Online Mindfulness Therapy for treating anxiety and panic attacks
ONLINE COUNSELING FOR ANXIETY
When I ask people what they most want from a therapist, most will answer that they just need a few pointer on how to work with their emotions, their anxiety or depression, stress or other form of suffering. They want to learn how to stop being overwhelmed by their emotions, of becoming the victim of emotional reactivity over and over again. People want to break free from their negative habitual reactivity, and learn new ways of processing their feelings that is positive and leads to healing, balance and happiness.
We all need help with difficult emotions, but many of us are afraid of therapists! We don’t like the idea of showing our vulnerability to a complete stranger and we may feel embarrassed telling them all about our personal history. Yet at the same time, part of us recognizes that we have become stuck and remaining stuck is just not an option anymore. Perhaps our anxiety or inner turmoil is causing us to be depressed and negative all the time leaving us feeling listless and fatigued. We see how this affects our personal relationships and family life, how we are just less “there” for our partner or our children. Life should be a passionate dance in which we interact positively with all the challenges that face us. Instead, we retreat, contract and withdraw into our shell. No one at home; Do not disturb; Leave me alone. This is the state that so many of us find ourselves in, condemned to live life as slaves to our reactive habits. We live as victims of our emotions, thoughts, beliefs and memories, enslaved by the contents of our mind that arise out of habit and years of denial, and this is what Mindfulness Therapy tries to put right. Interestingly, communication through a videocam is definitely more comfortable for many people, and conducting a session in the familiar surroundings of ones own home (or office) makes the client feel much more empowered in the therapy process.
Mindfulness Therapy is all about regaining a sense of our real identity as something so much more than all the petty contents that make up the story of who we think we are. At some level, we know that there is more to us than the material content of shadowy forms; we sense an inner spirit that is bigger than all our worries, disappointments, frustrations and anxieties. Mindfulness Therapy puts us directly in touch with this spiritual dimension of our being, and as we make contact with this larger dimension, it breathes healing warmth onto the frozen and frigid regions of the contracted mind and transformation and healing begin. It is an extraordinary feature of the human mind that being completely present with our suffering is in itself directly healing. Mindfulness heals. Learning how to be fully present with our suffering, or the suffering of others, is the focus of Online Mindfulness Therapy.
When we focus mindfulness on painful emotions, we create a space around them that is the essence of compassion and kindness and non-reactivity. Nor surprisingly, contracted emotions respond to this inner freedom by unclenching and releasing their grip on you. In this inner space of full engaged-presence, which is what mindfulness is, painful emotions are finally given permission and freedom in which to change and heal. This is the remarkable insight pointed out by the Buddha over 2,500 years ago, and which is now regaining popularity with therapists and counselors everywhere. The big mind, called the psyche, is more than capable of healing the suffering created by the little mind, the ego, if…and this is the big IF…it is given the freedom in which to change. No freedom, no change. Mindfulness is the conscious awareness that generates this inner freedom and facilitates healing at the core. I encourage all of you who genuinely want to make a change for the better to learn mindfulness skills, including mindfulness meditation and apply this remarkable form of conscious awareness to heal the wounds of the heart.
"Mindfulness Online Therapy: The Effective, Convenient and Affordable Choice for Anxiety Disorders."
Do you feel yourself to be a victim of your anxiety? Do you feel hostage to your emotions?
Do you feel that your anxiety is ruining your life and preventing you from doing the things that you want to do?
Do you feel that anxiety is preventing you from forming close personal relationships?
Are you afraid of having a panic attack and losing control?
Mindfulness Therapy, whether in-person or online via Skype, provides a particularly effective approach for healing anxiety disorders.
As a Mindfulness-based psychotherapist it never ceases to amaze me the extent of the problem of anxiety disorders, general anxiety (GAD) and panic attacks anxiety. At least 1 in 5 people will experience some form of panic anxiety attacks at some time in their lives, and it is particularly common in young people in their 20s-30s. In its most severe form, it leads to social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia, which can be extremely debilitating.
