Online Psychotherapist for Agoraphobia

Online Psychotherapist for Agoraphobia available via Skype

Contact me via email to find out more about seeing an online psychotherapist who specializes in Mindfulness Therapy for agoraphobia.

During these Skype sessions of Mindfulness Therapy I will teach you how to apply mindfulness for promoting recovery from all forms of anxiety disorders, including Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, depression and agoraphobia, by using the well-tested methods of Mindfulness Therapy.

This approach is very effective and most people experience significant reduction in the intensity of your anxiety or depression after the first 2-3 Skype sessions with me.

Online Mindfulness Therapy is extremely effective for managing anxiety and depression without the need for anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants. It is better to treat the cause of your emotional suffering rather than just trying to manage symptoms.

The main healing factors developed during mindfulness-based psychotherapy are Consciousness, which is essential for breaking free from the negative habits that cause emotional pain, and Inner Compassion, which is what accelerates healing and resolution of emotional pain.

“Mindfulness therapy has helped me with my anxiety in a very significant way. No longer am I bound to my anxiety in a continuous circle. I’ve been able to see my anxiety for what it truly is, and it has liberated me. Thank you Peter.”

Go to my Contact Page to get help from an online psychotherapist for agoraphobia via Skype

Online Psychotherapist for 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.

Mindfulness-based exposure therapy for agoraphobia

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.

Develop Observer status and Objective Consciousness

The first training is to be able to stay conscious with the anxiety without becoming the anxiety. That’s the first most essential part of the training. When we have achieved that, when we can stay as the observer of our anxiety, our True Self, the Observer that does not react, then we proceed to heal that anxiety. We examine how we can help it heal.

The first part of healing is establishing that relationship that is not based on reactivity. The second part is to watch for any form of reactive thinking that feeds that anxiety. So when we see reactive to thoughts we need to change our relationship to those, as well, so that we do not become blindly identified with those thoughts. We learn to see the thoughts as an observer, as your True Self.

Change the internal imagery of the anxiety

We also look at the internal structure of the anxiety, which is always in the form of imagery. That is how emotions work in the mind; it is through internal psychological and habitual imagery. That’s what holds emotional energy together to form anxiety or depression or anger or whatever it might be.

So we look at the internal imagery. And one of the first things we work on is looking for the position of that emotional imagery, where do we actually see the imagery? Very often it’s in the chest. It could be any place, but we have to look in to find out. That habitual position is part of its imagery and is a very important part. It’s necessary in order for that emotion to work. It has to be in the chest, for example in order to create anxiety.

So when we see something of its position, we then explore changing the position of that emotion, moving it. Sometimes we move it to a place where we can embrace it, rather like taking an animal and moving it onto our lap where we can embrace it and comfort it. That helps a scared animal overcome its fear. Well emotions are very, very similar. So we can move the emotion and put it on our lap and then we can explore how to comfort it. And we can teach the emotion how to release itself; how to let go of its fear.

Develop a compassionate relationship with your anxiety

So this way we develop a very strong compassionate healing relationship with that anxiety. The biggest problem for most people is that the anxiety reaction becomes isolated, cut off from your True Self. It is left abandoned and it is that sense of isolation, which prevents it from healing. So we build a very strong, compassionate, friendly, loving relationship with our anxiety. That is precisely what it needs to heal.

So this is the kind of training we would do before doing the exposure challenge. We would ensure that we have healed the anxiety prior to doing the challenge. Then we do the challenge and we stay mindful, which means staying aware and conscious. And if we notice any anxiety arising then we respond to it with the response of compassion that we have been training on before the challenge.

After the challenge we then do another meditation on the anxiety. We play through the challenge we have just done. We look for any fresh anxiety that’s arisen and we respond to that anxiety with mindfulness, with compassion, in the same way.

So this way we’re training in a very conscious way with our habitual anxiety reactions and training them to release their anxiety, teaching them how to heal, how to extinguish themselves, so that we can imagine doing that exposure challenge and not feel any anxiety.

