Online Counseling for help with agoraphobia

Online Counseling for help with 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.

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

Online Counseling for overcoming agoraphobia - See an Online Therapist for the treatment of Agoraphobia

Online Mindfulness Psychotherapy for Stopping Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without relying on medications.

Talk to a Therapist Online using Skype for highly effective online help and mindfulness-based therapy for overcoming Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Social Anxiety.

If you want to recover completely from agoraphobia you must treat the underlying conditioned anxiety reactions. 

Anti-anxiety medications don’t address 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 CBT to overcome 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 extremely effective and most people see measurable decrease in anxiety symptoms 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 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 find out more about this online psychotherapy service and arrange for a therapy session via Skype with me. Inquiries welcome!

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

"I can’t write enough how grateful I am that I had a chance to learn how to take control of my overwhelming OCD symptoms under the guidance of Peter."

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

Agoraphobia Counseling Online by Skype

Online help from home for overcoming your agoraphobia

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 provide online therapy via Skype for anxiety and depression and particularly for the treatment of agoraphobia. So if you're looking for agoraphobia therapy online I invite you to go to my website. Read more about this online therapy service that I offer hand please contact me if you would like to schedule some Skype Therapy sessions with me to help you overcome your agoraphobia. 

So if you are suffering from agoraphobia it is essential that you are able to find an online therapist to work with simply because it's so difficult for you to leave home. And there are a number of services now offering online psychotherapy for the treatment of agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders too. 

Whether you choose me or someone else, the important thing is that you find a therapist to work with who uses Skype or similar video platform because it's very important that you can see each other. That will improve the quality of communication and the quality of the therapy that you are getting. 

The other thing is make sure that you feel completely comfortable with the therapist that you select. Make sure that they answer your questions about the therapist's approach and trust your own judgment, your own intuition. That is by far the best guide, much more so than how many letters the therapist has after his name. What's important is that you feel comfortable with the therapist and you like the approach that they are offering. 

So in the style of agoraphobia therapy that I offer is based on the application of mindfulness. Mindfulness Therapy is a very effective way of working with anxiety disorders like agoraphobia. It also helps you manage panic attacks and any other aspect of anxiety that's causing you distress and that are limiting the quality of your life. 

So in Mindfulness Therapy the primary approach that we take is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, and that is where you will basically design a series of challenges with my help so that you can begin to train yourself out of the anxiety habits. 

So in mindfulness training we teach that suffering like anxiety and depression is basically an emotional habit. It is the result of conditioning. This habit formation gets started, often in childhood, and it never gets resolved. And this anxiety shows up in different forms different types of anxiety such as agoraphobia or social anxiety or a phobia or panic attacks or driving anxiety, etc. 

 So the first stage is to set up a schedule of exposure challenges. And then what is most important is to train using mindfulness for each challenge that you schedule. Exposure therapy by itself is not sufficient. You must train with the anxiety beforehand. 

 So we do this by a technique called Rehearsal Meditation, whereby you imagine doing that challenge in order to find the anxiety and then you start working with that anxiety using mindfulness and compassion. 

 You look at the structure of the anxiety, you find out how it works. You look at the patterns of reactive thoughts that feed that anxiety and you begin to change your relationship to the anxiety formation. You start to break free from its influence by becoming more and more aware of it, more conscious of the thoughts and the emotion. The basic rule here is that the more you see, the less fear you will experience. That may seem counter-intuitive but it's actually the case. Fear is based on what you don't see much more than what you do see.

So we do this in great detail with the challenge in our imagination before we do the challenge. That's why it's called a Rehearsal Meditation. When you can visualize doing that challenge, whatever it might be, perhaps just walking around the block or driving in the car, if you can do that, whatever it might be, when you feel that you can do that with the complete absence of anxiety then you do the live challenge, the exposure challenge, and your training that you did in the Rehearsal Meditation will take effect and will effectively inhibit any anxiety reactions during the challenge. 

And when you take this approach you'll start to see dramatic improvements in a very short time. Typically, most of my clients see quite dramatic changes after three to four weeks of doing this kind of progressive exposure challenge using mindfulness. 

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

Agoraphobia Counseling Online over Skype

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I provide online therapy via Skype for the treatment of anxiety disorders, including agoraphobia. 

