Weitz, P. & Sukthankar, R. (2015). Introduction to working therapeutically online: Non-verbal communication and its role in online Instant Messaging therapy setting . Academy for Online Therapy.
This paper is based on an online interview held by Ritika Sukthankar with Philippa Weitz, March 2015, as part of Ritika’s research.
Weitz and Sukthanakar discuss the merits of live chat / instant messaging as a therapeutic tool, especially consisidering non-verbal communication and its positive and negative effect of the therapeuticvc relationship online. The conclusion is that instant messaging / live chat have plenty of merit as a therpaeutic tool but that it is important to know what you are doing before setting out, in other words, the requirement to train.
Online therapy, live chat.
© Philippa Weitz & Ritika Sukthankar, 2015
R: Can you tell me what you know about non-verbal communication and how it works in online chat counselling?
P: That’s a really big question. First of all, how do I use my own body as the therapist?
I’ve always believed that both the therapist and the client should treat their body as a psychological barometer. Our body tells us a lot about what’s going on in the room. Even if we can’t see each other, there’s a lot going on. So, for example, I might say to a client in a situation, ‘My tummy feels all tight; I can feel the anxiety for you.’
That would be an example of how I use it and how I convey that information to my clients, because, when you’re working by chat, it’s reading between the lines, literally.
In the same way, I might say to a client, or rather, type it, ‘What’s going on in your body at the moment?’ It would be the same as in the room. If the client was opposite me, I’d say, ‘What’s going on with you?’ The only difference is I can’t see the client jigging her leg or fiddling around or whatever. But, you know, there are other clues. Usually, when somebody is not feeling very comfortable in their body, they’re not feeling very comfortable in their mind either and they’re struggling with words, often, at the same time. So, one of the clues might be, for example, where there are gaps. So something has been said and there seems like quite a long gap between the chats.
In my client information pack, and everybody who works online needs to be very clear contractually and have a good client information pack that explains how things might work differently. One of the things I talk about in my client information pack is the role of silence. I mean written silence too. For example, on Skype, which is not suitable for therapeutic purposes, when somebody’s typing you see a little pen, so you know they’re typing. Therapists have found that to be invaluable in knowing that their client is at the other end.
On VSee.com, [Editor's note, 2022, this was written when VSee would have been cosnider the best online platform for therapeutic use, Zoom and others have replaced this] which is suitable for therapeutic purposes because it complies to the right level of confidentiality, you don’t have those little pens. I don’t have any problem with that, as one of the things I say to my client in the first session is, ‘If I haven’t heard from you, if there ever seems to be quite a lot of silence in the room, I’ll type some dots,’. What I don’t want to do is to interfere with their thought process by saying, ‘Are you still there? Are you alright?’ So I would generate a couple of dots, just so they know that I’m still there. That’s the agreement I have with my clients – we can do some dots, just so that we know we’re there. It’s a very simple, little technique that helps people to be, because, when people are struggling with their stuff, they can’t always get the words out.
So I can’t see the body language, so I have to guess that, if I’ve got some silence, there’s something else going on, but I will know that by the context of the preceding conversation, because I know where we’re going. These things don’t usually come as a bolt out of the blue. You’re not suddenly talking about what you bought in Marks & Spencer’s on Saturday and go straight into a silence. There’s a build-up in the conversation, an emotional build-up in the conversation and there might be a ‘bingo’ moment when either I or the client has hit that nerve and the silence will happen. So, I might say, ‘What’s going on in your body?’ or I might just acknowledge that there’s a silence, but I might just leave them to it a bit.
R: I guess you’ve also touched on how that’s different to face-to-face counselling – whereas the body is physically available to you and, from what I’m hearing, you take clues from other areas. So you’re paying particular attention to the build-up before that; what’s happening before when there’s silence in the chat communication, then specifically asking the client, ‘What’s going on in your body?’ or being explicit about what’s going on in your own body.