So we repeat the challenge after taking a break in this very strategic way over and over again until we have completely trained out of the habitual anxiety reactions. Then we may proceed to another challenge and we do it in the same way. Always meditating on the challenge before we do it. Watching for anxiety reactions. Changing our relationship to the anxiety from one of reactivity to a response that promotes healing. Then we do that second challenge and we meditate again after the challenge. And then we may go on to a third challenge.

And we keep cycling through all of our challenges until we are free from that habitual anxiety.

Anxiety is a habit

At the end of the day anxiety is nothing more than habit. It is simply conditioned habit, and that can be changed when we develop a conscious and a very friendly, compassionate relationship with that habit. You can’t change habits by pushing them away or avoiding them. You can’t really effectively change habits by just struggling through either. Mindfulness does not teach tolerance of the anxiety; it prefers to work on healing that anxiety. So that is quite a different approach and much more active, I would say.

Contact me if you would like help overcoming your agoraphobia

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. Let us schedule a Skype therapy session to get started on your path to freedom from agoraphobia. Thank you.

Let an Online Psychotherapist help you overcome your agoraphobia

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I provide online therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders and depression and addiction and OCD and many other common emotional problems that people struggle with. One of the anxiety disorders that I am most often asked for help with is agoraphobia.

So agoraphobia is quite a common condition actually, that affects somewhere between 4 to 5 percent of the population in some degree. It can vary in severity from mild discomfort and anxiety being in public places or being in a situation where you might feel trapped or feeling uncomfortable in a novel place that you’re not familiar with.

Agoraphobia typically refers to anxiety produced by unfamiliar situations and environments where you feel a sense of being trapped or a need to escape.

So it’s quite common and is quite common in young people as well as the elderly. It often starts in your 20s, but it’s something that can affect you at any time. The cause of agoraphobia is not really well known. The way I look at it is that it is underlying anxiety that’s become associated with certain triggers such as being in a busy shopping mall or even simply being out of sight of your home.

Some people I’ve worked with develop some quite severe anxiety the moment they turn a corner in their neighborhood and are unable to see their home from that position. So things like that can be quite powerful triggers that trigger anxiety and caused it to come together into a more intense form.

So really, agoraphobia can be reviewed as a set of learned habits that are unconsciously conditioned, that become associated with certain triggers and that operate and tend to proliferate, feeding that underlying anxiety.

Online therapy and help for agoraphobia

So how do we go about freeing ourselves from agoraphobia and panic disorder?

Well, the most effective way is to approach each of these challenging situations where those triggers exist and approach it in a very strategic way using mindfulness, what I call mindfulness-based exposure therapy. So this is where we work with those triggers and the anxiety that gets triggered automatically due to those underlying habits, those reactive habits. So we work with them consciously. This is the important thing in mindfulness Therapy; we work very consciously with the triggers and the emotional reactions that get triggered. We, in fact, learn how to meditate on those triggers.

We play through the triggers seen, for example, walking around the block or walking into a busy restaurant or a shop. We play that through in the mind and we watch for the emotions that get triggered and then we work on developing an internal relationship with that anxiety.

This is what is typically missing and this is the central problem in agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders. The emotions become separated from your True Self, the larger perspective of who you are. They become isolated. They become cut off and this prevents them from healing and changing and resolving and in the normal way that emotions resolve themselves. So they become trapped and frozen in place, ready to be triggered by the next encounter with the particular habitual triggers, conditioned reactions.

So we work on re-establishing this internal connection. We call this the True Self-Little Self Alliance. We are learning how to be present with the anxiety in a way that helps it heal. And the best analogy for this process is to think about forming a relationship in a family between the parents and the child. The child may experience fear and it goes to its parent for comfort, for reassurance. And the strength of that bond is extremely important for the child learning how to overcome fear, how to resolve fear and how to internalize these responses that will resolve its fear rather than increase its fear.

