Clay: Hello everyone and welcome to the Online Counselling Podcast. I want to give a special thank you today to Melvin Varghese of Selling the Coach and Joe Sanok of Practice of the Practice who both had me on their podcasts to talk about Online Counselling and the Directory that we’re creating. They are great guys with incredible value on their sites, really making a huge contribution to our field, and man, they have big followings. The numbers of people who came to the site really exploded after their podcast went live and we’ve had a lot of new signups on the Directory. Thank you to both of them and if you are a new listener because you found me through them, welcome. I’m glad to have you with us. Lots of exciting things are coming up.
As I mentioned last week, we are beginning our huge project of contacting each state’s licensing board to have them come on the podcast and talk about regulations of counseling people in different states. If you just had a moment where you went, “Huh?” Let me explain. Currently, licensing boards are playing catch up to the online counseling and how technology is changing the field here in the United States. For example, if you are licensed therapist in Florida and you only have a license in Florida, and someone from Alabama, a maybe just a couple of miles away from you, would like to start counseling with you online, the question is, can you legally do that?
Now, some therapists would say, “Sure. I’m in Florida. I’m licensed in Florida and the counseling is happening where I sit. I’m covered.” Well actually, that turns out not to be the case. This is a common misunderstanding. I have the same misunderstanding. You see, licensing boards are not really there to protect the therapist. They are there to protect their state’s citizens. That is their mandate and they say, “In order for the citizens of Alabama to get counseling, he needs to be seen by someone that we say is qualified. We know he is qualified because we looked at his education and he passed our test.”
The folks over in Florida now, “We don’t know about your quality control. Maybe you only require two years of post grad supervision and we require three years.” I’m totally making that up, by the way. I have no idea what the Florida and Alabama requirements are. I’m just using that as an example, and just about every state has defined therapy, online therapy as happening where the client sits, not where the therapists sits. My grandmother always says, “Follow the money.” How are the boards incentivized? They are incentivized to keep things unchanged because how do they get their money? From therapists who pay for license renewals, continuing education, test taking, training, etc.
Maybe that’s a bit too cynical but something to consider. It’s all in the mix. They are not too keen on, “Let’s have a national license” just like my driver’s license. I don’t have to stop at the border of New Jersey and get a new license to go across the rest of the state. Anyway, something to consider. Now, each state is different and that’s why we are going to each one and see if they will clarify things. For example, I’ve been told – second hand – that North Carolina recently updated their law saying that you could do counseling with one of their citizens if you are licensed somewhere in the United States, it doesn’t have to be North Carolina, but you can only do it for 30 days.
I think they were trying to address issues like if someone was traveling and on vacation in North Carolina and still needed to see their therapist back where they lived, but get this. They didn’t include the word “consecutive” in the law. You could actually see the client, in theory, once a week for 30 weeks. That would be your 30 days a year. See how strange all this gets? Hopefully, we can shed some light on things. That’s not all bad. This does mean that you could travel and take your clients with you. Going with the previous example, our Florida therapist who is licensed in Florida, seeing all Florida clients could travel to LA for a month for a long vacation still see his clients.
Remember, it’s where the client’s sits that matters. That’s a big draw to many therapists who, like me, love to travel. If you know of anyone who is currently working in a state licensing board, send them my way. I would love an introduction. By the way, are you on our mailing list? If not, you need to be. I’m putting together a webinar on the top 5 things to consider when you start an online therapy practice and if you sign up for the email list, you’ll know when that starts. Just go to onlinecounselling.com, click on Therapist Tool Box and there’s a box to enter your email and we won’t abuse it. We’ll take care of it. If I get to be annoying, you can just discontinue your subscription. All good.
On to today’s guest, Carole Francis Smith is a counseling psychologist in Bristol, England and she has a gorgeous British accent that I could listen to all day. She is a chartered psychologist with the British Psychological Society and a member of the Association for Counseling and Therapy Online. She is also working with our friend, Jeff Simon, in creating the Online Therapy Hub. Now, her specialty is in email therapy and I’ve spoken a lot recently about how I used to be very, let’s say, closed minded about counseling via email, but after reading Philippa Weitz’ book, Psychotherapy 2.0 – I really should get a kickback from that book. I’m pushing it so hard – it really opened things up for me, exposed my prejudices on this topic, so I wanted to talk with someone who is an expert in this field. Carol Actually gives trainings on how to do email therapy. She did her dissertation on this, so she knows her stuff and she’s a great guest. Let’s jump right in with Carole Francis Smith.