P: Absolutely, and that’s a matter of some experience, judging, that’s it. I think a newly qualified counsellor sometimes suffers from grandiosity. What I mean by that is they think they can cure everything and do anything and they know everything. I’ve noticed in my work that more qualified and more experienced psychotherapists and counsellors are often much more reflective about their own frailties and weaknesses than a new therapist.
I think, as a setting out counsellor, as a new counsellor, I probably would adhere, at a very minimum, to the Rogerian core conditions, because, if you stick to those, you won’t go wrong and I would always encourage people not to take risks with clients. We’re not here to take risks with clients,
I can see how much my online counselling has changed enormously this year since I trained to work online. I’m a great believer in being trained to work therapeutically online. I understand there might be emergency sessions, but otherwise I don’t think people should be counselling online without having a proper training, precisely because of issues such as how do you deal with the body.
Dealing with the body in psychotherapy, for me, is really important. I think that’s because I’m quite an eclectic practitioner. Some modalities would ignore the body completely and only be interested in the relational; what’s going on between us. Others are more task-focused.
There are all sorts of different things and things we need to think about in terms of the body. These may relate to your modality and how you’re working, to some extent, because some modalities don’t use the body at all and some would use it a lot. In my online training we were encouraged to think about the modality we were using and how we could use it online and how we might need to adapt it. The body would be one of the things you’d need to think about.
R: And could you expand on your particular experience of that in online chat? Could you maybe think about what’s missing, what’s helpful and what’s different?
P: Well, what’s missing, obviously, is being able to see; that visual clue. That’s the obvious thing that’s missing. But, actually, do you know something? That’s an advantage.
R: Could you explain that?
P: Chat is the fastest growing therapeutic format in the online world. I think it’s precisely because you can’t see the counsellor/therapist. It’s probably, in a sense, very psychoanalytic. If you think about psychoanalysis, the patient is lying on the bed, they can’t see the therapist. The therapist can see them, can see them squirming or whatever, wriggling or whatever they might be doing, but the client can’t see them. So what’s the difference? Not a lot, you see. There are many forms of therapy for which the body is unimportant anyway or might be dealt with differently.
I take my cue here from psychoanalysis, in a way and that the client, by not seeing the therapist, is freed from inhibitions. The opposite of an inhibition is a disinhibition and one of the issues that can rise as a result of this, of course, is a higher level of disinhibition. For example, if I was in the same room as a client, they might not like something I say but in the social niceness of the consulting room, they might have contained themselves until they’d gone and never come back again. What they do online might be different. They might go, ‘Fuck you,’ or they might actually just hit the ‘delete’ button or the ‘end’ button.
So there is a disinhibition that can be released. I suppose it’s a negative and a positive all at the same time, through not being able to see the client.
R: Anything else you’d like to say on how it’s helpful, what might be missed, how it’s different?
P: Well it is totally different and that is why I’m a firm believer in training. I would, I’m a trainer. But, taking away the cynical side of I can earn some money from it, I know that that’s fundamental, because working online is so different. The thing that has surprised me has been the powerfulness of the chat.
And it’s really interesting, because Kooth, they’ve just released an interesting report today. [Editor's note, 2022, reference not available.] They’ve been doing research in Sussex at the moment, trying to reduce waiting times. Not only have they managed to reduce waiting times for face-to-face young people, they’ve also discovered that young people really enjoy this sort of format of doing it.
I think, actually, the non-verbal also releases an ability to be open and frank in a way. For example, my first client I had when I was training, her almost final statement to me was that she got so much from the therapy because she couldn’t see me and how helpful she found that.
R: You were saying there is such a big difference, so, for you, one of the big differences is actually the clients are a lot freer. That’s been your experience of it.
P: Yes.
R: Could you say what other differences there are in terms of your experience of online chat and face-to-face counselling, in terms of the non-verbal aspects?
Also, I guess I’m wondering about the felt sense, because practitioners often talk about that when they’re in a physical room with a client, like you were talking about before, something gets created between them. Some people refer to it as an aura, a felt sense of inter-subjectivity. So, when there’s a lack of physical presence, I guess I’m wondering what happens to that and what’s been your experience of that.
