Zoom Therapy: What Are We Gaining, and Losing, From Going Digital?

I’m a lifelong insomniac. Until college, I preferred any bed that didn’t leave me alone in my own, a tendency my parents long suspected therapy could solve. I’ve since spent close to a decade chasing sleep and experimenting with methods that span the therapeutic spectrum, from seeing my mother’s own behavioral therapist, a warm woman (but an obvious mistake), to a short stint with an Jungian therapist on the Upper East Side whose rotating screensaver of Galapagos wildlife I would watch, reclined on her tufted-leather couch; to a few sessions with a male psychiatrist who I associate with Paul Auster novels and a low-level depression that I thought Zoloft could solve. (Couldn’t!)

It took me until August of last year to commit regularly to weekly sessions, at a discounted rate reserved for “creative types,” with a young therapist who I now know, after a quick Google search, is a licensed marriage therapist specializing in anxiety, life transitions, and identity development. (My trifecta!) At first, I was wary of seeing someone who wasn’t my parents’ age or older, and my trepidation only grew after a series of run-ins with her at my Brooklyn farmer’s market: she’d stand, exotic produce in hand, dressed elegantly in outfits foreign from her in-session uniforms, surrounded by a cadre of other hip thirty-somethings. I’d hide, crossing the street so as to avoid an awkward exchange. More than facing the fact that my therapist might actually be cool, I was having trouble accepting that she too was a person with a life outside of the room we found ourselves in on Tuesdays at 10 a.m.

Come March of this year, running into my therapist became the least of my worries. Seeing her at all was impossible, and so we pivoted, like everything else, to a virtual model. Our first session, done via Doxy, was strangely intimate: me in my bed, my laptop propped up on a stack of pillows, and her in her living room, surrounded by plants, a bright yellow lamp beside her, her back facing a window overlooking our shared neighborhood. Two people, just out of bed (well, half of us anyway), surrounded by our things. I rebelled against the new format at first, cancelling more frequently and more last minute, acting as if I was obliging her when she called. As if I wasn’t the one paying for her time. I was wasting both our time, and cheating only myself.

But: the world was collapsing and I, useless and confined to a new stay-at-home reality, was watching it from my window. And so, as if roused from a bad dream, I awoke to the reality of my privilege: I had someone else to talk to, and someone to safely welcome into my home. Suddenly my therapist was there on the couch, sitting beside me; she was there when my electrician showed up unannounced; there when my boyfriend accidentally entered the room (a mistake he knows never to repeat). She was becoming someone like a friend, an intimate confidante, a bystander to my life as it was unfolding in real time. And whether it was my newfound commitment, or the forced intimacy of telehealth, I was making breakthroughs. I even found myself looking forward to our sessions.

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