Online Therapy for Panic Anxiety

  Online Therapy for Panic Attacks

Online Therapy for Panic Anxiety

Online Help for Panic Anxiety

 It is now possible to receive online psychotherapy via Skype as a primary method to learn how to manage anxiety, panic attacks, depression and other forms of emotional stress. The approach described here is called Mindfulness Therapy, which describes a variety of skillful ways of working with emotions.

Online Therapy for Panic Attacks

Online Therapy for Panic Disorder

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.

Dr Peter Strong is a Professional Online Therapist and provides an Online Counseling Service via Skype. Email inquiries welcome.
Learn more about Online Counseling and Online Therapy today - the ideal way to get help for overcoming your anxiety, depression and emotional stress.