P: Well, I have to say that I’m always surprised by the depth to which we go in online work and this inter-subjectivity or the gelling of the moment. It’s about the moment, isn’t it?
R: The process.
P: And the intensity of the moment. I could show you scripts from my various clients in which you could see the power and the intensity of the moment, because, do you know something, it’s very challenging, doing it via the written word. There is an intensity on both sides. The one thing that I find myself always thinking about, and I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing, but I do think about it, is I think this is a written script that’s going to be around forever, because, once I finish the therapy sessions, I copy and paste it into a word document, password protect it and send it to the client. It’s there in posterity.
The one thing that I think is quite different from face-to-face is the “buckling over”, I’ll call it. You say something profound about your mother, I respond to that, but you’ve done that and you’re onto something else and I’m still responding to that. So, I’m still typing something about that and you’ve gone off to talk about your brother now. You type something about your brother and I’m still writing about your mother. So you get into a “dis-looping” and one of the things that’s really important for the therapist, and it’s our job to manage the situation, is to scan up and down at the text all the time to make sure we haven’t missed major things, because that can lead to misunderstanding. You can be typing your response to one thing, the client’s already moved onto the next thing and they’re typing, and mismatch is the outcome.
It’s really important to be scanning up and down and making sure that, first of all, you haven’t missed all major things, because it’s so easy to miss a major item. And, if you’re out of sync because things are moving so fast, then just to say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a bit out of sync here, shall we just catch up on this and then move onto that?’ Because that’s one of the things, because I can’t see the other person and I’m not talking to them – you know, in face to face we’re talking and it goes like this: I talk, you listen; then you talk, I listen; I talk, you listen; one, two, one, two, one, two. That doesn’t happen as clearly in the chat, because, once you start to get on a roll, especially if somebody’s really into their stuff. It can be quite difficult to respond and to know when to respond and when to stay silent, especially when you can’t see them.
So, generally, if I see we’re getting out of sync, I’ll say, ‘Oh, we got out of sync, can I just go back to this point and finish off on that first?’ But, if I sense that the person’s in an emotional state and they’re just dumping the stuff out and need to keep going, then it would be foolish of me to jump in and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute while I just come back on this.’ That would cut their emotional processes completely. So you have to judge it, but I would say one of the hardest things to manage is when it gets out of sync, but it is our job as a therapist to manage that situation; it’s not the client’s job.
R: So what do you use to judge it?
P: One of the things that I look for is a sense of proportion. Just as in a F2F therapy session, I think the client should do probably most of the talking / typing. It’s a balance thing. I, certainly, should not normally be typing more than the client. I guess I would allow two, three or four paragraphs to come over before responding.
Again, it might depend on where we are in the therapeutic process, because I think nearer the beginning the client often needs a leg up; they need some help. They almost need teaching how to do the therapy, certainly online. You do some sort of teaching of them in the earlier bit, so there is more back and forth. But, once you know your client and you know what their stuff, I’m more likely to leave them to free flow more. The proportion should be maybe me one part and then four parts, that sort of thing.
R: You said once you’ve gotten to know your client. How do you get to know the client? So, when you’re in the consulting room, you’ve got the facial gestures, you’ve got the body language, you’ve got the tone of voice and the pace of the voice. So how do you get to know your client when all of that is missing?
P: Well, this is the thing that I found so extraordinary, because, before I did my course last year, and I have written a book on the subject, if you had asked me which would be the best format for therapeutic work online, I would have said this (video-conferencing) would be.
R: That’s what a lot of people think as well.
P: By ‘people’ you mean therapists?
R: Yes, therapists, sorry.
P: That’s right. Therapists think that, but the interesting thing is it’s not necessarily what clients think. My biggest job as a trainer is to move the therapist away from their comfort zone and to open their minds to different ways of doing therapy, because there are lots of different ways of working online, not just through chat, but lots of different ways and therapists are very fit. They have just spent £30,000 or something, training to be a body therapist or a this one or a that one, and the last thing they want is this little, bumptious 58 and a half year old coming in and saying, ‘Well, now, you’ll have to forget all that and do it a new way.’ No, I don’t expect them to forget all that, because they need to integrate it, but it is a whole new learning that needs to happen.
R: So what type of new learning is that?
P: Well, the first week of our course last year, of course I hadn’t read the course book properly, I just signed up for the course, paid the money. Yeah, I’ll do the course, then I’ll be qualified. So, I’m waiting Monday evening at six o’clock, hands poised on the computer and up comes Skype chat. Chat? And, do you know, I was so angry, I could hardly take part in it. I thought what a ridiculous way to run a course, by chat! Because I was where all the therapists are, completely stuck on ‘this is the only way to do it, the best way to online therapy. It took me some weeks to calm down and to actually engage with it. Now I’ve finished both trainings and, I have to say, my favourite way of working online is via chat, because it is so rich and powerful; much richer and powerful than this.
R: And how so is it more rich and powerful?
P: It’s really difficult to say, because, of course, you don’t have any of the cues and clues that you talked about, but, in that freedom from those cues and clues comes a liberty of expression, I think I’ve said it in a different way already, where people just feel freer to be themselves instead of worrying about what I’m thinking about their hair or worrying about whether they’re younger or older. So, for example, when I work online via chat, nobody would know if I’m 20, 40 or 60.
One of the funniest experiences I had was last year starting with a new online therapist, because I have to have an online therapist. So I went onto the ACTO Therpist's Diectory, which is the register of online practitioners. You can only get on that register if you’re qualified to work online. I chose the only CBT one, because I knew nothing about CBT and I thought it would be really interesting. I picked her out, I knew nothing about her. I wrote to her and we had an exchange of emails setting up the contract etc. The first week when she came online and I looked at her, do you know what my reaction was?
R: No.
P: She must be useless, she’s far too young. So that was my immediate reaction.
R: Yes, so you had a snap judgement.
P: Yes. Others of my older colleagues have had the opposite. They have found people think, ‘Oh my God, she’s so old, she can’t know anything.’ Either way chat gets away from that issue of prejudgement. That, in itself, is extremely valuable, because you are just dealing with the essence of the person. You don’t see the bits that make up the person. You can’t prejudge, so there’s a lot of fantasy about what that person’s like or not like. All very useful for therapy.
R: So, in a way, if I’m just reflecting this back and bringing it back to that question of ‘how do you get to know your client’, what I’m hearing is, because there is almost this veil, it’s a slower process of getting to know them, but almost a richer process, because you’re getting to know them without any of your prejudgements.
P: Actually, it’s not slower. That’s the thing I’ve found absolutely extraordinary. All the rest is absolutely fine what you’ve just said except for the speed. I have been staggered by the speed at which people start to work seriously. In face-to-face therapy, you tend to take your time in the first session. The therapist spends about 10 minutes telling you how she works, then you spend half an hour telling them about all your various problems and then the therapist says, ‘Well, this is how I work.’ So you’ve lost the whole session and you’ve done nothing.
Whereas, in working online we do all that before we start. There are the practical things, emails back and forward just sorting out the details. Once you start to work therapeutically, that’s it, you’re working therapeutically. You’ve done all that stuff. It’s all in the client information pack, all in the contract, all being dealt with, with queries back and forth. So, when you start to work, you start to work. They come online for their first session and I go, ‘What would you like to talk about?’ It’s their time. And then they’ll say, ‘Well, I’d like to talk about my ex-wife,’ or, ‘I’d like to talk about my depression,’ or whatever it is.
In the first session, they’ve got to learn to trust me, so I will ask them to tell the story – ‘Well, tell me a bit more about it.’ Because, actually, in the client information form, the average amount of words they will write down will be about four. You want a whole paragraph about their life history and everything and they’ll write, ‘I have a wife and three kids.’ Well, big deal! That’s really helpful from a therapy point of view. So you haven’t learnt anything. So you’ve got to learn about them, so let them tell you. That tends to take up the first session.
By the second and third session, you’re really in there. I’m not really a short-term therapy person, but I’ve been working recently doing six sessions and I’ve been staggered by how much we can achieve in that time. Every one of my clients has achieved, in six sessions, a result that I’m happy about. I’m not saying their whole lives have turned around forever, but they’ve managed to work on a problem, deal with a problem and find a solution and move on. And I could imagine with face-to-face some of that would have taken a year.
R: Absolutely, yes. You said that the client has to learn to trust you. How does the client do that when there’s the lack of physical presence and all those cues?
P: You see, I think far too much is put on the physical presence, because, actually, very little is about physical presence. Freud knew that. It’s actually about the relationship. It’s actually about, when the client says to you, ‘I feel suicidal,’ I don’t reply, ‘Oh my God, we’d better get a doctor,’ or say something horrendously crass. I would say something like, ‘Can you tell me a bit more about that? That sounds really, really difficult.’
It’s all about the Rogerian principle of genuineness, Mick Cooper talks about this in a recent edition of Therapy Today, in a conversation between Mick Cooper and Colin Feltham. I’m sure it’s at the heart of doing good therapy, so that, when you say to the client in writing, ‘That sounds really difficult,’ it mustn’t just be some pat thing you’re writing because you know that’s what you’re meant to write; it’s got to come from the heart. So things like just being open and nonjudgemental and genuine.
R: And do you think that filters into subjectivity and the process between the therapist and the client that we were talking about, that genuineness?
P: Absolutely.
R: Yes, because you said it can just be a string of words that mean nothing.
P: Yes, absolutely, because, as much as I’m finding out about them, they’re finding out about me. So, they’ll be looking for cues in what I write, about how I manage what they say. They’ll give me a nugget to try me out.
R: Do you have any experience of that, that you can reflect on or you can share?
P: Well, every single client, really. They’d say something and a lot will depend on the tone of my response and how invited they feel to go further. What I will always try to be doing is be inviting in my tone and writing to allow them to go further.
I’m thinking of a client I had recently who told me something about himself and came from quite a similar background to me. One of the things I had to think about for quite some time was how much I would reveal of myself, which is exactly the same as face-to-face; it’s exactly the same issue as face-to-face, but it felt important, and I did think about it first, but it felt like, providing I didn’t take over the session, I just said, ‘I have a similar background to you and I might, therefore, have an inkling of what you’re experience.’ You should never have more to say on the subject than the client.
And, so, the use of self-disclosure, which I think is something that needs to be extremely carefully monitored; it’s something you do at your risk and peril, but, in this particular instance, I decided to disclose something because I felt it would help him feel at ease, because I think he felt he was in the only person in the world that felt that way. Rather than give him a little lecture that he wasn’t the only person, it was easier to tell him I’d had the same experience. So that was an example. I told him that and he went, ‘Gosh, that’s fantastic,’ sort of thing, ‘that’s really helpful,’ and off he went on his chat typing.
R: So, because you’re not physically giving a bit of yourself, you’re still able to give a bit of yourself just by giving them that little inkling that you know.
P: Absolutely, and in every single thing we write down, we give a bit of ourselves anyway. You can’t help it, you do.
R: That’s a really interesting point that you’ve made there, that even though you’re physically not giving anything, you actually still are by just the words that you’re saying, they’re getting to know you.
P: Absolutely. And there are other things to consider, such as the metre of the words, how quickly the words come out, how big the words are, how little the words are, how staccato. You know, there’s a lot of music in the words, if you look at it. You have to look at it live to see the speed or the slowness with which they’re written or how one word at a time.
R: So you get a feeling of the tempo.
P: Yes, absolutely, just as in face-to-face. I think there’s too much emphasis, people are too hung up, in a way that, just because you can’t see the person in chat, therefore you’re missing out on something. That’s absolutely not true at all. They’re not missing out at all. There is so much else – the richness of the language, the speed, the tempo, the metaphor used. There are so many different things to think about. Of course, those therapists who have good skills in writing, a narrative therapy might be one of those, have a real gift for online therapy.
