Online therapy for agoraphobia Santa Barbara, CA
Online therapy for agoraphobia Santa Barbara, 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 for agoraphobia California
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Online Therapy for agoraphobia
Online Therapist to treat Agoraphobia via Skype
Online Mindfulness Therapist for Controlling Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without using antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.
See a Psychotherapist Online via Skype for effective online help and mindfulness therapy for overcoming Chronic Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Social Anxiety.
If you want to recover effectively from agoraphobia you must treat the underlying habitual anxiety reactions.
Medications don’t do this. Medications only treat anxiety symptoms, but do nothing 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 highly effective and most of my clients see significant improvements after 3-4 Skype sessions with me.
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 good communication and effective psychotherapy.
Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for Agoraphobia
Avoidance is a major problem in agoraphobia, so any effective approach must include some form of Exposure Therapy. But, in order for Exposure Therapy to be effective, you must use a very focused approach to neutralize your habitual anxiety reactions BEFORE you do an exposure challenge, otherwise you risk reinforcing your anxiety instead of diminishing it.
During Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy we imagine performing each exposure challenge before doing it and we work with any anxiety reactions that emerge and neutralize the anxiety through the techniques of Mindfulness Therapy, which include forming a positive and compassionate relationship with your anxiety, treating it with the same quality of love that you would give to a child who was afraid. Establishing this internal relationship with your fear is essential for healing anxiety and it is always the absence of such a relationship that feeds anxiety.
Working with imagery
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 find out more about this online psychotherapy service and book a Skype session with me. Inquiries welcome!
Everyone that I have worked with really benefits from the mindfulness approach that I teach for healing emotional suffering…
"I really don’t want to continue taking medications to treat my anxiety. I hate the side-effects. I feel that this online counseling has given me the tools I needed to stop my panic attacks. Mindfulness therapy has been very effective treatment for me – and enjoyable too!"
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
Online therapy for agoraphobia California
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Online therapy for agoraphobia
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Online Psychotherapy by Skype for agoraphobia with panic disorder
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy. This is a system of psychotherapy that works very well by Skype and it's extremely effective for the treatment of agoraphobia. People suffering from agoraphobia find it very important to work online because it's so difficult to leave the comfort of your home or secure place. This is the biggest feature of agoraphobia, this fear of having a panic attack if you leave a secure comfort zone, and it can become progressively worse over time. Many people I've worked with have had agoraphobia for sometimes as much as 10 years.
Agoraphobia is very debilitating and limits just about every aspect of a person's life. So it's very important to seek treatment. Mindfulness Therapy is a very good way of working with anxiety in general. It helps you change the underlying patterns of habitual conditioned reactions that feed and sustain your anxiety and panic attacks.
Panic attacks are simply a very acute form of anxiety. It's like a storm, an anxiety storm.
The best strategy, the best approach, to overcoming agoraphobia is a very systematic system of exposure therapy. But not classical exposure therapy, which is based on the idea of becoming familiar and habituated through repeated exposure to the stressful situation or area or other triggers. That can work but often it's very inefficient because it simply re-traumatizes you, it simply feeds that anxiety.
So what I have developed is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy. And this is a different approach. It certainly will involve exposure challenges in a systematic approach where you will set yourself goals each day and carry those out. But the key ingredient with mindfulness-based exposure therapy is the preparation and training before and after each challenge. That is what is vital and I feel is often missing in traditional, conventional exposure therapy.
So what do we do in mindfulness-based exposure therapy for agoraphobia? Well you set up a series of challenges. You then do what we call a rehearsal meditation before you do your first challenge. This is where you will play through that challenge in your imagination and specifically look for those triggers and the anxiety reactions that get triggered.
When you find the anxiety you then work with that and train with that anxiety using mindfulness. You build a relationship with that anxiety that's based on openness and friendliness. These are the two vital requirements for healing anxiety.
Very often people fall into reactive patterns of avoidance and self-criticism or hatred towards that anxiety, and that will not help the healing process. In fact, avoidance and aversion are the two main factors that feed the underlying fear.
So we build a different kind of relationship based on consciousness and compassion for the emotion itself. We learn to see the emotion as being an object in our awareness. We start to break the habit of reactive identification, where we become completely consumed by that anxiety, where we take on the identity of our emotions. Instead we learn to develop a conscious observing relationship where we observe our emotions but we don't become them. This process is very, very important because if you identify with your anxiety, then you end up feeding it. It is another reactive process like avoidance and aversion that simply feeds the fire of anxiety.
So if you would like to get started with me and you would like to do online psychotherapy for your own agoraphobia and panic attacks and you'd like to schedule some Skype therapy sessions and please go to my website and send me an email.
This approach, the mindfulness-based exposure therapy approach is very efficient and typically people see progress, tremendous progress, within the first three to four sessions. It's quite different than conventional talk therapy. It's much more practical. And of course it gives you a set of tools that you can apply yourself between the session, because that's where the real change happens as you gain more and more experience of applying mindfulness with your exposure challenges. So if you would like to get started with me please contact.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME 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 Therapy for Agoraphobia & Social Anxiety Disorder without medication
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
Online Therapist for Agoraphobia - Mindfulness Therapy through 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 FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY
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 for agoraphobia California
Blog site:
Online therapy for agoraphobia
Main site:
Online Mindfulness Therapy for agoraphobia
Online therapy for agoraphobia Santa Barbara, CA