Online Therapy for Agoraphobia Washington, DC
Online Therapy for Agoraphobia Washington, DC
Online Mindfulness Therapy is available via Skype for Washington, DC for the treatment of anxiety, including agoraphobia and driving anxiety.
Online Therapy for agoraphobia
Online mindfulness therapy for agoraphobia
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Agoraphobia Therapy Online
Online Mindfulness Psychotherapist for Controlling Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without using antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.
Talk to a Psychotherapist Online via Skype for effective online help and mindfulness 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 conditioned anxiety reactions.
Anti-anxiety medications don’t do this. Medications only treat anxiety symptoms, but do very little 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 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 of my clients see significant 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 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 anxiety 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 discover more about this online therapy service and arrange for an online Skype counseling session with me. Inquiries welcome!
Everyone that I have worked with really benefits from the mindfulness approach that I teach for healing emotional suffering…
"Sessions with Peter are enjoyable – he is kind and patient and gentle. I love that the understandings I’m gaining in the sessions not only help me to heal my emotions but also contribute so much to my spiritual path."
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
Agoraphobia Therapy Online using Skype
Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I'm a professional psychotherapist specializing in online therapy. I offer online therapy for agoraphobia.
So, agoraphobia online therapy is very effective for people who really can't get out of the house to work with a therapist in their local area.
So, during these sessions that I offer via Skype, I focus on teaching you very effective mindfulness-based methods of working with your anxiety and panic attacks.
The real important thing to understand here is that Agoraphobia is really a psychological habit. I prefer to call it a habit rather than a disorder because when you start labeling these psychological states as disorders that tends to reinforce your sense of helplessness as a victim, and we don't want to do that.
The actual mechanism that generates the anxiety and panic attacks of agoraphobia is a habit and habits can be changed. So during online agoraphobia therapy sessions I will guide you in how to work with the underlying emotions and thought patterns that supports that anxiety.
We do this in a surprising way. We actually learn to make friends with our fear. This is very, very important. You can't change the belief when it has a very strong emotional charge based on fear. No amount of rational arguments or persuasion that you don't need to feel this way is going to change that anxiety. You have to learn to work with the anxiety directly. And that's what you do during mindfulness therapy. We actually learn to meditate on your own fear as you imagine walking or traveling out of your safe zone.
So, we set up a series of challenges, exposures, if you like, where you choose to do a particularly difficult exercise but one that you can manage. But then we prepare for this by playing it through in the mind it might be walking around the block or just simply leaving the house for a few minutes, whatever it might be. We design a challenge and then we prepare for it by meditating on it. We play it through in the mind and then we look for the fear reactions and we look for the thought reactions that feed that fear and then we develop a mindfulness-based relationship with these emotions and thoughts, and that relationship is based on friendliness.
You learn, essentially, to sit with your emotions and thoughts without becoming overwhelmed by them, without losing your balance. This is central. This is a central part of mindfulness training, that you can be with your thoughts and emotions but not be overwhelmed by them. When you can do this, then you start to break free from the reactive habits that feed our anxiety and fear.
So, we learn to sit with our emotions without becoming reactive and without identifying with those emotions. We learn to develop this other side of our identity, which we call the True Self, the Observer Mind, that which can be conscious of thoughts and emotions but is not identified with thoughts or emotions.
We then work with those emotions and begin to treat them very much as you might treat a child that's afraid. we learn to comfort the emotion itself, the fear. you build a strong relationship with it, rather like a parent to a child. And in this way the fear reaction, that we might call the Little Self is able to let go of its fear by proximity to your True Self which is fearless nature.
So, in this way we begin to build resolution pathways in the brain. You learn, basically, how to help the emotions resolve themselves, so that if they get triggered they simply resolve instantly, on the spot, through the training that you've done before you do the challenge And then you go out and walk around the block or whatever and put this training into action.
So, we repeat this process over and over again. Meditation before challenge and we do the challenge and we may come back and meditate some more and then we repeat the challenge until we no longer feel any fear in doing that challenge. Then we move on to a harder challenge. And in this way we gain more and more confidence in the process.
So, when you are able to neutralize these emotional reactions then the beliefs begin to change quite automatically. We don't need to try and change our beliefs. We simply need to change the emotional content that fuels those beliefs and makes them so powerful.
Get Help from an Online Therapist for Agoraphobia
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
How do I overcome my agoraphobia without medication? Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia
Email me to schedule a Skype therapy session with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in online mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders, including agoraphobia, and depression.
Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional online psychotherapist based in Colorado and I offer online therapy via Skype to help people manage anxiety and depression more effectively using the techniques of mindfulness therapy.
This is a system of psychotherapy that I've been developing over the last ten or more years now that seems to be extremely effective for anxiety and also depression but basically is very effective for helping you heal the underlying anxiety itself directly. And it does this and a variety of ways one of which is by helping you work on those patterns of reactive thinking that feed the anxiety.
So with agoraphobia the typical situation is that we get obsessed with anxiety producing thoughts about what will happen to us if we leave our safety zone for example that's a common kind of thought pattern. You know the fear of having a panic attack in public. The fear of fainting or being sick or anything else like that. These are these are fed by a whole system of internal dialogue that is relentless and feeding that anxiety.