I know we’re talking about chat as opposed to email therapy, and I hate email therapy; it’s like yesterday’s news. I was always taught that you need to deal with the here and now – when a client comes in and says, ‘I feel shit today,’ you don’t say, ‘But last week you told me you felt brilliant,’ because that’s yesterday’s news. The trouble is, with emails, they’re writing, you receive it, it’s already in the past tense. So I find that very complex to work with, but one of the advantages of that over chat is you can use colour and font and all sorts of visual things to emphasise a point. Personally, I hate all that. I can’t do any of that at all. I hate it when people write things in bold and then in italic and then in different colours. It’s too busy for me, but some people really respond to it. Kate Dunn talks about that a lot in her work. She’s very experienced in working via email and she talks about the use of visual effects to get that sense, but you don’t have any of that in chat. You’ve got a very two-dimensional typing with no cues.
R: But, from what you’ve been telling me, it’s not that there are no cues, it’s the different types of cues you’re getting online from each other.
P: They’re completely different cues and, actually, they are as full of richness. Once you’re open to it, they are as full of richness as any other form of therapy. I think the issue is with the therapist’s deep resistance that it can’t possibly be as good as being able to see the person.
R: Yes, absolutely. I guess this is why I’ve decided to focus on chat, actually, to be able to hear about that experience and report it to the wider world in that sense.
P: I think that would be very good. We’re still, surprisingly, in early days of therapy online. I say ‘surprisingly’ because the internet has been around now for, generally, a good 20 to 30 years and, yet, Kate Anthony has languished in the wilderness as one of the leaders in the UK on counselling online. The digital age affects every single one of us one way or another. I think, as it becomes more mainstream, I hope that people will take the training more seriously and take more seriously the creativity that comes with working online, and that’s what’s so enriching, the creativity and being open to do it in different ways. It’s just an openness.
Some people will always be better at doing it via email or face-to-face, that’s for sure, but I have certainly been astounded, and I’m a real ‘road to Damascus’ conversion on that, that chat is a very powerful format for therapy and I say that both as the provider of therapy and the receiver of therapy. I have received therapy by chat and all I’ll say is it was a ‘wow’ session.
R: I’m wondering if I can come back to, because you said the use of body for you is so vital to your work. I guess I want to go into that a bit more, because I think that’s really good in terms of being able to hear about your experience, in terms of how you use your body in face-to-face and how that’s different in terms of how you use your body online, in terms of the feelings you get and is it a longer process, is it the same?
P: I guess that, when you’re working face-to-face, you can see the person slouched or sitting bolt upright or jigging their legs or fiddling with their hands or filling with their diary or fiddling with their phone, and you don’t have any of those cues or clues at all when you’re working online. The client is not sitting in an armchair with a box of tissues by them and the usual scenario for a face-to-face therapy. That’s not the way that online therapy happens for the client. The client will be sitting somewhere, hopefully on their own, but in front of a computer. So, I think something about body language – you see I’ve just moved forward because I’m going to type, I’m sitting differently as opposed to the client in the face-to-face therapy room may well be sitting quite passively or fiddling or whatever. But, because you’re sitting over your computer with your hands on the keyboard or near the keyboard, that passive body language doesn’t take place in the same way, I don’t think.
That’s the first thing, and I’m thinking about this as I’m talking. So that passive body language doesn’t happen, because they are sitting in a different way. Even if they’re sitting in an armchair with their laptop, they’re much more engaged and they’re already communicating with the laptop. It’s active rather than passive. The therapy room is quite a passive place to be, in a way. You don’t get up and leap around in it. You sit in your chair and you do as you’re told. Well, you don’t do as you’re told, but there’s a sort of etiquette about what you do in counselling.
R: There’s a boundary, isn’t there?
