Skype Therapy for agoraphobia
Skype Therapy for agoraphobia
Overcome agoraphobia through Online Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy via Skype.
Online Therapy for agoraphobia
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Online Mindfulness Therapy for Agoraphobia
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Being able to work with a therapist online is a necessity when you are suffering from agoraphobia.
During these Skype therapy sessions I will teach you how to overcome your agoraphobia and anxiety by training you in Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, one of the components of Online Mindfulness Therapy that I teach.
Online therapist for treating agoraphobia - Dr.Peter Strong
Online Mindfulness Psychotherapist for Recovery from Agoraphobia and Social Anxiety Disorder without relying on medications.
Speak with a Psychotherapist Online through Skype for effective online help and counseling for overcoming Chronic Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder.
If you want to recover completely from agoraphobia you must treat the underlying habitual anxiety reactions.
Anti-anxiety medications don’t do this. Medications only treat 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 neutralizing 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 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 required for effective communication and good psychotherapy.
What Treatment Methods work Best 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.
Email me to learn more about this online psychotherapy service and schedule a therapy session via Skype with me. Inquiries welcome!
Everyone that I have worked with really likes the mindfulness approach that I teach for healing emotional suffering…
"Beyond healing the anxiety, my whole inner landscape is changing. I’m learning that the self-criticism, shame and doubt I have been stuck in for so long can all be met with compassionate awareness and brought to resolution. I’m starting to feel the joy Peter talks about and a real tenderness toward myself and others."
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME TO HELP YOU OVERCOME AGORAPHOBIA
Online Treatment for Agoraphobia without using drugs
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 FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
Agoraphobia Therapy Online over Skype or Zoom
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I provide online therapy via Skype and sometimes Zoom 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 FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
Mindfulness-based Online Help for overcoming 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 TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR HELP WITH AGORAPHOBIA, PANIC ATTACKS & ANXIETY
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Skype Therapy for agoraphobia