Telephone Psychotherapy

Montage by Victor Bloomberg, December 27, 2016

Cell Phone Sessions

This is about a young mother with two little ones. Her husband was in tech [and is hyper, self- absorbed]. Theirs is not a gratifying relationship. She came out of terrible poverty, had an alcoholic father and an emotionally disturbed mother. Her parents were immigrants. She got herself out of that situation by going to college and then she met this guy. She really did feel that he was like the American dream and if she married him her life would be perfect. She didn’t look much farther than that. Now, years later, the stress is pretty bad. I saw her in the office for a year and a half before the pandemic hit. She came in and we worked through a lot together. It really freed her up. She made great strides. It was often very painful. She worked really hard to stay aware of her feelings, to try to make some healthy changes. To allow herself to like to take a walk every day. They were important little steps. But, COVID happened. She did not have a laptop even though her husband was successful in tech. She had to barricade herself in her room to keep the boundaries with her preschoolers. They wanted her. She’d let sessions be interrupted. She stopped that to have her session. Man, that became the beginning of a lot of change. She began to recognize that she sacrificed excessively. And I think Telehealth required her to practice the stuff we talked about. Maybe coming into the office became comfortable, going over how bad things are. Then there was a shift, “I need to make my life better.” She is a changed woman. She is not a victim. She asserts herself. She tells her husband what she needs. She asks things of him. She sticks with it. Her relationship with her children is much better, because she’s much calmer. She realized that she was becoming, acting like her own mother to her own little girls. And it killed her when she realized that. Telehealth came at the right moment. She was strong enough on her own to really start practicing and becoming the life she wanted. Yeah, it wasn’t even screen to screen. It was just a cell phone. That’s it. She and I now meet once a month. And that’s all her own doing. First, she went every other week. Then she started to miss. Things came up. To me, it is always a sign of the client not needing it as much. She was resuming her life. And she was stronger. It’s been incredibly rewarding, and her life is better. The best outcome so far with Telehealth.

The story is from a psychotherapist with 32 years experience and is psychodynamic in approach. Telehealth, including telephone work, began when COVID-19 forced businesses to shut their doors.