Some therapists, including myself, had been discouraged from working online by our training organisations. Rapport is key in any personal change work we learnt (absolutely right!) and this is difficult to achieve online (turns out not to be right!).

Governing bodies were initially cautious too, even though studies have been showing that online therapy can be equally effective as in person work. In the end the governing bodies also took the leap and began to offer training, guidance and advice to those therapists looking to get started online.

As well as concerns about rapport, other voices argued against online sessions because of technology concerns. “What if the connection goes down?”. I wonder if some of these concerns were a little outdated, as we’ve certainly moved on a long way since the days of dial-up internet connections and flaky signals.

In reality, in my experience, connection issues are rare and easily resolved by calling the client on their phone if we lose our internet connection. And in the rare case we have a problem, the client moving to a different part of their house or maybe switching to a different device is all that is needed. I consider this sort of thing to be the face to face equivalent of “What if the client gets stuck in traffic and is late?”, answer - we’ll adapt, we’ll work round it, we’ll figure it out!