that alliance is missing within. So building that is essential. And there are many other things that we do during the training before each challenge session, but that's a taste of Mindfulness Therapy. It is very, very effective in deed, and most people see significant improvements after three or four weeks practicing the techniques that I will teach you. So, if you're interested in online help for your anxiety and your agoraphobia do please send me an email and schedule a therapy session via Skype.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY
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