What a therapist wants you to know about remote therapy

I felt like a thawing glacier. Still chill, I reached out to my colleague, Jo-e Sutton, a certified holistic health practitioner. She surprised me with her enthusiasm. “Zoom sessions are the greatest blessings to come out of this dark time.”

“Really? How come?” I have asked.

“It saves so much time,” she enthused, “It used to take me an hour to dress professionally, pack food for the day, lumber around town, pick up freshly cut flowers, park, light candles. and make tea. . Now all I have to do is get dressed (from the waist down) and poof, there I am.”

“But how does it work for your customers?” I asked stunned.

“They say they like it more because of the convenience.”

I felt myself warming to the idea, but still felt the need for more insight. I reached out to Patti Ashley, a licensed professional counselor. She said, “I miss giving my client a tissue when they cry and offering them a soft blanket when they discuss a challenging topic. In a virtual session, I teach my clients to do those things themselves, which can give them more strength in the long run.”

With that I answered my clients and scheduled times to explore this strange new frontier. The next day, Sophie (another customer, not her real name), dressed in a ruffled pink shirt, envisioned her deep blue pools that appeared life-sized on my computer screen. I could even see the thin red lines in her bloodshot eyes. I taught her how to pull herself out of the hypnotic state if necessary. We laughed every time her cat walked over her keyboard, and she joked that her cat needed the session as much as she did.

By the end of the hour, Sophie looked refreshed and said she was clearly feeling better than before we started. We were amazed that even though we were nearly 2,400 miles apart, we could feel connected.

Fast forward to today. It is now several years and hundreds of Zoom therapy sessions later. In hindsight it’s 2020, pun intended, here’s what I’ve determined so far to be the pros and cons of cybertherapy:

Cons

• No human touch: There is no denying that we are social beings. Even though pandemic restrictions have eased, many people feel like wilting flowers because they can’t enjoy the sunlight of each other’s presence as often or as freely as they used to. It turns out that a crucial part of the value of a session is the atmosphere the therapist creates.
• No control over the environment: In a virtual session, therapists cannot create the womb-like environment they prefer to help clients feel safe and supported (to more easily open up and share their struggles, which is essential to the healing process). When trying to calm someone down in their deepest memory at the heart of their core wound, leaf blowers, pots rattling in the background, and kids running into the room can derail the process.
• Technological failures: The power goes out from time to time, the screen freezes, and the customer is so absorbed in his story that he doesn’t notice his laptop’s screen has dropped below eye level, and we’ll be forced to listen to their sobbing story as they look up their nose.

Advantages

• An explosion of opportunity: Distance therapy gives people access to mental health services from all over the world. If we lived outside of a metropolitan area in the days before the pandemic, we’d be lucky to have a therapist within a 20-mile radius. And we hope that therapist was a good one. Today we are not limited by geography.
• A different kind of intimacy: On Zoom, even though you can’t read each other’s full body language, you’re only a foot away from each other’s faces. You can see each other’s eyes – the windows to the soul, larger than life – which in some ways helps to deepen the connection.
• Less cost and hassle: You no longer have to worry about petrol and parking costs, transport costs or other costs to get to or from your session. For therapists, remote sessions mean we no longer have to pay for expensive office space. Similarly, in Los Angeles, where I live, it wasn’t unusual to get a call from a client on their way to a session saying they had to cancel due to a deadlock. With remote sessions, that’s not as common, and you don’t have to leave your home to talk to a professional. Any quiet, private space in your home is usually sufficient.
• Filters and backgrounds: Last but not least, even when we don’t have time to tidy up our home office, virtual backgrounds save the day and give therapists a professional look (while masking the clutter of paperwork or unfolded laundry). Not to mention, when we need more time to dress our best for our sessions, zoom filters make us all look better than in real life. This also applies to customers: no worries about laundry in bed when you join a session from your phone. The challenge with this, however, is that if and when we do eventually meet in person, we should be prepared to see more wrinkles and dark lines than we’re used to seeing.

I like to tell my clients that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. And I just find it ironic that the isolation of the pandemic has created more demand for mental health services than ever before. And it also created more supply for it then.

I went back with Kappas last week to see how distance therapy continued to work with him; I was not surprised to hear that he was more satisfied than ever. When our conversation ended, his phone pinged. It was a Facebook post from his colleague: “Seeing customers online is incredible. I used to think that this work had to be done face-to-face. Just got back from a five week trip to Italy where I had daily Zoom sessions!”

With the upsides causing the downs, I can’t imagine that in the therapeutic world we will ever go back to the horse and buggy way of old.