P: There’s a boundary but there’s also an etiquette that you will sit in your chair and you will talk about whatever or not talk about it, but that chair is where you sit. Whereas I think, in online work, it works quite differently and I think there’s much more engagement between the therapist and the client and it’s a much more equal relationship. In the work I’ve done, and other therapists say the same, is it’s much more of a partnership between the therapist and the client, though it is always my responsibility as the therapist to manage the situation. And I guess the same is true for me: so where am I sitting when I do my therapy? I’m not sitting back in a chair either. I’m not fiddling with my pen or all the other things. I’m sort of hunched over a computer. Body language is quite different and I think that body language, in a sort of way, has an engagement with the computer and then to the client. It’s different from when you sit passively in a chair, leaning back most of the time.
R: And how else do you use your body in terms of how you might use it in a room, in terms of feelings you get? Is that the same? Is it different?
P: I found it to be exactly the same, in that respect. So, for example, I’m thinking of a particular client who made my tummy go into terrible knots, so I told her it made my tummy go into terrible knots, as I would’ve if she’d been in the room.
R: So you use your body quite similarly?
P: Absolutely, as I said right at the beginning. As a barometer, it’s a very, very good indicator of what’s going on. I will say to the client, ‘Monitor what’s going on in your body. It’s really useful.’ Just because I can’t see it, doesn’t mean the body doesn’t exist.
R: So, the words that you see on the screen are able to trigger something in your body. You don’t need any other non-verbal communication to kind of ignite anything within you; that still comes across from the words?
P: Absolutely. The power of the words can be quite dramatic. That is what has really stunned me in a good way, is that, actually, you strip away all the extraneous stuff, in a way, and, so, actually, you’re in quite an intense relationship in these six sessions. It’s much more intense. I suppose in F2F you can spend some time looking out of the window, but, actually, online, you’re so focused on the words in front and reading what the other person’s written and thinking about them, that, actually.
I still remember David, who was a therapist of mine a very long time ago, he had a picture on his wall. It always irritated me, because I’m very anal retentive with these things. It was some picture by Monet or somebody quite famous and it’s a garden bench where you can’t see the fourth leg. I spent the entire sessions thinking that about this bloody fourth leg of the bench and drawing it in, in my mind. What a distraction that was from the session!
R: Yes. So, what I’m hearing is, because there aren’t these distractions…
P: Do you see what I’m getting at?
R: Yes, because there aren’t these distractions, actually the quality of the relationship actually becomes a lot more intensified in terms of the non-verbal communications that go on, in terms of what you feel in your body, what’s being created between the both of you, even though you’re separated by a screen. It feels a lot stronger.
P: It feels very much stronger. The power of words is extremely strong. Why is literature among one of the most powerful forms of communication and entertainment? We all love to read books. Books, whether we read them on iPads or however we read them, the power of the written word is incredibly strong in our culture. I think that, when people criticise chat as being some second rate way of doing therapy, they’ve forgotten about the power of the written word.
R: I think it’s very interesting, yes.
P: What I do think is, because of the way we sit in the therapy and because of the intensity of the power of the words, some of the other stuff is stripped away that in F2F enables us to go on little daydreams. I used to go on a 20-minute daydream, looking at this picture on the wall. That’s not much use for my therapy. I was paying him a lot of money for that. And the picture irritated me so much.
R: Yes. So, it sounds like, in chat you take out all the nitty-gritty and you’re just zooming in, into what’s happening right here, right now between the client and I.
P: Yes.
R: Well, that’s been really brilliant to hear about your experience. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
P: Just really that I think that everybody who wants to really work well online needs to train, because it’s in the training that you think about all these issues, verbal and non-verbal, and how they are in keeping with your way of working, because we all work in different ways.
Of course, we’ve got the issues of different cultures to think about, different disabilities to think about. One little side issue, which I thought was going to be very interesting and, actually, it is but not for the reasons I thought, is I thought that chat was going to be excellent for those who are deaf. But it isn’t, because English is a second language to people who use BSL. So assumptions are the road to ruin. It’s very, very interesting how we make assumptions.
Cooper, M. & Feltham, C. (2014). The quality of connection. The Interview. Therapy Today. October 2014, Vol. 25 Issuee 8. Lutterworth: BACP
Rogers, C. (1973), Some New Challenges. In: American Psychologist. American Psychological Association. May 1973: 379-287