Online treatment service for agoraphobia

Online treatment service for agoraphobia via Skype or Zoom

Overcome agoraphobia through Online Treatment using Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy via Skype.

I will guide you through the process and you will see significant improvements after each Mindfulness Therapy session.

Mindfulness Therapy teaches you how to work with your anxiety to promote healing and recovery instead of becoming continually overwhelmed.

The key is to develop a strong conscious relationship with your anxiety and anxiety-producing thoughts based on mindfulness and compassion. This relationship is what promotes healing and recovery.

Online Treatment for agoraphobia

Online Therapy for agoraphobia

Main LinkedIn article: Online Therapy for agoraphobia

Online Mindfulness Psychotherapy for Treating Agoraphobia

Treatment for agoraphobia online via Skype

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

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

Medications don’t address 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 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 healing these habitual reactions directly at the psychological level. This approach is highly effective and most of my clients see measurable improvements after 3-4 Skype sessions with me.

Online therapy is very effective 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 Treating Agoraphobia

Best online treatment 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.

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 therapy service and book a therapy session with me. Inquiries welcome!

Everyone that I have worked with really benefits from 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."

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Online Support for Agoraphobia - Online Treatment via Skype

Get online treatment for agoraphobia

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 TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Agoraphobia Treatment Online over Skype

Online Treatment for overcoming 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.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA

Teletherapy for the treatment of Agoraphobia by Skype

Agoraphobia treatment online via Skype

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.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY