Online Anxiety Therapy

The number of people suffering from anxiety disorders, panic attacks and depression is reaching epidemic proportions. People are looking form help, but many are uncomfortable with seeing a therapist or counselor in their local community. Now the internet offers people the opportunity to get the help that they need, but in the privacy of their own home. Online Therapy or Internet Therapy is becoming more and more popular as a first choice for learning how to manage anxiety, non-clinical depression and general emotional stress.
Now, with the advent of Skype, people can hold face-to-face counseling therapy sessions with a therapist as if they are in the therapist’s office.

There are of course some forms of psychotherapy that might not work well using the online format, but for the cognitive therapies such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Mindfulness Therapy, which I developed many years ago, the online video format is excellent. In my experience, there are even some benefits, because clients do feel substantially more comfortable when working from home. For clients suffering from agoraphobia and social anxiety, this format has obvious advantages.

Online Therapy for Anxiety – Mindfulness Therapy
During sessions of Mindfulness Therapy, clients learn how to form a stable, non-reactive relationship with their emotions. This is called the Mindfulness-Based Relationship, or “sitting” with our emotions, a central feature of Mindfulness Therapy. Our habit, of course, is not to “sit” with our pain, but to avoid it or run away from it, or to resist it and try to suppress it. This is our instinctive biological conditioning – the fight or flight reaction that is part of our biological makeup. This primitive reaction may work for managing physical attack from wild beasts, but this kind of conditioned reactivity does not help us process and resolve our emotional suffering.

In fact, experience shows us that avoidance, which is simply the cultivation of unawareness, is probably the worst thing we can do. Resistance or aversion is also generally very ineffective and actually feeds the problem. The truth is that any form of reactivity simply makes the problem worse, causing the unresolved emotion to solidify and harden in the mind. Whenever a mental formation hardens in this way it starts to become resistant to change and it cannot heal itself. Mindfulness Psychology teaches us that healing and resolution requires inner freedom and fluidity of mind, so we can see that reactivity simply inhibits change and inhibits healing, transformation and resolution.

Unresolved emotions become suppressed and continue to generate inner suffering and anxiety deep within the psyche, which in turn generates even more reactivity at the cognitive and behavioural levels. These unresolved core emotions don’t go away, and in fact they often pass on from one generation to another, and will propagate themselves indefinitely – until we have the courage to reverse the unawareness and avoidance, resistance and aversion. This is the central direction in Mindfulness Therapy.

The object is not to try and change our anxiety or pain, but to learn how to sit with it in exactly the same way that you would sit with a friend or with a child. We create a safe space for the emotion, we allow it to exist, but we train in not becoming reactive and in not becoming overwhelmed by the anxiety. Mindfulness is simply the process of learning how to stay present – that is, present for the emotion itself. We learn how to hold the emotion in the inner space of our awareness, the field of awareness, and be with the emotion, watching and learning about the emotion. Does it have a color? Shape? Where do we feel it in our body? It is through getting to know our anxiety in this way, through direct seeing, that we learn what can help the emotion become fluid again so it can continue its natural process of healing – of resolution.

When your friend comes to you, distressed and agitated, you know that what is most important is to make the space and time to simply sit with him or her. You sit together, not saying much at first, but simply experiencing being present – You being totally present for your friend. It is only when you get this state of relationship right that he or she feels able to talk. Just a few words...then more...and before long, your friend is expressing herself at a very deep and subtle level. This is resolution in progress; this is the return of fluidity that allows the change process required for healing. This too, is what we need to establish internally with our anxiety, our panic and fear, our depression, anger or any other form of emotional stress.

In short, we need to become friends with our inner suffering. This quality of inner friendliness is cultivated when we establish the mindfulness-based relationship with our emotions – and this catalyzes change and healing better than anything else.


Peter Strong, PhD, is a professional mindfulness psychotherapist, spiritual teacher and author, based in Boulder, Colorado.
Besides face-to-face therapy sessions, Dr Strong offers Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype. For this Online Counseling Service visit http://www.counselingtherapyonline.com and to learn more about Mindfulness Therapy visit http://www.mindfulnessmeditationtherapy.com
Email inquiries are most welcome. Request a Skype session today and begin a course of Mindfulness Therapy.