Online Therapy for help with agoraphobia

Talk to a Psychotherapist Online through Skype for effective online help and treatment for overcoming Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Social Anxiety.

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

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 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 very effective and most people see measurable decrease in anxiety symptoms after 3-4 Skype Therapy 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.

What Treatment Methods work Best for Agoraphobia?

Online Therapy for overcoming agoraphobia

In my experience, the best therapeutic approach for helping people overcome agoraphobia is a combination of Cognitive Therapy (CBT) and Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy (Mindfulness Therapy).

Cognitive-based therapy helps you identify the underlying habitual and reactive thoughts and beliefs that create anxiety. Developing awareness of these habitual negative thinking patterns is a very important first step in changing them.

Mindfulness Therapy helps you neutralize and resolve the underlying emotional panic anxiety and fear that fuels the thoughts and beliefs. Learning how to diffuse and resolve the underlying emotions is essential and mindfulness is one of the best awareness tools for doing this.

With practice, you begin to completely change your relationship to the emotions from being a victim to being aware. the more aware you are, the less reactive you become. As you become less reactive, you can begin to explore ways to heal the anxiety-fear directly. Instead of fighting your emotions or avoiding them, you learn how to be with them as a friend. Mindfulness training makes this possible.

The combined approach teaches you how to work with panic anxiety thoughts without becoming overwhelmed by them and this makes it possible to do Imaginal Exposure Exercises, where you imagine leaving your house or going on a journey or being in a crowded place. Through repetition you quickly learn how to process any anxiety reactions as they arise and you prepare yourself for an actual real-life challenge.

At first, we make the challenge small and manageable. We begin to build direct experience and confidence and build on what we have achieved. This very systematic process of preparation through guided Imaginal Exposure followed by real challenges is a proven and effective method for breaking free from agoraphobia and panic attacks.

Contact me to find out more about this online therapy service and book an online Skype counseling 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 one Skype session with Peter Strong and it has helped me heaps in my recovery. I am now trying to apply mindfulness in my everyday, whether I go back to depressive or anxious states, or whether I am feeling normal, mindfulness helps you view life in an easier, more adventurous way."

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA

Online Psychotherapy by Skype for agoraphobia with panic disorder

Get Online Therapy for help with agoraphobia

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

Agoraphobia Therapy Online via Skype

Find Online Therapy for help with 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 FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Agoraphobia Help from Home - Online Mindfulness Therapy

Online Therapy for treating agoraphobia

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional psychotherapist and I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy, which I teach online over Skype.

I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy for anxiety disorders but I also treat depression and PTSD and many other emotional conditions that respond well to Mindfulness Therapy.

In particular, I offer online therapy for people suffering from agoraphobia. So if you're interested in online therapy for your agoraphobia from home then please email me and ask any questions you may have about this service and I'll be happy to explain to you how I can help you overcome your agoraphobia using Mindfulness Therapy.

This approach is very effective indeed, especially for anxiety disorders. Basically what we will do during these sessions is we will learn how to work with your anxiety in a very practical and very focused and very strategic way. That's what makes the difference.

So this begins by establishing a routine of exposure challenges. So these are challenges that you can determine for yourself that you want to use to train yourself out of the anxiety habit, if you like. You want to find a whole range of challenges that you can go through one by one and develop more and more confidence and learn how to defuse that anxiety. So that might be as simple as walking to the end of your driveway. Or it could be going into a mall or some challenge like that.

Now the important thing with exposure challenges like this is that you prepare for them well, that you prepare ahead of time. It is not sufficient to just throw yourself into the challenge and hope that you will survive and overcome your anxiety. The chances are you will simply re-traumatize yourself and make that anxiety worse.

But if you train for it well, then the exposure challenges can become very effective indeed. So I call this mindfulness-based exposure therapy.

So if you are going to the mall for example, you would sit down and meditate on that scenario. You would play it through in the mind like a movie, watching yourself going to the mall, with all of the particular triggers that are there, and then you look for any anxiety that gets triggered as you play through this scene.

When you find the anxiety you then consciously build a mindfulness-based relationship with that anxiety. And this is based on compassion and friendliness, and really, learning how to comfort that anxiety as if it was like a small child that's coming to you for comfort after being scared by something.

So we need to learn to approach our emotions in the same way. We need to see them as being visitors, if you like, that get triggered in the mind that really need our help to help them resolve their anxiety.

Technically speaking, you are not anxious; it's the emotion itself that is anxious. so we learn to see it this way. We built this mindfulness-based relationship with the emotion and we help it basically heal so it can overcome its own anxiety.

Then we can rehearse them further with those triggers and we can imagine being in the mall and not feel any anxiety, because the anxiety has resolved itself. We have given it what it needs to resolve itself by being a friend to the anxiety, if that makes any sense.

So we do this in a very detailed strategic way before we do the challenge. Then we do the challenge and then after the challenge we might do another meditation where we replay the scene again, which will now be fresh and we'll be even more contextualized, and we look for any anxiety that got triggered and we work with that in the same way.

So in this way we we progressively train the anxiety to resolve itself over and over again until basically it doesn't arise. So this is what we mean by a strategic approach. And if you do this in this kind of strategic way you will see results in a very short time. And most people see quite significant improvements after the first three to four sessions of this mindfulness-based exposure therapy.

So if you would like to learn more, please go to my website and then contact me by email to schedule a Skype therapy session in which I will go through this process in great detail and help you learn how to build an exposure challenge routine and how to meditate on your anxiety yourself so that you can do this via self between sessions. So if you would like to learn more please email me.

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

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Online Therapy for help with agoraphobia