How to overcome the fear of driving on the highway - Online Exposure Therapy via Skype

Описание: How to overcome the fear of driving on the highway - Online Exposure Therapy via Skype. Visit: https://pdmstrong.wordpress.com/onlin... to schedule a Skype therapy session with Dr. Peter Strong, specialist in online mindfulness therapy for anxiety and depression.

How to overcome the fear of driving on the highway - Online Exposure Therapy via Skype.
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional mindfulness-based therapist, based in Boulder, Colorado, and I offer online therapy via Skype for the treatment of anxiety disorders and particularly for driving anxiety, which is extremely common. So if you'd like online help to overcome the fear of driving on the highway, then please contact me and schedule a Skype Therapy session.

Typically it takes about three or four sessions with me to learn how to apply mindfulness-based exposure therapy methods for overcoming your fear of driving on highways or roads or any other form driving anxiety.

The key is to set up a series of exposure challenges. I think that is fairly self-evident. You have to face your fears. However, exposure therapy by itself is not sufficient. Just facing your fears and trying to get through them is not an adequate approach to overcoming the fear of highway driving.

We do this, surprisingly for many, we do this by actually learning to meditate on the anxiety itself. So this is what I will train you in how to approach your anxiety. You play through the challenge that you're about to do in the mind. You look for the anxiety reactions that get triggered. And then at that moment you stop and change your relationship to that anxiety, and you turn it into an object. So this is the first most important step.

You look at the anxiety as an object or as being like a small child or a small animal or pet or any other object that feels right for you. You then change your relationship to that object and you become the observer of that object. Instead of becoming swallowed up by the anxiety, you now become the observer of that anxiety and that's a very different relationship. When you train in being the observer you will train yourself out of the tendency to react, to become overwhelmed by the anxiety, to identify with the anxiety.

The second most important step is developing a compassionate relationship with that anxiety. So when you can see it as being like a small child it becomes fairly easy for most people to start to change their relationship from one of reactivity and fear, which simply feeds the anxiety, to one of compassion and friendliness, and that actually frees you even more from the anxiety itself.

So the more that you can develop friendliness towards your anxiety the freer you become. So that's a very important process.

The third thing we do in our training, in our mindfulness-based exposure therapy training, is to look at the imagery of the emotion. So anxiety, like any emotion, has imagery. That's what cause triggers in the mind and that imagery is what creates the anxiety.

So typically with intense emotions like anxiety or a panic attack the emotion is very large, it's very close, and also usually very high in your mind's eye, the way you see it in your imagination. So those features are being very large, very close, and very high, are actually what causes the anxiety.

Now when you have established a non-reactive mindful relationship with your anxiety you can begin to investigate this imagery and you can then start to change it and change the imagery into a form that does not produce anxiety. So for example, we made the imagery of the emotion of anxiety many times smaller, we shrink it in size. We move it further away.

In the case of driving a car, what often works quite well for many people, something you try yourself, is to place that anxiety on the passenger seat beside you. So you make it small, you move it and it will now be at a lower level beside you, rather than being at head level above you.

Then when you feel ready, you then would do that challenge, and I will stay with you via Skype, and we can put these methods into practice during the challenge. You can literally imagine moving the anxiety to the passenger seats if it arises during the challenge, and then we can meditate again after the challenge and review any fresh anxiety that was triggered and we can help it resolve itself and heal by the same methods.

So please contact me if you would like to learn more about online mindfulness-based exposure therapy for overcoming fear of highways and freeways and driving in general.

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