Seeing your couples online holds a great deal of potential – and possibly anxiety, too. We hope you’ll find the information on this page helpful.[/text_block]
5-Minute Video About Beginning Sessions.
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Some Advantages and Disadvantages of Working Online:
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Advantages
- Potential to use the crisis/quarantine to improve and reinforce the couple’s ability to work as a team
- Increased intimacy from “meeting” their kids/pets
- Therapist skills increase because being directive and intervening quickly is essential
- Ability to reach and work with people from a broader geographic area
- Convenient for partners who travel a lot
- Save on office rent if you work from home
- More flexibility for your schedule
- Couples like the flexibility, too.
- Efficient – couples don’t have to take as much time away from work.
- Unlike telephone work, you can see their nonverbal facial cues
- Powerful work can be done with the two partners in different locations
- You can frontload the work before the first session.
Disadvantages
- Zoom fatigue and headaches from too much screen time
- New modality causes more exhaustion at end of the day
- Internet and tech challenges
- You feel less able to control fights and negative energy
- You can’t control interruptions from family members, phones and pets
- It is easier for a client to leave a session prematurely
- Harder to do somatic work
What to Consider as You Move to Working Online.
- How do you choose whether to work with a new couple or not?
- What questionnaires or diagnostic forms do you use to screen new clients?
- Do you always do a phone screening first or do you do some other type of diagnostic evaluation?
- What is the optimal length of time between first contact and your availability for a first session?
- How do you accept payment?
- What is and is not okay to put in email?
- Do you use an online scheduling calendar or not?
- How do you deal with internet connection issues?
- How do you make a strong, solid emotional connection with each partner?
- What has changed about starting your sessions?
- What has changed about ending your sessions?
- Do you ask partners to be in the same room or two different rooms?
- Do you ask partners to be on one screen or two?
- When is it essential to be able to see both partners on the screen?
- How do you onboard old clients who are returning?
- Do you have strategies for working with fights and volatility?
- How do you determine clients’ willingness to be accountable for self change?
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Your FREE Guide to Working with Infidelity
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Register for How To Work More Effectively With Couples Online webinar
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Discover to the How to Work More Effectively with Couples Online
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Watch this panel presentation of my husband and me along with Sue Diamond and Nancy St. John – two therapists who have been seeing couples online for years. Collectively, we’ve seen many hundreds of couples online. We want to share what we’ve learned with you.[/text_block]
In our recorded training, How to Work More Effectively with Couples Online, you’ll get 90 minutes of tips, techniques, and suggestions for overcoming your biggest challenges to online couples work.[/text_block]
- How to get past your anxiety about technology
- How to get self-accountability, starting with the first phone call
- How to define your expectations of the client
- How to start and end sessions – screening for stress level
- Effective questions to ask at the beginning to get more productive sessions
- How to end angry sessions
- How to manage hostility
- When and how to use appreciations
- Negotiating routines
- How to use experiential exercises
- Using the stop/replay exercise for repairing triggers
- And much more
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Here’s what people are saying about the training…
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