Find online counseling for agoraphobia

Find online counseling for agoraphobia

Overcome agoraphobia through Online Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy via Skype.

I will guide you through the process and you will see significant improvements after each therapy session as you start applying the techniques that I will be teaching you.

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

Get online counseling for agoraphobia

Online Mindfulness Therapist for help Overcoming Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without using medications.

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

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

Prescription medications don’t address this. Medications only provide a temporary relief from 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 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 with me.

Online therapy is just as effective as in-person therapy as long as you use Skype, FaceTime or Zoom so that you can see each other. Being able to see each other is essential for effective communication and good 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.

Email me to learn more about this online therapy service and organize a therapy session via Skype with me. Inquiries welcome!

Everyone that I have worked with really enjoys the mindfulness approach that I teach for healing emotional suffering…

"The insights that I have gained in the first two sessions of online counseling are proving invaluable. Now I can see a way through my anxiety for the first time. Mindfulness Therapy is amazing."

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START ONLINE COUNSELING  WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA

Online Counseling for Agoraphobia - Online Therapy through Skype

Welcome. My name is Peter strong and I'm a professional psychotherapist and I offer online help for agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders that may be affecting the quality of your life. I offer online therapy, which is of course very convenient if you're suffering from agoraphobia. 

The style of therapy that I offer is called mindfulness therapy and this is a very practical hands-on approach that gives you tools that you can use between therapy sessions to progressively overcome your agoraphobia. 

So, mindfulness therapy consists of a combination of two important aspects. The first is designing a series of progressive challenges. That's very important, of course, that you try to face your fears and not simply give into them. But you need to do this in a progressive way starting simple and then progressing to more difficult challenges. 

The other part of this approach is to do training before you do any kind of exposure challenge. You need to prepare yourself so that if anxiety gets triggered, that you will have trained such that that that anxiety will dissipate or resolve itself on the spot in the presence of the particular triggers that trigger the fear, anxiety or panic attacks. So we train beforehand. 

We do this by developing a very different quality of relationship to our anxiety and this is the hallmark of mindfulness therapy. The real problem is not so much the anxiety itself but our reactions to that anxiety. We tend to develop patterns of fear-based reactions to our anxiety and other emotions that tend to feed that underlying anxiety and stop it resolving itself. 

So, during the preparation step before a challenge you actually will be learning how to meditate on your anxiety. So you will play through the scene of perhaps walking around the block or whatever challenge you decide to start with. You look for the anxiety that gets triggered in your mind and then you change the way that you relate to that anxiety. And the most important thing is not to become identified with the anxiety; to see the anxiety as if it was a visitor or simply an object in the mind. Then we can learn to develop balance in relationship to that object. So you can sit with your anxiety without becoming anxious. That's the most important first step in the training before you do any challenges. 

The second step is to respond to that anxiety with a quality of friendliness and compassion. This also is a vital part of the mindfulness approach. Mindfulness is this combination of consciousness and friendliness. 

Friendliness is immensely powerful in overcoming fear. So you could think that of the fear emotion itself as being like a child. It feels isolated. It's scared. And what does it need? The most important thing it needs is to feel a connection with its parent. The parent is not afraid. During meditation on our anxiety we establish this kind of internal parent which we call our true self. It is not afraid it is able to establish a relationship with the anxiety that is not based on fear based on compassion. This is exactly what the fear needs in order to resolve itself. And that is what we call the True Self-Little Self Alliance. 

So when people are stuck in patterns of anxiety it's because that alliance is missing within. So building that is essential. And there are many other things that we do during the training before each challenge session, but that's a taste of Mindfulness Therapy. It is very, very effective in deed, and most people see significant improvements after three or four weeks of practicing the techniques that I will teach you. So, if you're interested in online help for your anxiety and your agoraphobia do please send me an email and let's schedule a therapy session via Skype. Thank you.

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

How to overcome agoraphobia without medication - Online Counseling for overcoming agoraphobia

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I'm a professional mindfulness therapist specializing in mindfulness therapy which I offer online via Skype for the treatment of anxiety and depression, and also for agoraphobia. So if you'd like to learn how to overcome agoraphobia without medication do please go to my website and read my pages on the treatment of agoraphobia using mindfulness therapy. 

It is important to understand that medications don't actually treat agoraphobia. They treat the symptoms of anxiety and they simply mask those symptoms. They reduce them, but only in a temporary manner. The underlying cause of your anxiety, your panic attacks, your agoraphobia, remains untouched by medications. 

If you want to really overcome agoraphobia you have to change those underlying psychological patterns, those emotional habits, that create the anxiety in the first place. So this is essential and this is what we focus on during these online mindfulness therapy sessions for agoraphobia. 

You don't need medication, you need instead to develop a very positive and conscious relationship with your anxiety. When you do this you actually teach the anxiety how to heal itself by being present with it without becoming reactive. The best analogy here is a parent and child. So the child is afraid. What does it need? What it really needs is to be in contact with its parent, who is not afraid. The fearlessness of the parent is absorbed by the child and that allows the child to release his or her fear. So this connection between child and parent is extremely important for healing the underlying cause of the child's fear. 

The same goes for our anxiety, our emotions. They tend to become isolated in the mind, they become cut off from our true self, the bigger aspect of who we really are When they are isolated they cannot heal and then they become reactive and create the symptoms of anxiety and panic attacks that you are familiar with. 

