Mindfulness-based exposure therapy for agoraphobia
Mindfulness-based exposure therapy for agoraphobia via Skype
Online Mindfulness Therapy for Controlling Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without using medications
Speak with a Psychotherapist Online using Skype for highly effective online help and therapy for overcoming Chronic Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Social Anxiety Disorder.
If you want to recover effectively from agoraphobia you must treat the underlying habitual anxiety reactions.
Prescription medications don’t address 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 healing these habitual reactions directly at the psychological level. This approach is extremely effective and most of my clients see significant improvements after 3-4 Skype sessions.
Online therapy is very effective as long as you use Skype, FaceTime or Zoom so that you can see each other. Being able to see each other is required for good communication and good psychotherapy.
Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for Agoraphobia
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 find out more about this online psychotherapy service and book a therapy session via Skype with me. Inquiries welcome!
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
Online Therapy for agoraphobia
Main LinkedIn article: Online Therapy for agoraphobia
Online Psychotherapy over 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.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
How do I overcome my agoraphobia without medication? Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia
Agoraphobia Therapy Online
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.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
Agoraphobia Help Online over Skype
Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional online therapist based in Boulder, Colorado, and I offer online therapy for anxiety, depression, and stress, including PTSD, and I also offer online help for agoraphobia.
So if you're interested in seeking online therapy for agoraphobia, then please reach out to me by e-mail. Tell me more about how I can help you. What you're experiencing. And then we can schedule a Skype Therapy session and I will teach you how to overcome your agoraphobia using the well tested techniques of Mindfulness Therapy that I have developed over the years and found to be very effective for all kinds of anxiety disorders including agoraphobia.
The essence of what I will teach you during these online therapy sessions is how to set up a schedule of strategic exposure challenges. That's the first thing that we will need to do.
That might involve walking outside that house, or walking into a shop, or whatever it might be, but some challenge, basically, that triggers anxiety. We want to use these challenges as a way of training out of that anxiety reaction.
So we set up a series of challenges and then the most important thing is that we prepare for each challenge using mindfulness meditation, which means that we play through that challenge in the mind, we look for any anxiety reactions that occur and then we meditate on those anxiety reactions themselves.
We basically learn how to dis-identify from those reactions. We learn to overcome the habit of becoming overwhelmed or controlled by those anxiety reactions. You learn to sit with the anxiety without becoming overwhelmed. That is the second essential part of the mindfulness approach, and the third part of Mindfulness Therapy involves healing that anxiety that we find.
And this involves developing a very high quality conscious relationship with the emotion itself based on mindfulness and based on compassion or friendliness, and this approach works extremely well. The biggest problem that I come across is that people develop a fear of their anxiety and they try to escape it. They try to avoid it. They look for distraction behaviors. Anything to get away from it. And that will not work. You must learn how to form a stable non-reactive relationship with your anxiety and then respond with compassion in the way that I am advocating here, if you want it to heal. That is an essential requirement.
So if you would like to learn more about how to overcome your agoraphobia using Mindfulness Therapy, then please reach out to me by email and let's schedule Skype Therapy session.
Mindfulness Therapy is very effective for all kinds of anxiety disorders and most people that I work with can expect to see significant improvements after three or four weeks, once they start applying mindfulness methods and executing them with these challenges that I've been talking about.
If you take this very strategic and systematic way of working with your anxiety then you will overcome your agoraphobia, and you'll be able to extend your range and be completely comfortable in a wide range of circumstances that previously may not be possible for you.
Of course doing online therapy or Agoraphobia is very convenient, and sometimes it's very necessary because it's so difficult to go to see a therapist away from home.
So if you're interested, please email me and let's explore how Mindfulness Therapy can help you overcome your agoraphobia.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY
Online Therapy for agoraphobia
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Mindfulness-based exposure therapy for agoraphobia