Online therapy provides the opportunity to get help to many people who would really struggle to access counselling if they had to travel for face-to-face sessions. It is much more convenient and takes place from a place of your choosing, where you feel safe and secure.
So you’ve decided you should talk to somebody about your problems. You’ve decided to at least try counselling and see if that helps. Perhaps it’s what your friends have been hinting at, or suggesting you could try, or outright telling you it’s what you need to do. And you’ve been persuaded that maybe they’re right. You do need somebody to listen.
You tentatively do a bit of research but quickly hit a roadblock. The trouble is, you don’t live in a city where there are plenty of counsellors, in fact you live miles from the nearest town. There are only a handful of options within a reasonable drive and none of them seem right.
They may be somebody you already know. If you’ve barely accepted yourself that you need counselling, you may be keen to keep the fact private. So meeting your therapist in the post office, or on the street with your friends, could be awkward. Or maybe they specialise in types of therapy you don’t need or aren’t available when you are. Or, for some reason you can’t really explain, they may just not seem like somebody you could open up to.
Or perhaps you have a different issue: you have health problems – whether physical or mental health – which mean that leaving your home is very difficult for you. But you still need to be able to talk freely about how you feel to somebody who will truly listen, not judge but instead do their utmost to understand why you feel the way you do. Somebody who isn’t a friend or a relative that might be worried or angry or upset about what you need to say.
Or maybe you are an overworked, time-poor professional trying to cope with every minute of every day being already filled, without the luxury of time and space for enough self-care and reflection. Online therapy at least cuts down on the inevitable travel time which means therapy becomes easier to fit into a packed schedule.
Over recent years we’ve all become much more accepting of online connections. Many people find it much easier to share difficult thoughts on the phone than they do in person. If video calls were not much of a feature of our lives before the pandemic, most people had to rely on them during lockdown.
So at least one positive side-effect of the pandemic has been that online therapy has become accepted as just as effective as face-to-face. Even better, it allows so many more people to access support. Help really is only a few clicks away.