When we build an internal relationship between your true self and your emotions, that relationship allows those emotions to start to change and heal. And when that relationship is strong and based on consciousness and friendliness, the two key features of mindfulness, then that healing process becomes very strong and very fast. 

So this approach of bringing mindfulness to the emotional reactions that underlie our agoraphobia is very effective in deed and produces results in very few sessions compared to conventional talk therapy, and certainly better than medications. 

So if you'd like to learn how to overcome agoraphobia without medication and using the methods of mindfulness therapy that I teach then please email me and let’s schedule an online therapy session.

Contact me to schedule a Skype therapy session with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in online mindfulness therapy for anxiety and depression and for online help with agoraphobia.

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

Teletherapy for Agoraphobia over Skype

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I provide online therapy by Skype for the treatment of anxiety disorders, including agoraphobia. So if you're looking for teletherapy for agoraphobia, then I invite you to go to my website and learn more about the online therapy service that I offer. 

All my sessions are done via Skype. That is quite important. You must be able to see each other in order to have a successful psychotherapy experience. Being able to see each other means that the sessions will be much more effective in helping you learn how to work with your anxiety. So that's the primary focus of these teletherapy sessions. I will teach you very practical mindfulness-based methods that I have developed and found to be very effective for overcoming anxiety and panic attacks and basically allowing you to recover from the very debilitating effects of agoraphobia. 

The primary method that I will teach you during the online sessions is called mindfulness-based exposure therapy. And this is where we design a series of exposures that might be quite simple to begin with and then progressively more difficult that you then practice yourself at home between sessions. 

The mindfulness part of this practice is preparing before you do each challenge. So if it's, for example, walking to a local shop or going into a mall or even driving your car for a short period, then you basically, will run through that challenge in your imagination, you'll visualize doing that challenge and specifically look for any anxiety reactions that may occur. When you find those anxiety reactions you then start to work with them using the methods of Mindfulness Therapy, which I will teach you during these sessions. 

But primarily the idea here is that you train yourself to heal those anxiety reactions before you do the exposure challenge. That's the important principle here. You have to train with that anxiety to neutralize it before you do the challenge. When you've done that, when you've neutralized that anxiety reaction so you can imagine doing that challenge without feeling any anxiety, then when you do the exposure challenge that will reinforce this new perception, this new way of processing the particular triggers that are associated with that challenge. 

So, for example, one person that I worked with for a few months was not able to leave the house at all. She could not leave the front door, the thought of that was completely overwhelming. The anxiety was totally preventing her stepping outside the front door. 

So the mindfulness-based exposure therapy is about having her imagine her stepping out side the front door, whether it's one or two feet, it doesn't matter. But we designed that challenge. We then imagine doing it. We look for that anxiety and then we start to develop a mindful relationship with that anxiety that is based on compassion and is based on a very strong non-reactive relationship with the emotion itself. 

So the real problem is that when anxiety gets triggered it, it tends to proliferate. It triggers more anxiety through reactive thoughts and that simply feeds the anxiety and it stops it from healing. But when you can sit with that anxiety and not react, then you're not feeding that anxiety and it begins to diminish in intensity. The more that you can sit with it without reacting the less intense it beccomes. 

And when you've done this in a very focused way, by actually deliberately bringing your mindful attention to that anxiety, that rate of neutralizing the anxiety greatly increases. So this is what we do before we do the challenge. We work with the anxiety, learning to be with it without reacting and learning to relate to that anxiety with compassion. That is, how can you help that anxiety feel more comfortable? You learn how to comfort the emotion in the same way that you might comfort a child, for example, that was afraid. How would you do that? You would establish a conscious, non-reactive relationship with the child. This is what we need to do internally. We need to establish this quality of non-reactive, compassionate relationship with our anxiety. 

That is what will allow that anxiety to heal much more than any other methods and certainly more than trying to struggle through the anxiety. That approach tends to reinforce the anxiety yet again because it's providing evidence of how difficult it is to step outside the front door. 

We want to be able to imagine stepping outside the front door with no anxiety at all. Then once you do that, it now establishes a new experience that becomes learned and well established in the mind and in the brain as a new learned pathway, that stepping outside the front door is no longer a source of anxiety. 

And then you would move on to the next challenge, which might be walking to the street. And so on. So we work in is very focused and strategic way. This is what is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy and it's very, very effective. It's much more effective than traditional exposure therapy. It's completely different than talk therapy in the conventional sense. Trying to understand your anxiety and trying to convince yourself that you don't need to experience the anxiety, that it's irrational. That kind of approach, in my experience, is practically totally ineffective. 

What does work is when you gain the actual experience. First in the mind through imaginational exposure, if you like, and then in the actual exposure, afterwards. That experience is what produces the changes. 

So if you'd like to learn more about teletherapy for agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders using Skype, then do please look at my website and contact me if you have any questions. 

We can schedule a Skype therapy session and you can see for yourself how this works. Most people see quite substantial improvements after the first two or three sessions once you start learning and applying the mindfulness approach that I that I will teach you. It's very, very effective. So please contact me if you would like to learn how to overcome your anxiety and apply this kind of methodology. Thank you. 

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