Kate Anthony

OTI Europe Ltd | Consultancy, Personal Training and Research for Online Therapeutic Services

   

Being Virtually Homeless

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Avatars and virtual environments have been on my mind a lot lately: we recently relaunched our Avatar Identity Specialist Certificate; I finally got around to finishing the book Infinite Reality; and a recent question to the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy on the topic from a colleague led to the organisation making it their research enquiry of the month.  This allowed me to revisit my own writings on the subject, and reflect on past experiences that feed into my thirst for understanding how different technologies fit into the lives of others.

On Sunday of this week, it was my absolute pleasure to join DeeAnna in a shop in Second Life (SL) to choose our new virtual office furniture.  Since our previous SL landlady moved on to other projects and closed her Snapshot shopping_001beautiful island, we have been virtually homeless for around six months, both of us feeling out-of-sorts and ungrounded within an important part of our work – the virtual world.  If you have ever been homeless, as I have, you will know exactly what I mean. And if you haven’t, I promise you it’s not exactly a bundle of fun emotionally (quite apart from practically, of course).

To borrow the name of one of my favourite bands, it makes one feel “uncluded”.  I’m not going to exaggerate my experience – it was temporary, during the summer, and mercifully only for a matter of a few weeks – but it certainly gave me an outlook on life that enabled me to understand why people seek communities and environments created by those on the outside of mainstream society.  And what technology has enabled us to do, at least in the developed world, is to seek those out and be part of them virtually.

In our search for a new island in Second Life, I looked at spaces next to graffiti-covered biker bars, got thrown out and banned from a house of a, ummm, shall we say a “private” nature, and gatecrashed a virtual wedding.  I fell into virtual fountain and virtually almost drowned. I met an aardvark who then googled my avatar name and emailed me for therapy. I went to virtual Paris and bought a virtual croissant from a virtual vendor who bizarrely only spoke Spanish. These were interesting experiences, but none of them made me feel included.

So we turned to our dear colleague Gentle Heron, who runs Virtual Ability Island and who had available land for rent – you may remember her from the documentary film Login 2 Life and the feature she wrote for us for TILT Magazine.  We now have space in SL which could have been made for us – a therapeutic community, with a conference centre and cafe for our students to hang out in (office-warming party coming soon!), and a beautiful building with roof garden, library, therapy room, Reiki centre, and TILT’s headquarters .  It’s a work in progress as DeeAnna and I find time to shop together inworld from our offline offices either side of the Atlantic  – but it gets more like our virtual home every day.

I am very used to the odd looks I get when trying to describe the virtual living so many people partake in – it’s why we ask the majority of our students to experience it for themselves as part of their Foundational Course in Cyberculture.  We don’t need to have the same experiences as clients to empathise with them, but we do need to understand how they live.  If the community of the virtual world is where they feel included – rather than uncluded – then who are we to dismiss that as being unreal?

🙂

 

 

Certified Cyber Therapist – new approach, new course!

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At the Online Therapy Institute, our mission is to get as many trained online practitioners out there as possible, to protect the practitioner, the profession, and of course the potentially vulnerable client at the other end of the process.  This is in common with my fellow trainers here in the UK and internationally – we don’t mind which training you choose, as long as you seek training in being an online practitioner!

The classic phrase we all hear from our trainees is “I just didn’t know how much I didn’t know!”

But we also hear how practitioners – who let’s face it have already invested probably a lot of money in their core training – also feel that Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is a never-ending sink hole of expenditure. We empathise with that entirely – as practitioners ourselves, we know that our learning doesn’t end when we graduate with our counselling qualification.

Transferring your offline skills to an online environment isn’t just about knowing how to use electronic forms of communication.  For most of us, that is second nature now – and for the future therapists and clients it’s pretty much going to be in their blood from birth, metaphorically speaking.  I recently wrote an article on this, outlining how that tipping point hasn’t quite happened yet, but isn’t all that far off.

The point is, whether you want to practice online or not, your clients live in a digital world and deserve to have a therapist that is immersed in that world – understanding Cyberculture is the new first step to being an empathic practitioner (click here for an empathy-based in-joke).

But post-graduate training and CPD costs time and money 🙁

If you are thinking about investing in your ongoing development as a practitioner, and want to be an effective therapist in a fast-changing technology driven client world, you have probably seen our full BACP Endorsed trainings as a Certified Cyber FaciOTI_CertifiedCyberTherapist_Cover_v1 (1)_001litator (CCF) at the Institute.  But what if you are just not sure if the financial outlay is going to give you what you need?

DeeAnna and I have thought about this long and hard, and as a result have introduced a new introductory course called our Certified Cyber Therapist (CCT) course.  This cut-down version of our full training still gives you the one-to-one mentoring at every step that we are known for, but at a quarter of the both the cost and time needed.  If you are in the United States, you will have come to know the Distance Credentialed Counselor (DCC) certification as the ‘gold standard’- and OTI has been proud to have written the DCC curriculum, training thousands of practitioners. Now we bring you the absolute latest information through our own credential with our CCT course.

What’s more – if you take the introductory 15 hour CCT course – we’ll discount the money from the full CCF or PGCert training when you are ready for it!  It’s a win-win!  Many of our students pick up additional courses from us as and when time and money allow – and in between they get all the benefits of ongoing resources from us, as well as free subscription to TILT Magazine and now free access to the video library of our awesome colleagues at OnlinEvents!

Read more about the CCT here, and we look forward to mentoring you on your journey to being an effective and ethical online practitioner at whatever training cost suits you!

🙂

Kickstart TILT on the rest of the journey!

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tilt-mags

A few weeks ago, I blogged about how TILT is put together, and how DeeAnna and I complement each other as co-Managing Editors in producing such an accessible and visually pleasing magazine.  “Pride and joy” is a phrase we use a lot in relation to it, but another one we use is “labour of love”!

When we first discussed the possibility of creating a publication of benefit to those not only in our field of working online professionally, but also to those approaching the idea of fitting technology into practice, we talked at length about a journal.  We even had a name for it, JOT, the Journal of Online Therapy.  We approached publishers, wrote proposals, started seeking an Editorial Board and started making lists of potential peer reviewers.  In short, we started by going down the academic road to getting information about technology in our work to the field of counselling and therapy.

Why didn’t we continue down that road?

Well, firstly we knew that the work we do, and the work our colleagues worldwide do, need not be straight-jacketed into the phrase “therapy” in its traditional sense. We wanted a publication that spoke to other members of the helping profession – the coaches, the alternative practitioners, the befrienders and peer-supporters (to name but a few).  Essentially, we wanted to reach an audience that encompassed every type of change-agent using technology – and I include the client in that group as self-facilitator of their improved mental health.

Secondly, it became clear that journals need to make money to attract publishers. Making money from professional journals involves a large financial commitment by readers, and how could we square that with reaching as many people as possible to educate and entertain them about online work?  We needed a platform where we could offer the magazine free to our students, free generally for archived issues, and at minimal cost to everybody else for the current issue.

Finally, we wanted a publication that could keep readers as up-to-date on developments in the field as possible, and this meant that we had to trust our own skills and judgement in what we let get through the editorial process to the page.  I contribute articles to journals, I peer-review papers (sometimes three times over), and I work with editors all over the world. I know what a long process that can be first hand (and applaud those who stick with it!).

But here’s the bottom line – TILT costs money to produce to meet those three targets above: wide audience; open access; quick production. Our baby has grown up, and we need help to continue guiding it on the journey to maintaining the reputation it has as a great resource. Our pride and joy is also a labour of love, and we need to reach out to those who appreciate it now for help to keep it going.

As DeeAnna outlines on her blog – “We have started a Kickstarter campaign to help with the production costs of TILT Magazine, anticipating that as our student body continues to grow, we will not require supplemental monetary aid by 2016.  In the meantime, we pay for the production and distribution of TILT, including graphic layout and the time to edit and compile.”

By contributing to the Kickstarter campaign, you can help us keep TILT on the virtual stands. Please help our Labour of Love remain our Pride and Joy! It can cost as little as 60p, $1, or 70 Eurocents!

 

 

TILT’s Yin and Yang

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Stuart Miles yin yang

Ever noticed how DeeAnna’s blog is pertier than mine?!

Those of you familiar with Therapeutic Innovations in Light of Technology will be familiar with our in-house style. We put as much care into how TILT looks as we do soliciting interesting and dynamic content for you. Our dedicated team of columnists know what we want, and apart from a few images here and there which just can’t live up to the high technical specifications of producing the magazine, we do our contributors justice, we feel.

But you may be interested in just how the yin and yang of DeeAnna and I actually fits into its production, from coming up with the title itself to every issue you have read.

That’s not to suggest that DA and I are opposites – that is very much not the case. We share a philosophy and work ethic that has led to the steady growth of the Online Therapy Institute to be our life/work achievement since 2008, providing education and training not just in our core field of psychotherapy, but also our sister fields of coaching and complimentary health provision. We live 3,300 miles apart (and that’s as the crow flies, never mind the miles we tread searching for coffee and the occasional airport cocktail en route). We work five hours apart, meaning that we have to synch our day to take that into account when it comes to deadlines and check-ins with each other. And most importantly, we have to recognise each other’s strengths, and work to them accordingly.

With the production of TILT, my wordy yin plays to DeeAnna’s visual yang. Give me 100,000 words to edit or write, and I am a happy bunny. Ask me to come up with a visual that both illustrates and demonstrates a concept, and I will probably pack up my virtual bags and head for the Scottish Highlands to avoid you. It’s just not in my genetic make-up.

But of course, that isn’t a problem when it comes to producing TILT, because I have DeeAnna!

DeeAnna’s strength often lies in the visual. She can conceptualise what it is the words are trying to say, and then choose visuals to compliment and demonstrate the power of those words. An early adopter of Pinterest, she can see how online vision boards fit into our work, for example – whereas my Pinterest account still has two images pinned as far as I recall – Linlithgow Palace and the logo of an organisation I have forgotten. DeeAnna introduced me to PicMonkey, which she swears by, around four weeks ago and the tab is still open on my laptop untouched. I agonise over every image so far on this blog and still have no idea whether it conveys what I want it to.

So with TILT, I take first lead on submitted columns and features. I merrily edit away before uploading to Dropbox for DeeAnna’s turn. A folder of words sits waiting for the magic to happen.

And then poof – when DeeAnna’s visual yang kicks in, I see images aplenty uploading. We consult on the cover image only (which tends to consist of me ummming and ahhhhing a lot). We turn it over to our wonderful designer Delaine, and a new edition of TILT is born.

According to Wikipedia today,

“Yin and yang can be thought of as complementary (instead of opposing) forces interacting to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the parts.”

And, as a wordy kinda gal, that just about sums TILT up for me.
🙂

“Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net”.