Online treatment for agoraphobia without drugs/medication
Contact me to learn more about how to overcome agoraphobia without resorting to medications, which do nothing to transform the underlying cause of your anxiety.
Agoraphobia Therapy Online over Skype
Email me to schedule a Skype therapy session with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in online mindfulness therapy for anxiety and depression.
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong and I provide online therapy via Skype for anxiety and depression and particularly for the treatment of agoraphobia. So if you're looking for agoraphobia therapy online I invite you to go to my website. Read more about this online therapy service that I offer hand please contact me if you would like to schedule some Skype Therapy sessions with me to help you overcome your agoraphobia.
So if you are suffering from agoraphobia it is essential that you are able to find an online therapist to work with simply because it's so difficult for you to leave home. And there are a number of services now offering online psychotherapy for the treatment of agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders too.
Whether you choose me or someone else, the important thing is that you find a therapist to work with who uses Skype or similar video platform because it's very important that you can see each other. That will improve the quality of communication and the quality of the therapy that you are getting.
The other thing is make sure that you feel completely comfortable with the therapist that you select. Make sure that they answer your questions about the therapist's approach and trust your own judgment, your own intuition. That is by far the best guide, much more so than how many letters the therapist has after his name. What's important is that you feel comfortable with the therapist and you like the approach that they are offering.
So in the style of agoraphobia therapy that I offer is based on the application of mindfulness. Mindfulness Therapy is a very effective way of working with anxiety disorders like agoraphobia. It also helps you manage panic attacks and any other aspect of anxiety that's causing you distress and that are limiting the quality of your life.
So in Mindfulness Therapy the primary approach that we take is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, and that is where you will basically design a series of challenges with my help so that you can begin to train yourself out of the anxiety habits.
So in mindfulness training we teach that suffering like anxiety and depression is basically an emotional habit. It is the result of conditioning. This habit formation gets started, often in childhood, and it never gets resolved. And this anxiety shows up in different forms different types of anxiety such as agoraphobia or social anxiety or a phobia or panic attacks or driving anxiety, etc.
So the first stage is to set up a schedule of exposure challenges. And then what is most important is to train using mindfulness for each challenge that you schedule. Exposure therapy by itself is not sufficient. You must train with the anxiety beforehand.
So we do this by a technique called Rehearsal Meditation, whereby you imagine doing that challenge in order to find the anxiety and then you start working with that anxiety using mindfulness and compassion.
You look at the structure of the anxiety, you find out how it works. You look at the patterns of reactive thoughts that feed that anxiety and you begin to change your relationship to the anxiety formation. You start to break free from its influence by becoming more and more aware of it, more conscious of the thoughts and the emotion. The basic rule here is that the more you see, the less fear you will experience. That may seem counter-intuitive but it's actually the case. Fear is based on what you don't see much more than what you do see.
So we do this in great detail with the challenge in our imagination before we do the challenge. That's why it's called a Rehearsal Meditation. When you can visualize doing that challenge, whatever it might be, perhaps just walking around the block or driving in the car, if you can do that, whatever it might be, when you feel that you can do that with the complete absence of anxiety then you do the live challenge, the exposure challenge, and your training that you did in the Rehearsal Meditation will take effect and will effectively inhibit any anxiety reactions during the challenge.
And when you take this approach you'll start to see dramatic improvements in a very short time. Typically, most of my clients see quite dramatic changes after three to four weeks of doing this kind of progressive exposure challenge using mindfulness.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR THE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF AGORAPHOBIA
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