Online Therapy for Agoraphobia San Diego

Online Therapy for Agoraphobia San Diego, California

Online Mindfulness Therapy for agoraphobia via Skype for California, including: 

Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Fresno, Sacremento, Long Beach, Oakland, Bay Area, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara

Online Therapy via Skype is available for the USA, Canada, UK & Western Europe.

Go to my main website to learn more and to schedule a Skype Therapy session: Online Therapy for agoraphobia

If you are suffering from agoraphobia and find it difficult to leave home, then you should consider the online therapy option. This works extremely well as long as you use a video platform like Skype or Zoom so that you can see each other.

You also need to choose the right approach. I recommend Online Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy because it it is practical and focuses on helping you overcome your anxiety directly.

Online Therapist to treat Agoraphobia via Skype

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

Speak with a Therapist Online through Skype for effective online help and therapy for overcoming Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Social Anxiety.

If you want to recover fully from agoraphobia you must treat the underlying habitual anxiety reactions. 

Prescription medications don’t do this. Medications only provide a temporary relief from anxiety symptoms, but do very little 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 extremely effective and most of my clients see significant improvements after 3-4 Skype sessions.

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 effective 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 psychotherapy service and organize a therapy session via Skype with me. Inquiries welcome!

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

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. 

Online Psychotherapist for help with Agoraphobia via Skype

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Online Help for Agoraphobia through 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'm a professional psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy, and I provide online help for agoraphobia. Many people suffering from agoraphobia find it very difficult to leave home or leave a secure area where they feel comfortable and so the online therapy option is very convenient and sometimes essential. 

So I've been offering online help for people suffering from agoraphobia for about ten years now and it works extremely well. The online therapy sessions are organized via Skype and all you need is an internet connection and we can set up a Skype Therapy session to help you learn how to manage the anxiety and panic attacks associated with your agoraphobia. 

During sessions I will teach you a practical mindfulness-based methods of working with agoraphobia that have being well tested and have proved very effective over the last ten years or so that I've been offering this service. 

The most important thing that you will learn is how to change the way that you relate to your emotions and to your thoughts. 

The biggest problem for most people is that as soon as anxiety or fear gets triggered that they become completely overwhelmed by that emotional reaction, and that identification with emotion leads to the proliferation of reactive thinking which then feeds the underlying fear and anxiety. So this produces a perfect storm, essentially, a feedback mechanism that reinforces the fear and prevents it healing and resolving, and this is what we attempt to change during mindfulness therapy sessions for agoraphobia. 

If this interests you then please go to my website and learn more about this online therapy service and then contact me and we can schedule a therapy session over Skype to help you overcome your agoraphobia. 

So if you're looking for online help for agoraphobia please go to my website and EMAIL ME.

Agoraphobia Help Online

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

Agoraphobia Help from Home - Online Mindfulness Therapy

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional psychotherapist and I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy, which I teach online over Skype. 

I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy for anxiety disorders but I also treat depression and PTSD and many other emotional conditions that respond well to Mindfulness Therapy. 

In particular, I offer online therapy for people suffering from agoraphobia. So if you're interested in online therapy for your agoraphobia from home then please email me and ask any questions you may have about this service and I'll be happy to explain to you how I can help you overcome your agoraphobia using Mindfulness Therapy. 

This approach is very effective indeed, especially for anxiety disorders. Basically what we will do during these sessions is we will learn how to work with your anxiety in a very practical and very focused and very strategic way. That's what makes the difference. 

So this begins by establishing a routine of exposure challenges. So these are challenges that you can determine for yourself that you want to use to train yourself out of the anxiety habit, if you like. You want to find a whole range of challenges that you can go through one by one and develop more and more confidence and learn how to defuse that anxiety. So that might be as simple as walking to the end of your driveway. Or it could be going into a mall or some challenge like that. 

Now the important thing with exposure challenges like this is that you prepare for them well, that you prepare ahead of time. It is not sufficient to just throw yourself into the challenge and hope that you will survive and overcome your anxiety. The chances are you will simply re-traumatize yourself and make that anxiety worse. 

But if you train for it well, then the exposure challenges can become very effective indeed. So I call this mindfulness-based exposure therapy. 

So if you are going to the mall for example, you would sit down and meditate on that scenario. You would play it through in the mind like a movie, watching yourself going to the mall, with all of the particular triggers that are there, and then you look for any anxiety that gets triggered as you play through this scene. 

When you find the anxiety you then consciously build a mindfulness-based relationship with that anxiety. And this is based on compassion and friendliness, and really, learning how to comfort that anxiety as if it was like a small child that's coming to you for comfort after being scared by something. 

So we need to learn to approach our emotions in the same way. We need to see them as being visitors, if you like, that get triggered in the mind that really need our help to help them resolve their anxiety. 

Technically speaking, you are not anxious; it's the emotion itself that is anxious. so we learn to see it this way. We built this mindfulness-based relationship with the emotion and we help it basically heal so it can overcome its own anxiety. 

Then we can rehearse them further with those triggers and we can imagine being in the mall and not feel any anxiety, because the anxiety has resolved itself. We have given it what it needs to resolve itself by being a friend to the anxiety, if that makes any sense. 

So we do this in a very detailed strategic way before we do the challenge. Then we do the challenge and then after the challenge we might do another meditation where we replay the scene again, which will now be fresh and we'll be even more contextualized, and we look for any anxiety that got triggered and we work with that in the same way. 

So in this way we we progressively train the anxiety to resolve itself over and over again until basically it doesn't arise. So this is what we mean by a strategic approach. And if you do this in this kind of strategic way you will see results in a very short time. And most people see quite significant improvements after the first three to four sessions of this mindfulness-based exposure therapy. 

So if you would like to learn more, please go to my website and then contact me by email to schedule a Skype therapy session in which I will go through this process in great detail and help you learn how to build an exposure challenge routine and how to meditate on your anxiety yourself so that you can do this via self between sessions. So if you would like to learn more please email me. 

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

Online Mindfulness Therapy California

Online Mindfulness Therapy for agoraphobia via Skype for California, including: 

Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Fresno, Sacremento, Long Beach, Oakland, Bay Area, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara

Online Therapy via Skype is available for the USA, Canada, UK & Western Europe.

Go to my main website to learn more and to schedule a Skype Therapy session: Online Therapy for agoraphobia