Thinking about Therapy?
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I get it, you clicked on this article because something about virtual therapy feels weird. Is it real? Does it help? I’ll be the first to say that before the pandemic hit I was one of the therapists that didn’t see virtual therapy as “real therapy.” When we had to move to virtual therapy during Covid-19, at first it felt like a placeholder to me until we could get back to doing “real therapy” in person.
However, as a former virtual therapy skeptic I am writing this blog as a full believer that virtual therapy is “real therapy.” For some people, I think it works even BETTER than in-person therapy!
One of the biggest issues that we treat at Clark Counseling is anxiety. The act of going to a new location, figuring out where to park, where to walk in, who you’ll see in the lobby, etc. can be common fears for those who struggle with anxiety.
With virtual therapy, there’s no sitting uncomfortably in a waiting room, walking down a maze of an office building while making small talk, or trying to figure out where to sit.
A client once said to me, “I can’t believe we have never talked about the weather.” She had tried in-person therapy for years and was pleasantly surprised at how much healing can happen when we were able to use the ENTIRE time of our sessions focusing on her.
There is no sitting down in a stuffy room without windows, sitting on an uncomfortable couch, (surrounded by books, candles, and lamps), or being stared at. You might start to feel like you’re in a police interrogation with a light over your head and shut down. I hope that anyone in any type of counseling feels comfortable enough to unpack their story and move toward healing.
In online therapy, you get to be yourself. You can show up with your cozy blanket, your dog on your lap, and your favorite mug full of tea. When you get to know each other, the feeling of being virtual drops away. You can build a relationship virtually with a therapist just as well as in-person.
Here’s something else to think about, with in-person therapy you only have access to clinicians within a certain radius of your home. That means that you have to cross your fingers that the local mental health clinic or private practice has a clinician that you feel comfortable with. You have to hope that there is someone skilled at treating your specific struggles near you. You might not even feel like you have a choice of who you’re paired with. With online therapy, you get to have the autonomy to work with a clinician that you connect with.
Don’t leave it to me though to decide if virtual therapy really works. In a meta-analysis titled, The effectiveness of Telehealth versus face-to face interventions for anxiety disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis, researchers found no significant differences were reported when analyzing the effectiveness of therapy. More specifically, “For effectively treating anxiety and related conditions, interventions delivered by Telehealth appear to be as effective as the same therapy delivered in-person.”
If you’ve been someone who traditionally found that in person therapy was too overwhelming, impossible to make work with your busy schedule, or intimidating consider giving virtual therapy a try.
