Online Exposure Therapy for agoraphobia
Online Exposure Therapy for agoraphobia via Skype
Overcome agoraphobia through Online Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy via Skype.
You will learn how to work with your anxiety in a way that neutralizes your anxiety and prevents you from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety.
Succesful therapy for overcoming agoraphobia involves learning how to work with reactive thoughts (CBT) and learning how to work with your emotions and the fear that feeds reactive thoughts (Mindfulness Therapy).
I will guide you through the process and you will see significant improvements after each therapy session.
Most people see significant improvements after 3-4 sessions.
Contact me to learn more about Online Mindfulness Therapy for agoraphobia and to schedule Skype Therapy sessions with me.
Online Exposure Therapy for agoraphobia
Online Therapy for agoraphobia
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Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia
Online Exposure Therapy for agoraphobia
Main LinkedIn article: Online Therapy for Agoraphobia
Speak to a therapist online for help overcoming agoraphobia
Find Online Exposure Therapy for agoraphobia
Online Mindfulness Therapy for Controlling Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without using antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.
Talk to a Therapist Online via Skype for effective online help and therapy for overcoming Chronic Agoraphobia, Chronic 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 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 highly effective and most people 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 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.
Email me to learn more about this online psychotherapy service and book a Skype therapy session with me. Inquiries welcome!
Everyone that I have worked with really likes the mindfulness approach that I teach for healing emotional suffering…
"I had been stuck in another bout of intense generalized anxiety for several months when I found Peter. His website states that people experience significant results after 3-4 sessions. Well, after just 2 sessions I was 80% back to normal."
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
Online Therapy for Agoraphobia without using medication
Find Online Agoraphobia Therapy
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. Thank you.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
Agoraphobia Therapy Online by Skype
Get online therapy for agoraphobia
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.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
Teletherapy for Agoraphobia through Skype
Online Therapy for treating agoraphobia
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.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY
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Online Exposure Therapy for agoraphobia