“Hi, my name is Pete Campie. I’m a marriage and family therapist at Cedar Rapids Counseling Center, and today I wanted to talk a little bit about how to get the most out of your therapy session if you’re doing it via telehealth. No matter what platform you’re using to do it via telehealth there are challenges that come up that are specific to video conferencing and can really hamper your ability to get the most out of those sessions. As therapists, we are, of course, doing a lot more sessions, via teleconference, and you know with that experience we’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way. These can really help you minimize distractions and really find what you’re looking for out of those sessions, even if it is something that you’re doing on your computer or your phone.
Well, my first tip is to really be mindful of the time and try to get the most out of each minute that you can. Most of our sessions will last about an hour, it’s good to have a drink, it’s good to have you know, access to anything you might need over the course of that hour, just so that you don’t break up the continuity or have to get up and leave or something like that. Which, you know, when we’re talking about feelings can definitely be can be a challenge or a roadblock.
The second focus area that I wanted to cover was distractions, mostly because they’re everywhere. Whether you’ve got kids, pets, maybe a loud partner in the other room, all those things can really make it hard to focus on what you’re trying to focus on in your therapy session. Now obviously we can’t do anything about the guy with no muffler blowing down your road, but if you work on managing the distractions that you can predict, hopefully, the distractions that you can’t predict will be less disruptive.
The last piece of getting the most out of your teletherapy session is technical issues. Since these are done on your computer, on your phone it’s very common to have issues with the camera, issues with the microphone, even issues with your Wi-Fi. What I find to be helpful is to test these things out before you get on to your session. You know, maybe five or 10 minutes before the session, see if you can get your computer camera working, make sure that it’s pointing in the right direction. Make sure that you don’t have any cords that you might trip on or anything that could be in the way. As far as your physical setup, but also your computer setup, you know, if you have push notifications that frequently come across the phone, mine always made this really loud ding. So, you might want to silence those as well if you’re planning to do your session on your phone.
Thanks for taking the time to listen to a few of these tips and tricks to get the most out of your telehealth session, hopefully, some of them have been useful. If you’re interested in learning a little bit more about me or the Cedar Rapids Counseling Center, feel free to visit our website, give us a call. I am accepting new clients, and I do sessions, both in-person and via telehealth so if you’d like you can put all these tips to use when you talk to me.”
