Online Psychotherapy for treating agoraphobia using exposure therapy

Online Psychotherapy for treating agoraphobia using exposure therapy


Find an online therapist for agoraphobia


Online Mindfulness Therapy for Recovery from Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without using medications.


Speak with a Psychotherapist Online over Skype for effective online help and counseling for Chronic Agoraphobia, Chronic Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder.


If you want to recover fully from agoraphobia you have to treat the underlying conditioned anxiety reactions that cause your agoraphobia. Anti-anxiety medications are not able to do this because medications only treat symptoms and are not able to change the underlying psychological process that causes anxiety. You will need a psychological approach to do that. During Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy (Mindfulness Therapy) we work on neutralizing these habitual reactions directly.


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 necessary for effective 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.


Contact me to discover more about this online counseling service and book an online Skype counseling session with me. Inquiries welcome!


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


Online Psychotherapy 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 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 AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA


How do I overcome my agoraphobia without medication? Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia


Agoraphobia Help Online via Skype


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 ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA


Get Help from an Online Therapist for Agoraphobia


Best Online Help for Agoraphobia - Online Mindfulness Therapy 


Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional therapist and I offer online therapy via Skype for a variety of emotional and psychological problems that don't require medical treatment, such as anxiety and depression and also agoraphobia. 


So I offer online help for agoraphobia via Skype. And this of course is very convenient for many people who are suffering from agoraphobia, because it's so difficult to leave home. 


So during these online therapy sessions I will teach you how to work with your anxiety and panic attacks using the well tested techniques of Mindfulness Therapy. 


Mindfulness therapy is a form of psychotherapy that is very effective and very popular these days because it focuses on helping you learn practical ways of working with your anxiety and reducing your anxiety and eliminating your anxiety. 


Mindfulness teaches you practical methods to do this, and during our online therapy sessions I will teach you how to work with your anxiety using these techniques. 


The basic most important part of getting over agoraphobia is to really take it on as a challenge rather than recoiling from your anxiety with fear. 


So fear of fear of course makes things worse. Trying to avoid fear makes things worse. But facing your fear is what will leads to success. However, facing your fear has to be done in a very strategic and careful and measured way and that's what we explore during Mindfulness Therapy. 


So you will set yourself up a series of challenges that you can explore and develop each day and prepare for these challenges using mindfulness meditation. 


Basically, this is where you meditate on the challenge that you're about to do and look for any anxiety that gets triggered, and then work on healing that anxiety, that very specific anxiety in that specific context, by building a conscious and non-reactive relationship with that anxiety. That's what I mean by facing your fear. It's not some general statement, that will not work. That's of little value. It's about facing the specific fear that is triggered in a specific situation. 


For example, many people with agoraphobia find it very distressing when they try to leave their house and walk down the street to a place where they can no longer see the house. That's very common. There's also often a tremendous fear of having a panic attack away from the security of your home. 


These are examples of triggers, and in the mindfulness therapy approach we use these triggers. We actually will meditate on them and work specifically to help heal that particular anxiety that is triggered in that situation. And then we do the challenge. And then we meditate after doing the challenge to again work with any anxiety that may have arisen. 


So this is a very strategic approach which I call mindfulness-based exposure therapy. And if you do this consistently every day you will absolutely overcome your agoraphobia or any other anxiety disorder. The same approach works very well for OCD, for example. 


If you'd like to learn more about this approach then please send me an email. Ask any questions you have about online mindfulness therapy for agoraphobia and I'll be happy to answer anything that you would like to explore with me. 


When you're ready we can schedule the first Skype Therapy session with you and in that therapy session we will get started straight away on developing some of these mindfulness-based practices and develop a exposure challenge schedule for you to start your recovery process. 


Most people see really quite outstanding results when they take this approach and typically you should expect to see significant improvements after three or four weeks when you practice in this way. 


So if you'd like to learn more need to get started with me to overcome your agoraphobia using mindfulness then please email me. 


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


Online Psychotherapy for agoraphobia




Online Psychotherapy for treating agoraphobia using exposure therapy

Online Psychotherapy for treating agoraphobia using exposure therapy