Online Psychotherapy for help with Agoraphobia

https://sites.google.com/view/online-therapist-agoraphobia/online-psychotherapy-for-help-with-agoraphobia

So agoraphobia usually begins with a series of panic attacks often appearing for no particular reason but that are very distressing, very unpleasant. And what happens is that we tend to develop fear, reactive fear to the reoccurrence of these panic attacks, and that fear then converts into avoidance. So we try to avoid any situation in which that panic attack may reoccur. So these patterns of avoidance tend to proliferate and we start avoiding more and more things based on that fear. 

The problem is that avoidance fuels fear, so the more you become wrapped up in patterns of avoidance the more fear you will experience and then that leads to more avoidance behaviors. And so it sort of spirals out of control and you become more and more limited and confined to a smaller and smaller space. Sometimes people are unable to leave their house. They're afraid of any kind of zone that is out of that immediate comfort zone of their house. So going to the grocery store, driving a car, even walking around the neighborhood may be way too challenging. And this is the result of this accumulation of avoidance and the fear that is fed by avoidance. 

So the first understanding we must have if you want to beat agoraphobia, if you want to overcome agoraphobia, is that you must not accept these avoidance habits. Instead we must turn that around and start facing each situation. But we have to do this in a strategic way and with lots of training and that is what we find is usually lacking in classical exposure type therapy. 

It is not enough to just force your way through a traumatic situation. That will simply reinforce the fear. It will not resolve it. So exposure therapy as it's usually taught is basically going to be mostly ineffective. You cannot expect yourself to habituate to that situation simply by repeating it over and over again. That could also simply repeat the fear, the trauma, over and over again. 

In many ways agoraphobia is really a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. It's that reaction to the trauma of the panic attacks that you had originally. 

So exposure therapy by itself is absolutely not enough. You must take a much more strategic approach, but it is, of course, a necessary part of your recovery. If you want to beat agoraphobia you must undertake progressive exposures. We understand that. But how do you do that? That's the question. 

So in the mindfulness approach, what I call mindfulness-based exposure therapy, we will start by making a list of all of our challenges, those situations that we are currently avoiding. We turn that into a list and we train with each one of those challenges on that list and we do it thoroughly until we experience no anxiety whatsoever. 

The way that we train is the vital component here. This is what makes the difference. You must train in a very thorough way before you do any of those challenges so that you can avoid that re-traumatization. 

So we train through a process called mindfulness meditation. And this, basically, is where you would meditate on the challenge before you do it. So you play that challenge through your mind in detail and you look very carefully for any fear reactions and any thought reactions that get triggered as you imagine going into the grocery store, or whatever it may be. 

So if you'd like to learn more about this approach then please contact me and we can discuss this further and we can set up some online therapy sessions via Skype. 

Agoraphobia Help Online via Skype

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