Early in March 2020, I closed my physical office doors and bought a Zoom subscription. I called my clients to let them know and I got a mix of responses—“Why?”, “Are you serious?”, “That’s fine. How do I call you?”, or “How would that work?” In all honesty, I had mixed feelings too. My biggest question was whether I could engage clients via Zoom. In all my years of counseling, I had done some teletherapy visits, but they were few and far between.
After over a year of hundreds of teletherapy visits, I see so much good in it:
The teens and adolescents don’t have to worry about being driven to and from therapy by their parents. They can take full control of the process by logging in and out – affording them ownership of their therapy experience. And what I hear the most often from teens — don’t have to have “awkward” conversations with parents in the car about what happened in therapy. As a psychologist, I encourage open dialogue between clients and family members, however, those car rides tend to be described as forced and often takes client’s ability away from discussing information in their own terms.
For college students, they attend therapy between classes while sitting outside a building on campus or in a reserved library room. It affords them the opportunity to miss very few sessions. So many college students don’t have access to cars or transportation, making it difficult to receive quality mental health services. College counseling centers are booked solid and on many college campuses, they have few therapists within walking distance. Telehealth allows for so much more.
I’ve also seen clients who sometimes struggle verbally disclosing some information and prefer to type certain things into the chat or use emojis when speaking to this distress. In addition, clients screen share with me and I with them. We can bring in material from other places to engage differently. For those creative souls, teletherapy affords the opportunity to express the self in various ways.
As a therapist, I can offer more time to my clients.
I can see clients late into the evening and early in the morning (before the sunrises). It provides me the opportunity to be flexible with seeing clients on more days that I ever had in the past, which allows clients to pick more times that work for them.
Even as the world opens up, I’ve already been asked by a number of clients to keep teletherapy. To keep it for the benefits that being in person does not allow for—more time for treatment and more time to feel better.
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