Online psychotherapy for agoraphobia Chicago, Illinois

Online psychotherapy for agoraphobia Chicago, Illinois

Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia is available via Skype for Illinois, including: Chicago, Aurora, Naperville, Joliet, Rockford, Springfield, Elgin, Peoria

Online help for agoraphobia

Online Mindfulness Therapist for Recovery from Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without using antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.

See a Psychotherapist Online using Skype for highly effective online help and therapy for overcoming Chronic Agoraphobia, Chronic Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder.

If you want to recover completely from agoraphobia you must treat the underlying conditioned anxiety reactions.

Anti-anxiety medications don’t address this. Medications only treat anxiety symptoms, but do very little to change the underlying psychological cause of your anxiety. To recover fully you need an effective form of psychotherapy that should include Exposure Therapy and Cognitive Therapy to manage anxiety-based thinking. You also need to work directly on the anxiety that feeds those thoughts.

During Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy (Mindfulness Therapy) we work on neutralizing these habitual reactions directly at the psychological level. This approach is very effective and most of my clients see big improvements after 3-4 Skype sessions with me.

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 necessary for good communication and good psychotherapy.

What Treatment Methods work Best for Agoraphobia?

In my experience after working with many agoraphobics over the years, the best therapeutic approach for helping people overcome agoraphobia is a combination of Cognitive Therapy (CBT) and Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy (Mindfulness Therapy).

Cognitive-based therapy helps you identify the underlying habitual and reactive thoughts and beliefs that create anxiety. Developing awareness of these habitual negative thinking patterns is a very important first step in changing them.

Mindfulness Therapy helps you neutralize and resolve the underlying emotional panic anxiety and fear that fuels the thoughts and beliefs. Learning how to diffuse and resolve the underlying emotions is essential and mindfulness is one of the best awareness tools for doing this.

With practice, you begin to completely change your relationship to the emotions from being a victim to being aware. the more aware you are, the less reactive you become. As you become less reactive, you can begin to explore ways to heal the anxiety-fear directly. Instead of fighting your emotions or avoiding them, you learn how to be with them as a friend. Mindfulness training makes this possible.

The combined approach teaches you how to work with panic anxiety thoughts without becoming overwhelmed by them and this makes it possible to do Imaginal Exposure Exercises, where you imagine leaving your house or going on a journey or being in a crowded place. Through repetition you quickly learn how to process any anxiety reactions as they arise and you prepare yourself for an actual real-life challenge.

At first, we make the challenge small and manageable. We begin to build direct experience and confidence and build on what we have achieved. This very systematic process of preparation through guided Imaginal Exposure followed by real challenges is a proven and effective method for breaking free from agoraphobia and panic attacks.

Email me to find out more about this online counseling service and arrange for a Skype therapy session with me. Inquiries welcome!

Everyone that I have worked with really benefits from the mindfulness approach that I teach for healing emotional suffering…

"Beyond healing the anxiety, my whole inner landscape is changing. I’m learning that the self-criticism, shame and doubt I have been stuck in for so long can all be met with compassionate awareness and brought to resolution. I’m starting to feel the joy Peter talks about and a real tenderness toward myself and others."

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Online therapy for agoraphobia Illinois

Online Therapy for agoraphobia

Agoraphobia Therapy Online by Skype

Email me to schedule a Skype therapy session with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in online mindfulness therapy for anxiety and depression.

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong and I provide online therapy via Skype for anxiety and depression and particularly for the treatment of agoraphobia. So if you're looking for agoraphobia therapy online I invite you to go to my website. Read more about this online therapy service that I offer hand please contact me if you would like to schedule some Skype Therapy sessions with me to help you overcome your agoraphobia.

So if you are suffering from agoraphobia it is essential that you are able to find an online therapist to work with simply because it's so difficult for you to leave home. And there are a number of services now offering online psychotherapy for the treatment of agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders too.

Whether you choose me or someone else, the important thing is that you find a therapist to work with who uses Skype or similar video platform because it's very important that you can see each other. That will improve the quality of communication and the quality of the therapy that you are getting.