So building this alliance is everything. We do that by meditating on the anxiety.

Many people think that meditation is a process of escaping the mind, escaping anxiety and depression, trying to find a more tranquil place. And that’s not the case. That is not correct meditation. If you try to escape suffering, that suffering will simply follow you, it will chase after you with a vengeance.

That anxiety is trying to heal itself. But it cannot do it alone in isolation. It can only do it when we have a strong alliance between your True Self and the emotion, which is the Little Self. So the True Self is really like the parents. And it is not afraid. The Little Self is afraid, the conditioned reaction is afraid, but not the True Self. The True Self is like the parent, and when you bring together that which is not afraid with that wishes afraid, then you begin to give the fear what it needs to heal. In the presence of that of that which is fearless it will begin to heal quite quickly.

So building this internal alliance, the internal relationship, is the purpose of meditation. We sit with the emotion. You learn how to comfort it, how to help it change often by working with its imagery, but mostly by establishing that relationship. When it is strong, then the emotion is free to change and heal according to its own internal structure. So all emotions will try to heal, that’s their direction. The best analogy for that would be the analogy of a fire. The primary direction for a fire is to burn itself out. And if we allow it to do that, it will always burn itself out.

And it’s the same with anxiety or depression or any other emotion. Its essential nature is to try and extinguish itself, to resolve itself, to burn itself out. But to do that, it must have the freedom that is established when you are able to be present with that emotion without reacting. When you react to the emotion, you effectively put new fuel into the system and that stops it from changing. So this is a very important part of meditation, learning to be present with our emotions and with our suffering without reacting. The more you can do that, the more things will heal; the less reactivity, the faster the healing.

So that’s one very important strategy that I will teach you during our sessions together.

People like working with online therapists because it’s convenient. It’s also much less intimidating. This is not medical treatment. It’s not clinical. It’s a process of really helping you see how anxiety works so that you can put these practices into practice and help that anxiety heal.

So we do that by facing the challenge situations. But we prepare for them by meditating before we do the challenge in this way that I’ve described. We play through the scene in our mind. We look for the anxiety that gets triggered. And then we help that anxiety heal by establishing non-reactive presence as the True Self.

Then we do the challenge and we stay as mindful as we can during the challenge situation watching for triggers, watching for reactions. And when we see any reaction, we simply greet it mindfully. That means consciously so that we again undercut the habitual unconscious nature of that reaction. Seeing it consciously, making that contact with it, where we are present with that newly emerging anxiety allows your training that you did before the challenge to come into effect, and that will neutralize the anxiety on the spot. So that’s what we do during the challenge.

Then we can also meditate after the challenge. This is particularly good because we can then work with any fresh anxiety and the triggers that triggered that anxiety during our challenge. We can work with that in the same way. We replay it in the mind. We meditate on it. We help it heal.

So this way we’re training the anxiety to heal. We’re allowing it to develop strong pathways in the mind, in the brain, that lead to its resolution. And those become new habits after a while and the anxiety effectively does not arise at all and then we feel completely comfortable in that situation, in the busy shopping mall or walking in the neighborhood or driving, or whatever it might be.

So we work in this very strategic way. That is the key to effective change and for healing and recovering from agoraphobia.

Online therapy through Skype for anxiety and depression

So if you would like to work with an online psychotherapist like myself who specializes in Mindfulness Therapy for agoraphobia, then do please contact me and let’s schedule a few Skype therapy sessions. This approach is very effective and very quick. Most people see quite significant improvements within a couple of weeks of working with me and putting these mindfulness methods into practice.

So please contact me if you are really interested in overcoming your agoraphobia. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to get help from an online therapist for agoraphobia via Skype

Speak to an online psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy for agoraphobia

So if you’re interested in online therapy for agoraphobia and you would like to speak to an online psychotherapist who specializes in the treatment of a agoraphobia, then I invite you to look at my website and then email me if you have any questions and we can schedule online psychotherapy sessions over Skype.