So if you're interested in online psychotherapy for agoraphobia, then I invite you to learn more by visiting my website and then simply e-mail me. Feel free to ask any questions you may have about online therapy and this approach that I specialize in for treating agoraphobia, without the use of medications. I'm happy to answer any questions you have, and if you feel comfortable with this approach, then we can schedule a Skype therapy session and you can evaluate for yourself if this is the right approach for you. It certainly is for the majority of people that I've worked with over the last 10 or so years. 

I see a lot of people who suffer from agoraphobia, not surprisingly, since it's very difficult to leave the security of home when you're suffering from agoraphobia. 

So the approach that I have developed over the years is called mindfulness therapy and specifically mindfulness-based exposure therapy. So you know already that you need to face your anxiety, you need some form of exposure therapy plan and protocol; that's going to be an essential part of your recovery process. But it's how you go about that that makes all the difference. 

So I do not advocate straightforward exposure therapy in its usual form, which simply means exposing yourself incrementally to your challenges until you develop more comfort with them through familiarization. I think that is a rather ineffective and crude approach to exposure therapy. 

It Is much, much more effective when you do a lot of detailed preparation and training before you do each of your exposure challenges, whatever that might be. 

So many people that I've worked with suffering from agoraphobia feel very uncomfortable in public places where there are lots of other people around. The real underlying fear for most people with agoraphobia is the sense of being out of your comfort zone and worrying about having a panic attack in that environment and not feeling that you have an escape route. You feel trapped in that environment. That's very common. 

There are many different types of agoraphobia. A lot of people just feel very uncomfortable driving, for example. They can leave their house, but they just cannot drive on a busy road. That's a different quality of agoraphobia. But it's basically any situation where you feel trapped. 

So in the mindfulness-based exposure therapy approach we identify all of our challenges, all of our triggers. That's the first step. It's very good to write those down, make a list of your triggers. And then we set up a strategy of exposure challenges each day. And we make sure that we stick to that strategy. 

We do not skip the practical challenges because avoidance, of course, is one of the big problems with agoraphobia, and the more that you avoid anxiety-producing situations, the more you're likely to reinforce that anxiety. I also don't recommend medications, because, really, medications are simply another form of avoidance. They're not really equipping you with new ways of working with your anxiety that resolve that anxiety; it is just covering up the symptoms. And that's not really an effective treatment. 

The only effective treatment is to strategically and intelligently design an exposure protocol that you follow through, religiously. So how do we go about doing this in the Mindfulness-based exposure approach? 

Well, we choose one of those challenges that we're going to work on. It doesn't matter how big or small it is, something that you feel is a good challenge, not too stressful, but sufficient that it creates anxiety. 

We then prepare for that challenge by learning how to apply mindfulness to work with that anxiety. 

This approach is very effective and most people see very big changes within quite a short period of time. This is quite different than the classical talk therapy or counseling. It's actually working at the deep process level that creates your anxiety. It works at the psychological level directly. That's the important thing. 

So please contact me if you are struggling with agoraphobia and you are committed to overcoming your agoraphobia. 

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

The best agoraphobia treatment without medications - Online Mindfulness-based Counseling

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I'm a professional psychotherapist and I offer mindfulness based online therapy for agoraphobic anxiety and panic attacks. 

The mindfulness approach is extremely effective and during online therapy sessions I will teach you how to work with your agoraphobic anxiety using the techniques of mindfulness to help you prevent your becoming overwhelmed by the anxiety reactions. We do this by actually meditating on our anxiety before we do any challenges. 

Meditating helps to change the relationship that you have with your anxiety and this is absolutely essential, because the biggest problem that I encounter is that people suffering from anxiety tend to become identified with their emotions. They tend to become consumed by their emotions. They effectively lose their identity and become the emotions and this creates a very reactive place that is very difficult to escape from. 

So with mindfulness training you can change this pattern and learn to develop a relationship with your anxiety whereby you do not become identified with it where you can see the anxiety as an observer. This is essential for change. Once you begin to do this the rate of recovery from agoraphobic anxiety and panic attacks increases dramatically, and most people will see quite substantial changes after only four or five sessions with me once they start applying the mindfulness-based techniques. 

So the basic idea is that you will schedule sessions with me and we will work on setting up a series of challenges that you can manage and then you prepare for these challenges using mindfulness meditation. You do that challenge and you meditate on any anxiety that arose during that challenge. 

And each time we learn a little more about how to change our relationship to our anxiety so that we basically break free from the habit of identification and becoming overwhelmed by it. And this approach is, from my experience, the most effective there is for overcoming agoraphobic anxiety. So if you'd like to get started with me simply go to my website and then email me to schedule a Skype therapy session with me. 

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY

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