Online Psychotherapy for help recovering from agoraphobia 

Online Psychotherapy for help recovering from agoraphobia and anxiety

 

Find an online psychotherapist to treat agoraphobia


Online Mindfulness Psychotherapist for Overcoming Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without using antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.


See a Therapist Online through Skype for highly effective online help and mindfulness therapy for overcoming Chronic Agoraphobia, Chronic Anxiety, Panic Attacks 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 do this. Medications only treat 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 very effective and most of my clients see significant improvements after 3-4 Skype sessions.


Online therapy works very well 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.


What Treatment Methods work Best for Agoraphobia?


In my experience, 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.


Contact me to learn more about this online therapy service and organize an online therapy 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 Psychotherapy for agoraphobia

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How to recover from agoraphobia - Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia 


Contact 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. 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. 


GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA


Online Psychotherapy over Skype for Agoraphobia


Contact me to schedule a Skype therapy session with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in online mindfulness therapy for anxiety and depression, specializing in the treatment of agoraphobia via Skype.


Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional psychotherapist and I specialize in mindfulness therapy delivered over Skype for help with anxiety disorders including agoraphobia. 


So during online therapy sessions I'll teach you how to work with your agoraphobia, with your anxiety, with your panic attacks, using the very effective methods of mindfulness therapy. 


So basically what we do is we start to design a series of challenges. These are manageable challenges that you can schedule and work on each day, extending the range of your comfort zone. Essentially, whatever those challenges are that's for you to determine. But what makes the mindfulness therapy approach so effective is that we do a lot of preparation before we do each of these challenges. And primarily the the mechanism, the the approach that I take is one of teaching you how to meditate on your challenge. 


So you play that through in the mind you visualize doing that challenge. Perhaps it might be walking around the block or as simple as stepping outside the front door, whatever it is doesn't matter. But we prepare for it by playing it through in the mind and then watching for any fear reactions that occur. When you find that emotional reaction we then build a mindfulness based relationship to the fear itself. This is the key. We learn to hold that fear in the mind without becoming identified with it and without reacting to that fear reaction with more fear or with avoidance or with hatred or self-criticism or some kind of distraction. 


We must not under any circumstances try to avoid the fear or anxiety. We have to build a conscious relationship with it. So that's the first part of our mindfulness meditation on our challenge. You play that challenge through in the mind. We look for the fear reaction and then we build a conscious mindful relationship with it. 


The second stage as we're doing our preparation here, our training, is to help that fear resolve itself. We effectively teach the fear to resolve itself, and we do this primarily by building this conscious non-reactive relationship with the fear. That is what allows the fear to subside and resolve itself. And so we're teaching the fear how to resolve itself. 


You cannot resolve fear by arguing with it or by some form of rational thought process, trying to explain to the fear that it doesn't need to be afraid. That kind of approach is not really very effective. What is effective is building this conscious non-reactive and also very compassionate relationship with the emotion itself. 


Another part of our mindfulness training is to look at the imagery of the emotion, the fear. So all emotions are based around imagery, how you see it and the mind, and we can work with that imagery using mindfulness and compassion to help that imagery change. And when the imagery changes the fear diminishes. So again you are teaching the fear how to resolve itself by changing its imagery by working with imagery.


If you would like to learn more about online therapy for agoraphobia over Skype using the mindfulness therapy approaches that I have developed over the years, then please reach out to me by email and let's schedule a session. 


My clients really enjoy this approach. It gives them very practical tools that they can develop themselves and it makes you much more independent. And it also does not involve medication. I do not recommend medication for treating any anxiety disorder because it doesn't allow you to change that underlying psychological habit that causes the anxiety. Medications may provide temporary relief from symptoms but that's not going to change the the mechanism that produces your anxiety. That is psychological in nature and needs to be addressed by a psychological process like mindfulness therapy. 


So if you would like to get started with me, and you would like to really get over your agoraphobia then please contact me now. Lets schedule a session at a time that works for you and for me. I see people throughout North America, Western Europe, the UK and as far away as Japan and Australia. So please contact me if you'd like to learn more about this online therapy approach for overcoming agoraphobia.


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


Online Psychotherapist for Agoraphobia by Skype 


Online treatment plan for agoraphobia recovery using Mindfulness Therapy


Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional psychotherapist and I offer online therapy via Skype for help with anxiety disorders such as agoraphobia. 


So if you're looking for an online therapist via Skype to help you manage your agoraphobia then please contact me and ask any questions you may have about this service and about how I can help you overcome your agoraphobia. 


So being able to see a therapist online is of course essential if you're suffering from agoraphobia and find it very difficult to leave the comfort of your own home or to travel by car to see a therapist. 


The biggest problem with agoraphobia is that we become trapped, we become imprisoned in our home or in a very restricted "safe zone" and it's very anxiety producing to try and leave that zone. So that's why I have developed an online Skype-based program to help people overcome the anxiety and panic attacks associated with the agoraphobia. 


The main approach that I have developed and specialize in and that I find works best for agoraphobia is called Mindfulness Therapy and specifically mindfulness-based exposure therapy. 


So exposure therapy is an essential part of your recovery process. You need to challenge yourself to move outside of your comfort comfort zone. That's very important. You must not fall into the habit of avoidance. That really is a problem for agoraphobia, this tendency to avoid anxiety-producing situations. When you fall into that trap of avoidance you end up reinforcing the anxiety. 


So we need to develop a very strategic approach to extending our range and stop the avoidance behaviors. 


The biggest problem for most people is they simply become hypnotized by those anxiety reactions; they become seduced by them and fall into that anxiety reaction. It's a blind and unconscious process that's going on here and that's what we have to change, and mindfulness is really good at doing that because it brings conscious awareness to the habits, to the thought habits and the emotional reactions that cause that anxiety. 


So that's a little bit of the theory of mindfulness therapy and how it works for neutralizing anxiety. So if you would like to learn more, please contact me and we can schedule a session and you can see for yourself just how effective this approach is. 


Online Psychotherapy for help recovering from agoraphobia

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY


Online Psychotherapy for agoraphobia



Online Psychotherapy for help recovering from agoraphobia

Online Psychotherapy for help recovering from agoraphobia