So I'm often asked how can I overcome my agoraphobia without using medication and to do this effectively you have to address this underlying psychological process of reactive thinking that's feeding your anxiety. Medications have their prey's place you know the selective serotonin uptake inhibitors you know these have their place but medications can change that underlying process. All the medication will ever do is reduce symptoms for a while. But that's not really healing the problem is not changing the essential underlying psychological habits that are creating your anxiety and fear.
So this is why it is recommended that you look into process oriented psychotherapy like cognitive behavioral therapy or exposure and prevention type protocols. Because these help you actually deal with that underlying reactive process.
I teach mindfulness based exposure therapy which is really great very effective indeed for agoraphobia specifically. It really helps you develop a strategic approach to overcoming your anxiety. So some of the exposure therapy models are OK up to a point but they don't really tell you how to process the anxiety itself directly. What to do with that emotion? In mindfulness work we work exclusively on reprocessing that emotion, that habit that gets activated.
If you'd like to learn more about the mindfulness approach for healing anxiety including agoraphobia then simply go to my website. Learn More and e-mail me with any questions you may have. Of course it's very convenient to be able to do your psychotherapy sessions online if you're suffering from agoraphobia, and that's one of the reasons why I specialize in Skype Therapy. It's very important that you can see each other. That's why we use Skype. This improves the quality of communication and makes the therapy sessions much more effective.
So during our sessions together I will teach you how to develop a strategy for overcoming your anxiety using mindfulness based exposure therapy. So what does this entail? Well it it entails designing a series of challenges that are manageable but that tend to produce anxiety. So it might be simply leaving the comfort of your own home and walking to a shop or going to a mall or any number of things. You will know what those triggers are that trigger your anxiety and panic attacks.
We design a series of challenges where we basically take one challenge and we prepare for it using mindfulness methods. This basically means playing the challenge through in the mind, visualizing going to the mall for example, and then watching for the anxiety reaction and all of the reactive thoughts that get triggered when that anxiety is triggered in the mind.
When we find those anxiety thoughts and the emotion itself we then start to build a different kind of relationship with it that is based on consciousness, on mindfulness, where we can become the observer of these thoughts and emotions but without becoming identified with them. In this way we break the habit that causes our anxiety.
Let me help you break free from your agoraphobia through Mindfulness Therapy.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
Mindfulness-based Online Help for Agoraphobia
Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional psychotherapist based in Boulder Colorado, but I offer online psychotherapy via Skype for anxiety disorders and for the treatment of depression and also for the treatment of agoraphobia. So many people like the idea of working with an online therapist to overcome agoraphobia. It means that you can have your sessions at home, which is an important consideration if you are afraid of leaving home in the first place.
So online therapy for agoraphobia is a way of getting the help that you need to overcome this anxiety disorder.
So I offer mindfulness based help for agoraphobia, and this is very different than conventional talk therapy and it actually helps you work with your emotions directly yourself. It teaches you how to change that habit of becoming identified with your emotional reactions, with your fear, anxiety or panic attacks.
The biggest problem that most people suffering from anxiety or depression have to deal with this problem of habitual reactive identification. This is where we simply become consumed by the emotion, we become overwhelmed by it, we become a prisoner of that emotional reaction. And this is a habit. This is a psychological habit. We become conditioned to identify with the emotion in that way and it operates unconsciously.
So in mindfulness therapy we work on making it conscious. We actually work on making the anxiety much more conscious so that we can build a conscious relationship with the anxiety and learn to break this habit of reactive identification. So you can hold the anxiety in the mind as an object and not become identified with it and not become consumed by it. That is very important, if not is totally essential part of recovery from any anxiety disorder, including agoraphobia.
One of the things that we look at in great detail also, is the imagery of your emotions. So the imagery is what actually creates the emotion, the anxiety. This imagery typically is going to be very large, is going to be very close and probably all consuming. It is going to be overwhelming because it is very large in size.
That imagery, the size of the emotion, is what actually makes the emotion work. When we actually get to see the imagery consciously using mindfulness we can then exercise choice. We can begin to explore changing this habitual imagery.
And the rule is when you change the imagery you change the emotion.
The other very important principle of mindfulness based therapy is learning how to hold the anxiety and overcome the habit of reacting to the anxiety.
So we usually react with aversion. You do not like the unpleasant feelings associated with anxiety so we try to push it away. We try to avoid it. We try to distract ourselves from it in any way we can. But the rule here is, any form of reactivity will simply feed the anxiety. It will not help it heal or resolve itself.
The other part of the mindfulness based approach to healing Anxiety and Agoraphobia is to take on deliberate challenges. Exposure therapy, in a sense. But mindfulness based exposure therapy is much more effective than classical exposure therapy.
So this is where you will set up a schedule of small challenges that typically would create anxiety but then you work on training yourself ahead of each challenge using mindfulness to find the emotion that gets case triggered and then to help it heal by doing things like changing its size, changing its imagery and changing your relationship to that anxiety that gets triggered in that situation.
So if you'd like to learn more about the mindfulness based approach to healing anxiety and you'd like help with your agoraphobia then please contact me by email and let's schedule a therapy session via Skype.
The mindfulness based approach is very, very effective and very focused in its approach. And generally people see quite noticeable changes in a relatively short time. I usually say you should expect to see changes within three to four weeks when you start applying the mindfulness based techniques that I will teach you during the sessions and that we will practice together during sessions.
So if you would like to learn more please go to my website and then please contact me. Ask any questions you may have about online therapy for agoraphobia.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY
Online Therapy for Agoraphobia Washington, DC