Online Counseling Therapy for Overcoming Agoraphobia
Online Counseling Therapy via Skype for Overcoming Agoraphobia
Agoraphobia Help Online - Counseling via Skype
See a Therapist Online over Skype for highly effective online help and mindfulness-based therapy for overcoming Chronic Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder.
If you want to recover fully from agoraphobia you must treat the underlying conditioned anxiety reactions.
Medications don’t address this. Medications only treat symptoms, but do very little 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 just as effective as in-person therapy as long as you use Skype, FaceTime or Zoom so that you can see each other. Being able to see each other is necessary for good communication and effective psychotherapy.
Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for Agoraphobia
Working with Inner Imagery – The secret to healing Agoraphobia
Internally, every emotion is structured around imagery – inner pictorial representations that resonate with the emotion. For example, anger is usually associate with the color red and anger is structured around imagery that is red in color and probably hot as well.
We can learn about the structure of our inner imagery by observing our emotions with mindfulness. From what we learn, we can intuitively see what changes in the imagery might be helpful. Change the imagery and you change the structure of the emotion.
People with agoraphobia typically have a great deal of inner imagery, very often based on the feeling of emptiness, an inner void or black hole that threatens to swallow up everything.
Discovering the structure of this imagery provides a very powerful tool for changing the intensity of the anxiety underlying agoraphobia. This approach is one of the most effective treatment for agoraphobia and was pioneered by Dr. Strong in the 1980s.
Email me to discover more about this online counseling service and organize 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
Online Counseling for agoraphobia
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How to beat agoraphobia - Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia
Contact me to schedule a Skype therapy session with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in online mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety and depression.
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional online therapist offering online therapy as a way of helping you overcome your anxiety or depression or addiction. And it's much more convenient and much more comfortable for you. I really enjoy working with people over Skype. It is much more empowering than going to see a therapist in an office. This approach, I feel, is much more effective, especially if you're working with anxiety and particularly if you're struggling with agoraphobia.
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 problem is that avoidance fuels fear, so the more you become wrapped up in patterns of avoidance the more fear you will experience and then that leads to more avoidance behaviors. And so it sort of spirals out of control and you become more and more limited and confined to a smaller and smaller space. Sometimes people are unable to leave their house. They're afraid of any kind of zone that is out of that immediate comfort zone of their house. So going to the grocery store, driving a car, even walking around the neighborhood may be way too challenging. And this is the result of this accumulation of avoidance and the fear that is fed by avoidance.
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 is not enough to just force your way through a traumatic situation. That will simply reinforce the fear. It will not resolve it. So exposure therapy as it's usually taught is basically going to be mostly ineffective. You cannot expect yourself to habituate to that situation simply by repeating it over and over again. That could also simply repeat the fear, the trauma, over and over again.
In many ways agoraphobia is really a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. It's that reaction to the trauma of the panic attacks that you had originally.
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.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
Online Help for Agoraphobia via Skype
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I provide online therapy via Skype. So if you're suffering from agoraphobia then Skype therapy can be a wonderful opportunity for you to get the help that you need to uncover these awful habitual patterns of reactivity that keep you imprisoned in your home or in a very restricted area.
So it's very important to find a way of overcoming these habitual anxiety reactions and I have been developing an approach that's called Mindfulness Therapy that's very effective for agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders.
Whatever style of psychotherapy you select, it's important that you find one that's very practical, such as cognitive behavioral therapy or Mindfulness Therapy, which is my specialty, and whatever approach you use must include some form of exposure therapy that enables you to start pushing those boundaries out to start overcoming your habitual anxiety reactions.
So I've developed a system called mindfulness-based exposure therapy for agoraphobia, which works extremely well and is very easy to learn via Skype. I will teach you how to approach your anxiety using mindfulness techniques that you can practice yourself and start to push back those boundaries.
So typically I see people once a week and then they practice the methods that I teach between sessions, and you should expect to see significant changes and improvements after the first three or four weeks.
Once you start applying the methods I will teach you, you will rapidly overcome your anxiety and start to break free from the prison of habitual anxiety.
So the online therapy option of course is very beneficial if not completely necessary if you're suffering from agoraphobia because it's so difficult for you to leave home or travel to see a therapist in their office; it's often impossible.
So if you would like to learn more about Skype therapy for agoraphobia, then do please contact me. Just ask me any questions you have; anything that you want to discuss about this approach. I'm happy to answer questions.
When you're ready though, let's schedule a trial session. I offer a no risk policy. That is that if you don't like the session, you don't like this approach or it doesn't feel right for you, then there's no charge. There's certainly no upfront charge for my sessions. The sessions are based entirely on your satisfaction with the results. So you pay after each session but on condition that you are happy with the results of that session. So it's a no risk approach and I think that's very important.
So if you would like to schedule a trial session with me and get started on a treatment plan that will help you overcome your anxiety and allow you to develop greater freedom from agoraphobia, then do please contact me and we can get started.
I see people throughout North America, but also in Western Europe as well. I am from the UK originally. I now live in Colorado but I see people all over the world and especially people who want to take a very practical and focused approach to working with their anxiety. In my opinion Mindfulness Therapy is one of the most effective approaches there is, followed by CBT. So please contact me if you'd like to get started.
Online Help for Agoraphobia over Skype
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
Teletherapy Counseling 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.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE COUNSELING THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY
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