Meeting with a therapist is nothing more than giving yourself a chance to hear yourself better. It will allow you to get to know your needs better, find out what you want, what you need to achieve it. It will help you discover what you need to do to get to where you want to be. And although meeting with a therapist in itself is not enough, it will help you develop a deeper understanding of yourself, prepare yourself to make important, sometimes difficult decisions, and set goals that are important to you. Below are a few points on how you can prepare for an online psychologist meeting to get the most out of your therapy session.
- You can take part in an online meeting with a psychologist by connecting through a desktop computer or laptop, but also a tablet and smartphone, which gives you great opportunities when it comes to places where you can connect with a specialist – the only condition is access to the internet.
- Before meeting the psychotherapist, check that everything works (e.g. application, headphones, microphone). Sometimes applications can hang, often this happens e.g. after updating the system of the device.
- Find a comfortable place to sit, remember that you will spend 50 minutes in it (that’s how long individual sessions last, for couples the estimated time is 1.5 hours)
- Remember to choose a place where you will feel free, without stress, that someone overhears what you say. Lack of comfort can greatly limit your possibilities of getting the best / best from a therapy session. During a meeting in the office, it is the therapist’s responsibility to organize everything so that a person with difficulties feels safe and comfortable – during an online session you also have to take care of it.
- During the meeting with the psychotherapist, you can come to interesting, important discoveries, conclusions, reflections, surprising feelings may appear. So let’s have a notebook with you to write something to write down the most important things. This is a good way to be able to return to them after the meeting or between sessions with the therapist. All you have to do is let the emerging new thoughts and feelings develop in you. Sometimes it can help to talk to a trusted and close person about them.
- Remember that you do most of the work not at the meeting with the psychotherapist but after him. Reading notes taken during the session can help organize thoughts, a better understanding of emerging reflections, assimilating new information about yourself, and your functioning – you can also save them. Even if their content is not always pleasant, they may pleasantly surprise you. If you find them important, you can then use these thoughts to work on the next session.
- It is also worth observing how you function between sessions, in dealing with people important to you or strangers – depending on what your problem is about. You can also use these observations during your next session.
What we love online psychotherapy for
For its availability, convenience, price (usually it is cheaper than service in a psychological office). Many people use this solution on a “either online or not at all” basis, so it’s hard to deny that this is a cool and useful breeze of modernity.
It is most often used by persons living abroad (where the language or the price of consultation may be a barrier to access to services); overworked, with a small amount of free time (connecting to an online psychologist saves up to 2 hours, which are needed to get to the office); living in the countryside or in a small town (where usually there is not a large selection of specialists and available dates) or those who simply feel the safest and most comfortable at home and where they want to talk to a psychologist – because yes! And you know what? They not only have the right to do so.