Today, more and more people suffering from anxiety are taking matters into their own hands and seeking help to learn self-help strategies to better cope with their anxiety and better manage the stress and distress produced by anxiety and panic attacks. To address this growing need, I developed a system of cognitive therapy called Mindfulness Meditation Therapy (MMT), based on Buddhist Psychology, NLP and Experiential Psychotherapy. What I have discovered over the years is that MMT works very well for online counseling therapy through Skype-based video call sessions. Skype Therapy or Internet Therapy is gaining tremendous popularity and is so much more convenient and less intimidating than going to a therapist’s office. Now, there is a growing number of research studies that show Online Therapy to be just as effective as traditional office therapy.
One of the most important techniques to learn for managing anxiety attacks is called Reframing. This simply means that you teach yourself to see the anxiety emotion as an object that arises within the mind. This is the opposite to identifying with the anxiety or fear and then becoming swept up with catastrophic thinking, worrying and other forms of reactive thinking that simply make things worse. Instead of, “I am afraid!” we reframe that as “I notice the emotion of fear arising in me.” This simple action stops the mind contracting into the emotion and keeps the mind free to engage with the emotion as an object, and that is something totally and absolutely different. In a sense, you leave the “I” out of it altogether – something to be discovered at a later time. The main point of Reframing is that you learn how not to be overwhelmed by a panic thought when it arises and not to feed the emotion by becoming lost in thinking and reacting. With practice you become more and more familiar with the anxiety emotion as an object, a visitor and you find that you don’t need to react to it with fear or more anxiety.
This form of retraining how we respond to our emotions develops a kind of immunity to the anxiety not unlike the immunity that the body develops to pathogens. Before immunity is established, we are at great risk from viruses and bacteria, but after we have developed an immune response, the same organisms are rendered completely harmless and incapable of causing suffering. It is the same when we develop mental immunity to our emotional pain. The panic anxiety may still arise out of habit, but we don’t react and therefore are immune to the suffering that we create when we react to emotional pain. Mindfulness is the tool that allows us to develop this mental immunity.
When the mind is free from reacting to our emotional pain then it is put in an ideal state to allow the pain itself to begin to heal and lose intensity. When you learn how to sit with your pain without becoming reactive then you are creating the right inner conditions that allow beneficial change and that allow your innate intelligence and creativity to work on healing and resolving the pain.
The next factor that works to facilitate this new relationship with our panic anxiety is the immensely powerful factor of friendliness. Now that we are getting better at holding the panic anxiety as an object within our mind that we can relate to and look at, we take this relationship to a whole new level by welcoming the emotion. We actually train our self to greet is just as we would greet an old friend. Turn to the anxiety with warmth and friendliness instead of our habitual knee-jerk reaction of hatred and resistance and everything changes. Why? Because we actually create an inner space in which that anxiety emotion can exist unmolested and unharmed. This above anything else creates the best possible conditions in which the emotion can heal itself.
Try this for yourself: Practice Reframing followed by the Response of Friendliness. You may find this difficult to do at first, but it becomes increasingly easier with practice, especially when you begin to feel the benefits as the reactivity and the core panic anxiety begin to resolve themselves.
Peter Strong, PhD, is a Mindfulness Psychotherapist, Online Therapist, Spiritual Teacher, Medical Research Scientist and Author, based in Boulder, Colorado. He was born in the UK and educated at the University of Oxford.
Besides therapy sessions in his Boulder Office, Dr Strong provides an Online Counseling Service via Skype for anxiety (Online Therapy for Anxiety ), depression (Online Therapy for Depression ) and mindfulness-based therapy for stress and PTSD (Online Therapy for PTSD). Email inquiries about Online Therapy and Online Counseling are most welcome. Request an Online Psychotherapy Skype session today and begin a course of Mindfulness Therapy for your Anxiety, Depression or Emotional Stress.
You can purchase a copy of Dr Strong’s book ‘The Path of Mindfulness Meditation’ at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca and Amazon.co.uk and Barnes&Noble.com. A Kindle edition is also available.
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