Online therapist for overcoming agoraphobia

Agoraphobia Therapy Online over Skype for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I'm a professional psychotherapist specializing in online therapy. I offer online therapy for agoraphobia.

So, agoraphobia online therapy is very effective for people who really can't get out of the house to work with a therapist in their local area.

So, during these sessions that I offer via Skype, I focus on teaching you very effective mindfulness-based methods of working with your anxiety and panic attacks.

The real important thing to understand here is that Agoraphobia is really a psychological habit. I prefer to call it a habit rather than a disorder because when you start labeling these psychological states as disorders that tends to reinforce your sense of helplessness as a victim, and we don't want to do that.

The actual mechanism that generates the anxiety and panic attacks of agoraphobia is a habit and habits can be changed. So during online agoraphobia therapy sessions I will guide you in how to work with the underlying emotions and thought patterns that supports that anxiety.

We do this in a surprising way. We actually learn to make friends with our fear. This is very, very important. You can't change the belief when it has a very strong emotional charge based on fear. No amount of rational arguments or persuasion that you don't need to feel this way is going to change that anxiety. You have to learn to work with the anxiety directly. And that's what you do during mindfulness therapy. We actually learn to meditate on your own fear as you imagine walking or traveling out of your safe zone.

So, we set up a series of challenges, exposures, if you like, where you choose to do a particularly difficult exercise but one that you can manage. But then we prepare for this by playing it through in the mind it might be walking around the block or just simply leaving the house for a few minutes, whatever it might be. We design a challenge and then we prepare for it by meditating on it. We play it through in the mind and then we look for the fear reactions and we look for the thought reactions that feed that fear and then we develop a mindfulness-based relationship with these emotions and thoughts, and that relationship is based on friendliness.

You learn, essentially, to sit with your emotions and thoughts without becoming overwhelmed by them, without losing your balance. This is central. This is a central part of mindfulness training, that you can be with your thoughts and emotions but not be overwhelmed by them. When you can do this, then you start to break free from the reactive habits that feed our anxiety and fear.

So, we learn to sit with our emotions without becoming reactive and without identifying with those emotions. We learn to develop this other side of our identity, which we call the True Self, the Observer Mind, that which can be conscious of thoughts and emotions but is not identified with thoughts or emotions.

We then work with those emotions and begin to treat them very much as you might treat a child that's afraid. we learn to comfort the emotion itself, the fear. you build a strong relationship with it, rather like a parent to a child. And in this way the fear reaction, that we might call the Little Self is able to let go of its fear by proximity to your True Self which is fearless nature.

So, in this way we begin to build resolution pathways in the brain. You learn, basically, how to help the emotions resolve themselves, so that if they get triggered they simply resolve instantly, on the spot, through the training that you've done before you do the challenge And then you go out and walk around the block or whatever and put this training into action.

So, we repeat this process over and over again. Meditation before challenge and we do the challenge and we may come back and meditate some more and then we repeat the challenge until we no longer feel any fear in doing that challenge. Then we move on to a harder challenge. And in this way we gain more and more confidence in the process.

So, when you are able to neutralize these emotional reactions then the beliefs begin to change quite automatically. We don't need to try and change our beliefs. We simply need to change the emotional content that fuels those beliefs and makes them so powerful.

Mindfulness-based Online Help for Agoraphobia

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA

How to Overcome Agoraphobia Online Help through Skype

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I'm a professional online psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders such as agoraphobia. If you're interested in learning more about how to overcome agoraphobia and other forms of panic disorder then do please go to my website and learn more about the mindfulness therapy methods, and feel free, at any time, to email me and ask any questions you have and I will explain to you in as much detail as I can how Mindfulness Therapy can help you overcome agoraphobia and other forms of severe anxiety.

The key to the mindfulness therapy approach is to give you practical tools that you can apply yourself between sessions. And the two major approaches that you will be practicing yourself after I teach them to you are a combination of a disciplined approach to exposure challenges, so that you will be setting up a series of manageable challenges to extend beyond your comfort zone. And that should be done on a daily basis and often repeating those challenges many times during the day.

So that's one part, setting up that strategy of regular disciplined challenges. But that alone is not enough. So that's one of the limitations of exposure therapy. Exposure itself is not enough. You can end up re-traumatizing yourself and making the anxiety worse. You must combine that exposure challenge strategy with adequate preparation and processing beforehand. So there's a training element and this is where the mindfulness therapy comes in.

Basically, the way that works is that you rehearse the challenge before you do it. Many times you play it through in the mind, whatever that challenge might be. You imagine yourself walking to the edge of your comfort zone just sufficiently that you can access that anxiety. You then work on the most important thing of all which is changing your relationship to the habitual anxiety reactions that get triggered.

