Online Therapy for treating agoraphobia

Online Therapy for treating agoraphobia

Online Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy via Skype for the treatment of agoraphobia.

I will guide you through the Exposure Therapy process and you will see noticeable improvements after each online 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

Main LinkedIn article: Online Therapy for Agoraphobia

Agoraphobia Help Online

Online Mindfulness Therapist for Recovery from Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without using antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.

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

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

Prescription 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 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 neutralizing these habitual reactions directly at the psychological level. This approach is highly effective and most people see measurable improvements after 3-4 Skype Therapy 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 good communication and effective psychotherapy.

What Treatment Methods work Best for Agoraphobia? Online Therapy for treating 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.

Email me to find out more about this online counseling service and schedule a Skype therapy session with me. Inquiries welcome!

Everyone that I have worked with really enjoys 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 FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Online Treatment for Agoraphobia - Online Therapy over 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 ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA

How to Overcome Agoraphobia Online Help via Skype

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I'm a professional online psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders such as agoraphobia. If you're interested in learning more about how to overcome agoraphobia and other forms of panic disorder then do please go to my website and learn more about the mindfulness therapy methods, and feel free, at any time, to email me and ask any questions you have and I will explain to you in as much detail as I can how Mindfulness Therapy can help you overcome agoraphobia and other forms of severe anxiety. 

The key to the mindfulness therapy approach is to give you practical tools that you can apply yourself between sessions. And the two major approaches that you will be practicing yourself after I teach them to you are a combination of a disciplined approach to exposure challenges, so that you will be setting up a series of manageable challenges to extend beyond your comfort zone. And that should be done on a daily basis and often repeating those challenges many times during the day. 

So that's one part, setting up that strategy of regular disciplined challenges. But that alone is not enough. So that's one of the limitations of exposure therapy. Exposure itself is not enough. You can end up re-traumatizing yourself and making the anxiety worse. You must combine that exposure challenge strategy with adequate preparation and processing beforehand. So there's a training element and this is where the mindfulness therapy comes in. 

Basically, the way that works is that you rehearse the challenge before you do it. Many times you play it through in the mind, whatever that challenge might be. You imagine yourself walking to the edge of your comfort zone just sufficiently that you can access that anxiety. You then work on the most important thing of all which is changing your relationship to the habitual anxiety reactions that get triggered. 

The real problem that prevents anxiety disorders from healing and changing is the way that we get lost in habitual reactivity. We simply identify with that anxiety and we become our fear. What we need to do is change our relationship to the anxiety so that we can see it consciously as it arises, and cultivate balance in relationship to your anxiety. It's like learning to sit on the bank of the river and not fall in. That's the key component of mindfulness therapy that makes it so effective. 

Because anxiety arises is not the end of the story. It's only because we become identified with that and anxiety reaction. And then, of course, we tend to feed the anxiety with catastrophic thinking and all kinds of cognitive reactivity, as well. 

So by training with the anxiety reactions and thought reactions ahead of time you can basically disarm those habitual reactions before they get triggered. So, that's the training phase that you would do before each of your daily challenges. 

Then you do the challenge and during the challenge you basically just put into practice the training that you have perfected before the challenge. This is mostly about staying conscious staying awake, recognizing the reaction that arises, greeting it consciously and also with a degree of friendliness, which is very, very important in all mindfulness work, and not allowing that habitual reaction to take charge. 

And then after the completion of a challenge you might meditate again on any fresh anxiety that arose during that challenge. And again help process that reactivity so you can neutralize it. 

Then you can repeat the challenge again and each time the training gets stronger and stronger and stronger. 

Most people can expect to see quite significant improvements, and that includes a reduction in the intensity of anxiety, within three to four sessions, three to four weeks of practicing in exposure challenges and training. 

Eventually the training becomes so effective that the anxiety doesn't arise at all and that is a remarkable experience for people who have often struggled with agoraphobia or other forms of extreme anxiety for many years. 

So if you'd like to get started with online therapy for your agoraphobia or panic attacks,  send me an email then we can schedule a Skype session and we can get started.

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

Online treatment plan for agoraphobia using Mindfulness Therapy

Exposure Therapy is an essential part of the recovery process, but is not sufficient by itself. You have to engage in thorough training before you do each exposure challenge to prevent simply re-traumatizing yourself. Hence the development of Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, an approach that I developed several years ago and have found to be very effective when working with clients suffering from agoraphobia.

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional psychotherapist and I offer online therapy, which of course, is very convenient and necessary if you're suffering from agoraphobia or other anxiety condition that keeps you housebound. 

So I'm often asked, "What is the best treatment for agoraphobia?" "What's the best way to overcome the anxiety and panic attacks that accompany agoraphobia?" From my experience working with people suffering from agoraphobia, over the last ten years or so now, I find that the best approach is what I call Mindfulness Therapy. This is a system of work that I've been developing for many years which really works at the underlying core level of your anxiety. It helps you break free from those patterns of habitual reactivity that cause your anxiety. It works by changing the anxiety directly so that it is not habitually triggered by the common triggers that you encounter in your agoraphobia. 

We have to uncover these underlying anxiety habits and then work on changing them. And the best way to doing this is what I call Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy. So this means that you actively create a series of exposure challenges. That might be walking around the block or driving a short distance if you can still drive or even just stepping outside the front door. But it doesn't matter what the challenges are. But it is essential that you identify challenges that are accompanied by a degree of anxiety and then start working on those challenges and training yourself out of the reactive anxiety that has become habitual. 

The way that we train ourselves out of the anxiety reactions is not by simply repeated exposure as is often taught. Repeated exposure is very inefficient and you risk intensifying the anxiety. 

So in mindfulness-based exposure therapy we prepare for each challenge in a very thorough way before you do the challenge, and this preparation is called a rehearsal meditation. It's all about training. So in a rehearsal meditation you imagine doing that challenge and then you look specifically for any anxiety that gets triggered. And then you start to work with that anxiety, working with its structure and helping change that anxiety directly. 

So if you would like help with your agoraphobia, please contact me and let's schedule some therapy sessions over Skype and I will teach you exactly how to apply mindfulness to overcome your agoraphobia. So please contact me if you'd like to get started with the mindfulness approach to overcoming agoraphobia. 

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION 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