Psychotherapy Blog

When I think about why clients choose online therapy, the first intuitive answer that comes to mind is about convenience: the comfort of being in your own office or home, no travel necessary, the time saved, and the possibility to have sessions during a work trip or a holiday. For many of my clients online therapy was the only practical option. For example, I have worked with refugees or expats unable to find a therapist speaking their language within reachable distance....

Welcome to my house. We had been meeting for a month already, but this was the first time Nick connected from his flat for our weekly online psychotherapy session. Because of our time difference—I am based in Europe, and Nick lives in the US, we were usually connecting during his early morning hours. I was by now fairly familiar with his work surroundings: a small office cubicle, neon lights, grey doors shut tight. This time everything was different, and Nick looked younger and...

Some mornings Nora would wake up, and the little girl would be there. She would always be curled up in the darkest corner of the room, concealed behind the curtains. Her un-natural white skin, her bare feet, and a part of her burgundy-red dress would be clearly visible in the early morning light. She looked wicked, and the very fact of her presence in the room seemed uncanny. But at the same time, Nora felt a compelling desire, almost a necessity,...

The shift from desktop/laptop computers to mobile devices—especially smartphones—has progressed faster than anyone predicted. In most parts of the United States, it is now typical for over 50% of searches for therapists to happen on iPhones or Android phones. Google itself admitted in May 2015 that there are now more searches on mobile than desktop/laptop computers. And while Google commands only about 67% of desktop/laptop searches, they control over 80% of searches on smartphones. On the surface this would seem like...

I thought we had our session today… My client Jane was right, I had just missed the therapy session we had booked. It had not happened to me before, and I felt guilty. Online therapists know how the virtual and body-less nature of the encounter makes it easier to fail each other, be it for the client, or for the therapist. The precious relational tissue seems even more fragile. I always attend to mending these ruptures as well as I can, but...

There are places I’ll remember all my life. —I was born in a small Russian town, a very cold and dirty place. This was one of the first things Anna shared about herself in a long introductory email reaching out to me for online psychotherapy. In this description of her native town, I could sense her sad childhood: a lack of emotional warmth and possibly some neglect. The way people describe their early surroundings usually tells something significant about their life story. We developed early...

This couple therapy session was the last chance before Anna and Guy’s upcoming wedding in Paris. They had reached out to me for a premarital counselling session via Skype, knowing that I was working with mixed couples. Their situation, as Anna exposed it to me in her short email, needed to be addressed with some urgency: they were due to get married in the town hall of Guy’s native Paris within two weeks, and Anna still had serious doubts about her...

I clearly remember my very first visit to my British psychotherapist. She used to receive her patients in her conservatory. Her dogs sometimes got impatient and produced considerable clatter, which I could clearly hear from inside the house. The front door would be unlocked. Clients just had to push the gate to get through an unkempt garden into the peculiar therapy room. She would be already comfortably sitting there in the same old chair, and a flowery cup of tea...