During these sessions I will teach you how to work with your anxiety using the well-tested and profoundly effective methods of mindfulness therapy. This is a modern form of cognitive-behavioral therapy that focuses on helping you change the underlying structure of your anxiety.

So mindfulness therapy focuses on helping you overcome those blind habitual reactions that feed your anxiety. And these are a chief feature of any anxiety disorder, including agoraphobia.

So the typical pattern is that certain triggers trigger these habitual conditioned reactions and they produce the unpleasant feelings and sensations of anxiety. These habits, like any habits, operate subconsciously. We are not really aware of the reactive process that is going on. We simply experience the anxiety as a resultant reaction to the particular triggers.

Common triggers for agoraphobia include thoughts such as thoughts of losing control or having a panic attack, thoughts of feeling trapped, of not being able to return to your safe area, your home. There will probably be a large array of thoughts like that. And these reactive thoughts in turn get associated with physical triggers such as reaching a certain distance from your home or going into a shop or a cinema or a mall. Travelling out of range of your home so you can no longer see your home is a common physical trigger.

These kind of external physical triggers trigger the reactive thinking and emotional reactions that feeds the anxiety.

So the way to overcome agoraphobia is through mindfulness-based exposure therapy, which is where we deliberately expose ourselves to these particular triggers. But we do it consciously. That is what makes ALL the difference. We need to focus conscious awareness on those habitual reactions and learn to see the impulse to react without blindly giving in to that impulse out of blind habit.

So the classic way we go about doing this is that we set up a series of challenges. Starting with easy challenges and progressing to harder challenges after we have overcome each challenge successfully.

We then embark on a period of training before we do the challenge. So this is where we use mindfulness meditation to develop that all-important conscious awareness to the anxiety.

We imagine doing one of those challenges, to play it through in the mind, we watch for those habitual blind subconscious reactions and when we identify them we then deliberately hold them in conscious awareness without identifying with those reactions, without becoming blindly overwhelmed by them. We hold those reactions, those thoughts and emotions as objects in the mind and retrain ourselves to stay as the observer.

So this is developing what is called “objective consciousness,” which is the key factor needed to break free from the habits that create anxiety. So we train with our mind. We train with the thoughts and the emotions consciously. This is the secret that has proven to be very, very effective. Most people are not conscious of their habitual reactions. They simply fall into those reactions the moment they’re triggered. They become anxious. And our training is learning how to overcome this habit of becoming. Instead, we train in the habit of becoming aware and staying as that conscious awareness and observing the anxiety as an object.

So this training in mindful consciousness is what breaks the reactive habit that creates the anxiety. This is what we do BEFORE doing the live challenge.

There are other factors that we can bring to to to play here such as responding to that anxiety with compassion. Compassion is a very, very powerful force. When you bring compassion to your anxiety, it increases the rate of healing considerably. And not surprisingly, objective consciousness makes compassion possible. If there’s no objective consciousness, then you cannot develop a compassionate relationship with your anxiety. In fact, you’re more likely to react with aversion and avoidance. And those are forms of reactivity that will feed that anxiety.

So if you would like to learn more about how to apply mindfulness for working with agoraphobia and you’re interested in online therapy, then to please go to my website and learn more about mindfulness therapy. Please contact me if you have any questions. If you would like to schedule some Skype therapy sessions with me, then let me know. Let me know what time’s work for you and we can set those up.

Typically, people see tremendous improvements within the first few sessions once you learn how to change the relationship that you have from an unconscious reactive relationship to a conscious and compassionate relationship with your anxiety. This is what makes the difference.

So please contact me if you would like to schedule online agoraphobia therapy sessions and if you like the idea of being able to talk to an online psychotherapist for help with your anxiety. Thank you.

Online Therapist for Agoraphobia near me

I am based in Colorado, USA, but I provide online therapy for agoraphobia world-wide.

Online Psychotherapist for Agoraphobia

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