The real problem that prevents anxiety disorders from healing and changing is the way that we get lost in habitual reactivity. We simply identify with that anxiety and we become our fear. What we need to do is change our relationship to the anxiety so that we can see it consciously as it arises, and cultivate balance in relationship to your anxiety. It's like learning to sit on the bank of the river and not fall in. That's the key component of mindfulness therapy that makes it so effective.

Because anxiety arises is not the end of the story. It's only because we become identified with that and anxiety reaction. And then, of course, we tend to feed the anxiety with catastrophic thinking and all kinds of cognitive reactivity, as well.

So by training with the anxiety reactions and thought reactions ahead of time you can basically disarm those habitual reactions before they get triggered. So, that's the training phase that you would do before each of your daily challenges.

Then you do the challenge and during the challenge you basically just put into practice the training that you have perfected before the challenge. This is mostly about staying conscious staying awake, recognizing the reaction that arises, greeting it consciously and also with a degree of friendliness, which is very, very important in all mindfulness work, and not allowing that habitual reaction to take charge.

And then after the completion of a challenge you might meditate again on any fresh anxiety that arose during that challenge. And again help process that reactivity so you can neutralize it.

Then you can repeat the challenge again and each time the training gets stronger and stronger and stronger.

Most people can expect to see quite significant improvements, and that includes a reduction in the intensity of anxiety, within three to four sessions, three to four weeks of practicing in exposure challenges and training.

Eventually the training becomes so effective that the anxiety doesn't arise at all and that is a remarkable experience for people who have often struggled with agoraphobia or other forms of extreme anxiety for many years.

So if you'd like to get started with online therapy for your agoraphobia or panic attacks, send me an email then we can schedule a Skype session and we can get started.

Online Therapist for treating Agoraphobia through Skype

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Online Therapist for Agoraphobia - Mindfulness Therapy by Skype

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional online therapist and I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders including agoraphobia.

So if you're interested in seeing an online therapist for help with your agoraphobia then please do contact me. Go to my website. Learn more about the Online Mindfulness Therapy service that I provide and then reach out to me by email. Feel free to ask any questions you may have about online therapy and the mindfulness approach that I use.

Mindfulness Therapy is very effective indeed, and in this treatment plan that we will work out together you will basically learn how to apply mindfulness to progressively overcome your fear of leaving your home.

So the way we go about this is called mindfulness-based exposure therapy.

You then work using mindfulness to completely change your relationship to that anxiety to prevent it from overwhelming you and to prevent it from proliferating, but also to help it heal and resolve itself so that you can imagine doing the challenge with no anxiety at all before you go on to do the exposure challenge. So that's the secret.

Exposure therapy by itself is not sufficient. You must do some kind of training to neutralize the anxiety before you actually do the live challenge, and that's what makes the difference. So when you take this very strategic approach you will see changes quite quickly. I have worked with people who have suffered from agoraphobia for sometimes many years and they have been able to progressively expand their area of activity in the matter of a few weeks and usually within a month they are able to go to the supermarket, the mall and other places that would have been impossible before.

So anxiety is simply a habit. It's a condition reactive habit and we need to change these habits and the first way you change any habit is by bringing more mindfulness to it, more consciousness. Habits operate automatically, unconsciously. So you must make those habits conscious.

First of all we do that through this process of mindfulness meditation on the emotions and the triggers that form those habits.

We work on changing our relationship to that anxiety so that instead of just becoming overwhelmed by it we change the relationship to becoming the Observer. This is a critical shift. When you can observe your fear without reacting, then you are well on the way to changing that anxiety habit.

But the primary focus really is on developing a compassionate relationship with that fear. So the reactive habit is usually based on hatred, on fear itself. Fear of the fear is the real problem here. When you can change that relationship to one of compassion towards that fear that you're now observing instead of reacting to, then you can begin to help it heal.

You can think of the fear as being like a child. The child is not very capable of solving its own suffering. If it’s afraid it can't heal that fear very effectively by itself. It needs to make contact with the child's father or mother in order to make a connection between the fear in the child and the fearlessness in the parent. So when that bond is strong then the child is able to overcome his or her fear by absorbing the fearlessness of the child's parent.

It's the same process that we will be applying to work with our internal fear. We build a compassionate relationship with our fear, and in a sense, we become the parent to that fear. And when that fear feels the connection to that part of you that is not reacting, that is your observer self, your True Self, then that is what allows the fear to heal. So the fear learns how to heal itself through this internal relationship that you build through meditation on the fear.

This may be novel for you. It's a different way than is typically taught by other therapists, but it is very effective, and I have helped many people over the years now using this mindfulness-based exposure therapy.

If you would like to get started is on a treatment plan using mindfulness-based exposure therapy, then contact me and let's schedule a therapy session via Skype. I do all my online sessions using Skype and it works extremely well.

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

Online therapist for overcoming agoraphobia

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