The other thing is make sure that you feel completely comfortable with the therapist that you select. Make sure that they answer your questions about the therapist's approach and trust your own judgment, your own intuition. That is by far the best guide, much more so than how many letters the therapist has after his name. What's important is that you feel comfortable with the therapist and you like the approach that they are offering.

So in the style of agoraphobia therapy that I offer is based on the application of mindfulness. Mindfulness Therapy is a very effective way of working with anxiety disorders like agoraphobia. It also helps you manage panic attacks and any other aspect of anxiety that's causing you distress and that are limiting the quality of your life.

So in Mindfulness Therapy the primary approach that we take is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, and that is where you will basically design a series of challenges with my help so that you can begin to train yourself out of the anxiety habits.

So in mindfulness training we teach that suffering like anxiety and depression is basically an emotional habit. It is the result of conditioning. This habit formation gets started, often in childhood, and it never gets resolved. And this anxiety shows up in different forms different types of anxiety such as agoraphobia or social anxiety or a phobia or panic attacks or driving anxiety, etc.

So the first stage is to set up a schedule of exposure challenges. And then what is most important is to train using mindfulness for each challenge that you schedule. Exposure therapy by itself is not sufficient. You must train with the anxiety beforehand.

So we do this by a technique called Rehearsal Meditation, whereby you imagine doing that challenge in order to find the anxiety and then you start working with that anxiety using mindfulness and compassion.

You look at the structure of the anxiety, you find out how it works. You look at the patterns of reactive thoughts that feed that anxiety and you begin to change your relationship to the anxiety formation. You start to break free from its influence by becoming more and more aware of it, more conscious of the thoughts and the emotion. The basic rule here is that the more you see, the less fear you will experience. That may seem counter-intuitive but it's actually the case. Fear is based on what you don't see much more than what you do see.

So we do this in great detail with the challenge in our imagination before we do the challenge. That's why it's called a Rehearsal Meditation. When you can visualize doing that challenge, whatever it might be, perhaps just walking around the block or driving in the car, if you can do that, whatever it might be, when you feel that you can do that with the complete absence of anxiety then you do the live challenge, the exposure challenge, and your training that you did in the Rehearsal Meditation will take effect and will effectively inhibit any anxiety reactions during the challenge.

And when you take this approach you'll start to see dramatic improvements in a very short time. Typically, most of my clients see quite dramatic changes after three to four weeks of doing this kind of progressive exposure challenge using mindfulness.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

How to beat agoraphobia through Online Therapy

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional online therapist specializing in Mindfulness Therapy for the treatment of agoraphobia. So if you're looking for online psychotherapy for agoraphobia, then I do ask you to visit my website and learn more about this online service that I offer via Skype and then feel free to email me using the contact page to ask any questions you may have about this online psychotherapy approach for treating agoraphobia.

So Mindfulness Therapy, which is what I specialize in and have developed specifically for treating agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders, is extremely effective. It works in a very strategic and focused way on helping you resolve the fear reactions, the anxiety and panic attacks, that are a feature of agoraphobia.

So the primary approach that I will be teaching you is called Mindfulness-based. Exposure Therapy. So all forms of successful psychotherapy for treating agoraphobia will employ some form of exposure therapy. Clearly that is a necessary component to help you extend the range of confidence that you have, to be able to move into areas that were previously very difficult for you, to move into different social situations and to leave your comfort zone and develop a much broader level of comfort. This is a necessary approach.

So we work by extending the boundaries of our comfort zone and we do this by developing a systematic approach, that is, that you will design a series of challenges to go to your comfort zone and move a little bit beyond that comfort zone on a daily basis.

But the important thing here that I teach in the mindfulness-based approach to exposure therapy is preparing before you do each challenge. I feel this is what is often missing. Simply throwing yourself into difficult and anxiety producing situations is not very efficient and probably not very effective for most people. You have to train yourself out of the habitual anxiety reactions before you do each of the challenges and that's the focus of mindfulness therapy and the mindfulness-based exposure therapy.

So you set up a series of challenges and then we do the training. So the training is about meditating on each of those challenges. You start off by playing the challenge through in your mind in order to find those anxiety reactions. You want to get access to them under your terms so that you can work with them consciously rather than trying to struggle with them in the heat of the moment during the challenge.

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY 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.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY