I was pleased recently to have a good old chin-wag with my colleague Clinton Power, the founder of Australia Counselling, about Online Therapy and whether it is the future of the profession.  Clinton hosts an awesome number of interviews on iTunes, and I’m more than happy to be one of them!  Do check it out, there’s something for everyone there.

But do start with my interview! I talk about the current state-of-play of how we are defining Online Therapy, my hopes for the future where we can stop talking about the field as something with a technology attached to it, and start conceptualising it as just another way of having a therapeutic interaction with a client – focusing on the therapy, not the channel we have to hand.

You may remember I touched on these themes in my blog about Omnichannelled Therapy recently, and you’ll be able to read more about this in a forthcoming article in the BACP Counselling at Work journal (and read my last column here!).

Also part of the interview is the work of PlusGuidance, and my role in helping this young platform set the global standards by which we all work if choosing to work online. And remember, the platform is designed to work with your face-to-face practice as well, and is free to sign up to.

So – I hope you enjoy the interview! Listen to it from Clinton’s blog here while you browse the resources posted there to accompany it, or click below.

One of the things I love about collaboration is how things tend to circle back around to work in your favour as well as the recipient of the original favour!

Take this as an example – a colleague in the USA reached out recently for resources for her presentation to a professional organisation in Ireland – which, since I live in Scotland, is but a hop, skip and a short flight away from me. After a quick videoconference to align our thoughts, I sent her some presentations on ethics and theory of Online Therapy to make sure she was fully armed with the most up-to-date resources in relation to the UK and Ireland.

The colleague came to me via my close colleague DeeAnna and their work together within the field of using Essential Oils as a compliment to a healthy lifestyle. An unusual link you may think – Online Therapy and Aromatherapy – but as you can see from a recent article in TILT Magazine, “Aromatherapy Goes Digital”, soon to made available as a free resource, technology need not exclude more traditional means of well-being.

Having shared resources from my own suite of face-to-face workshops with the colleague, her contacts came to me for assistance in developing the ethical side of online delivery of services for the profession in their country, and now I am very much looking forward to flying over to Ireland to present, brainstorm and develop services in yet another part of the world.

In many ways, pioneers of any development in society feel very protective of their ideas and – in particular – their intellectual copyright. Many of us spend long hours putting in the work needed to develop the good of our profession, and this is particularly the case when we are constantly running to keep up with technological developments that impact on our clients and our work. And in many instances, we feel the need to shut down and tell ourselves “I put all the graft in, why should I give it away?”

Personally, I struggle with this a lot – I am naturally a giving person, and yet I also need to put bread on the table. My mission has always been to educate the profession of counselling and psychotherapy – and its related fields such as coaching – in how best to safely take advantage of what technology can offer both us and our clients, but that and a dime will buy me a cup of coffee, as the saying goes (that link is indeed totally a birthday present hint, btw).

So I have learnt to trust in CyberKarma. That’s not to say that I can give away my time and work for free all of the time (although don’t forget that the Online Therapy Institute has a stunning bunch of free resources for you!), but sometimes we just have to trust that collaboration with colleagues we know only in Cyberspace will come good – CyberKarma can mean that doing favours for others online will come back around to give you a cuddle rather than bite you in the backside. I guess that’s a part of CyberCulture I haven’t appreciated enough yet.

🙂