Online Therapy for Anxiety

Online Therapy for Anxiety

Talk to a therapist online for help with anxiety

Online Mindfulness Therapy for Anxiety

Online Therapist for Anxiety

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I am a professional psychotherapist pecializing in Mindfulness Therapy for the treatment of anxiety disorders. I offer online therapy over Skype for the treatment of anxiety, depression, addictions, compulsive disorders and other emotional problems that you may be struggling with. Now, Skype Therapy is particularly effective for working with anxiety and in fact, most of my clients are seeking help for anxiety; sometimes that might be in the form of Generalized Anxiety Disorder or it may be Social Anxiety Disorder or it may be a specific phobia such as Driving Anxiety or a phobia.

Now, what do we do during these online therapy sessions? Well, basically, this service is based on a style of psychotherapy that I developed many years ago, which is called Mindfulness Therapy. This resembles mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and incorporates some mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), but the approach that I use is quite unique and incorporates different aspects of the Buddha's teaching on mindfulness and how to apply mindfulness specifically for working with the mind. And that means working with different emotional states and working with patterns of reactive thinking.

Working with Anxiety Thoughts

Anxiety, as you know, is a condition that is fueled by habitual, obsessive thinking, so a very important part of mindfulness is learning to break free from these patterns of reactive, habitual thinking, and we do this by meditating specifically on the mind; on those thoughts themselves. We do not try to avoid anxiety-thoughts and we do not push them away, but rather, we welcome into the space of mindful concentration which we might call meditation. This is, in fact, mindfulness meditation as the Buddha taught it. We must meditate on the mind because that is the source of our suffering.

So, the first part of mindfulness meditation therapy that I offer online via Skype is to begin to change our relationship to our thoughts, to develop more consciousness of our thoughts and to avoid becoming identified with our thoughts. When we become identified, we become overwhelmed by them, we become lost in our thoughts, literally, and that process often called rumination or just excessive worrying has the effect of feeding the underlying emotional state of anxiety. So, learning to break that habit of identification with reactive thoughts is absolutely central to Mindfulness Therapy.

Working with Emotional Imagery

The second part of Mindfulness Therapy that we explore during the Skype therapy sessions is to look at the structure of the anxiety itself, the emotional state. What makes that emotion so powerful in the mind? What we find in almost all cases is that the defining features that make anxiety so strong is to do with the way that you see that emotion internally at the psychological level, at the level of emotional imagery.

So, every emotion is based around some form of emotional imagery, how you see it in the mind. In Mindfulness Therapy, we focus on exploring this emotional imagery. We look closely at the emotion, which we meditate on, we introduce it into the mind and examine it closely to look at the imagery behind the emotion. The more that we see the imagery, the more that we can change the emotion, and often, this may involve simply changing where you see the anxiety, the actual position, psychologically, where the emotion arises. Most people have never actually looked at the imagery of their emotions; they just become overwhelmed by them and continue to react based on identification with the emotion. But, in Mindfulness Therapy work, we are actually investigating as an observer the imagery of the emotion.

For many people, anxiety has a particular position and the emotion is very commonly seen at a position that is very close, the imagery may be very large, very intense in color and has all the qualities that literally make it overwhelming. In fact, emotional imagery in general tends to occupy a spatial position that is higher than we are so we see it above us. That's why we say things like, "I feel overwhelmed" because the emotional imagery actually appears at a higher level, and that gives it greater power and causes us to feel the intensity of the emotion.

Seeing its position allows us to change its position and one of the very first mindfulness exercises that we might do is to take the emotion and move it to a new position, and generally that position will be at a lower level, on the ground. Literally, take the emotion and move it onto the ground. You will make it smaller, you move it further away from us. When you change the way that you see the emotion internally you change the emotion itself. You start to become less anxious.

So, in this way we can retrain the emotion, to change its imagery to a different form that does not create the intense emotional suffering.

So, that's another part of Mindfulness Therapy that we do during the online therapy sessions. So, we seek to change our relationship to the contents of our mind so that we don't become identified, and we start to look at the structure of our emotions and we try to explore changing that structure to decrease and resolve the emotion. Those are two fundamental techniques that we explore during Mindfulness Therapy.

Developing your True Self

There are other things that we begin to explore as well, such as the concept of your True Self, the one that sees the imagery of the emotion, the one that is able to be consciously aware of the emotion as an observer, without becoming identified. What is the nature of that observer? That is what we call your True Self, its actually not the content of your mind and your True Self is not defined by the contents of your mind. You are not what you think. The statement, "I think therefore I am," is actually not correct. The statement should be, "I am therefore I think."

So, a larger part of Mindfulness Therapy is learning to discover this totally different side to your personality, what we call the True Self, in contrast to the Little Self, which is the contents of the mind - emotions, reactive habits, memories, all of the thinking processes that tend to go on automatically. The more that you begin to discover your True Self and begin to break free from the Little Self, the Conditioned Mind, the more happiness, well-being, creativity, strength and resilience you will discover. So, this is the third and spiritual aspect of Mindfulness Therapy that we develop during online therapy sessions.

Contact me to learn more about online mindfulness therapy for anxiety

So, if you would like to learn more about online therapy via Skype, and Mindfulness Therapy, do please go to my website, CounselingTherapyOnline.com and email me and then we can schedule a Skype therapy session. Thank you!

Online Therapy for Anxiety

Find out more about Online Mindfulness Therapy for the treatment of Anxiety and Depression and for Addiction Counseling Online and for treatment for PTSD over Skype.
Visit my YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/pdmstrong to learn about Online Therapy over Skype.

Read: Online Therapist for Anxiety via Skype

ONLINE THERAPY FOR ANXIETY

See My LinkedIn Articles:  Online Therapy for Anxiety