Video sessions, with my therapist? Are you sure?

As many people are making dramatic changes to their lives to try to #flattenthecurve in our country while we deal with this pandemic, therapists are making changes as well. Most of us are moving towards video session and our practice is no different! Starting next week, we are going to be only offering video sessions for our clients until it is reasonable to start up in person sessions again and we feel comfortable doing so without concern of transmitting Covid19.

As the leader in our practice, this was a tough decision for me for many reasons. One, I really want to support my clients and love doing so in person. Two, I really didn’t want this choice to impact people’s access to care particularly during a time where so many of us are understandably feeling stressed, anxious, and even depressed. Three, I also genuinely believe in how calming it can be to have some normalcy in our lives when the world feels like it is falling apart.

Upon reflection, I realized that while I am feeling all these conflicting feelings about it, people might be feeling conflicted even about attending sessions. We all know that there has been a variety of responses to Covid19 and some people continue to feel that we are all “over-reacting.” However, there are also those who are working hard to change their lives in the interest of protecting the most vulnerable in our society. Once I got used to the idea of changing our life and the way we offer our services, the more I realized that this is valuable coping in a time when things are unstable. Perhaps the more we learn to roll with the challenges life hands us, even when they are HUGE like right now, the more we all learn how to refocus on what mattes and how we can connect and cope together through this unprecedented time in our world.

So, I had my first client video sessions in the past few days and realized that this is actually such a great way to connect with my clients! We luckily had very few tech related issues and the sessions felt almost exactly the same as in our office. My clients loved it and I felt thrilled to be able to continue to provide services without feeling any conflict around if I could possibly be exposing my clients to something dangerous.

For those of you on the fence about telehealth, I thought I would share some pros with you!

• You can do it from the comfort of your home
• Video sessions are very similar to in person sessions when you are using a platform with little buffering like we are at our office
• You don’t need to worry about possible transmission of coronavirus
• You can optimize your time as you will not have travel time

These are just simple things that were fun today. The most important reason to continue with telehealth is that you don’t need to cancel your personal growth just because everything else in our world is cancelled. You can still work on yourself, how you are managing the unknown of this situation, and find support. Plus, we are all not sure how long this situation will last and it is going to be important for all of us to schedule in self-care. I feel that many parents in our world who are suddenly home schooling while working, are going to feel the pressure to be in survival mode throughout this situation. I would encourage you to consider the harm and stress of that. Carving out an hour a week to find support and a time for you, is most likely going to be crucial in maintaining this situation as long as we need to.

We at Thrive would be thrilled to help any Californians during this time and are no longer limited to the bounds of who can drive to our office. We are hopeful that this will help extend the people we are able to help, particularly during a time of such challenge and uncertainty in our country. We are even working on strategies of things to do with younger kids in telehealth and ways to continue our work with the whole family!

From our Thrive family to your family, we hope everyone is hanging in there and we look forward to supporting you!