Hello and welcome to the Online Counselling Podcast. I’m Clay Cockrell and today, I’m thrilled to have as our guest, Dr. Carole Francis Smith who is a therapist in the UK who works online. Carole, thank you so much for joining us.
Carole: You’re welcome.
Clay: I just realized, and I do this every time, my realize will realize that I completely forgot to turn off my air conditioning with the sound and that’s going to be very difficult today because we were talking just before the call that it’s 94 degrees here in New York. It’s hot and steamy and awful. Be glad that you’re there in the UK.
Carole: Well, funnily enough, I have an office in the loft of my house, so that’s also quite hot, so just before I started talking to you, I turned my air conditioning off. If we both start melting, we’ll be doing it together, Clay.
Clay: Okay, that’s very good. That’s very good. I’m not alone. Carole, tell us a little bit about how you came to be a therapist and what drew you to this profession?
Carole: Okay. Well, I guess I came to it a little bit later in life. I had a 20-year career in, I’ve sort of working for a big organization in this country. Whilst I was in that career, I realized that I was sort of, when I was helping the people there, I sort of was helping them under the umbrella of that particular organization and I wasn’t, I remember having a thought sort of, am I really helping the person and started training whilst I was still working as a counselor or sort of through the counseling system, and then I left and took a psychology degree. Towards the end of that, the sort of counseling and psychology ideas melded and I took the counseling and psychology doctorate because it held a bit of everything that I was interested in, and so that was my journey. Of course, it’s probably a lot longer and a more in depth and sort of what happens to you when you’re growing up, that sort of thing. All of that was involved.
Clay: How long have you been in private practice?
Carole: Okay. I haven’t been in private practice that long. I’ve been in private practice since the end of last year. Before that, I was working in different placements in the NHS for charities and qualification to work in different places to sort of get a feel for different types of work and what you’re suited to sort of forge out an identity for yourself of what you want to do. My doctoral thesis was in email counseling and the therapeutic relationship. That partly grew out of the fact that on my qualification, there wasn’t really any input into what seemed to me to be quite a different way of working.
Clay: absolutely and that’s what fascinates me about your work is you work online with audiovisual connection, but you also do email therapy and I talked to someone else in a previous podcast about my own prejudices in that when I first heard about someone doing email therapy. I thought, “Well, that’s just not real therapy,” but our common friend, Philippa Weitz, her book Psychotherapy 2.0, which I’m always – I should get a cut of her money because I’m always pushing this book. It’s amazing – talked about this clinician who worked via email and it just changed everything for me in that this is not just real therapy. this is good therapy and so specific to a certain type of clientele. Tell me a little bit about how you were drawn to that and how you work via email through counseling.
Carole: Yeah sure. I mean, I guess when I was looking at setting up the research, when I was looking into it, I chose email because the thing that was best would be most different, I guess, to face to face counseling but it really fascinated me really the idea of what sort of communication is going on in that sort of way and I guess my question in the therapy was asking therapists, can you have a therapeutic relationship? This is a sort of question in, I guess it’s the same all over the world. Do you know the therapeutic relationship is the most important part? Can you have that just working by text?
If you do, how do you know that you have and does it work? That sort of stuff, and the research was saying that clients liked to work in this way online, but the research also isn’t clear because sometimes, it mixes up the different types of online therapy, so email therapy with web cam type therapy with instant messaging when they are clearly very different. I sort of went into it thinking, this seems quite different to me. What is therapeutic about it? I also felt that I needed to train in it to understand it because I hadn’t had that sort of input. Quite crucially really, I had spoken to a therapist.
We’re being asked to be involved in other ‘s people’s research who didn’t know anything about it so they felt like they were teaching the researcher what they needed to know about it rather than what they are experiencing. That’s what I did.
Clay: What did you find out as you were getting to know? Is this effective? Can you have a therapeutic relationship via email?
Carole: Well, the thing is that writing therapies are quite well documented in lots of ways as having therapeutic effects. There were some sort of evidence that letter writing, as such, was therapeutic to a degree that you can translate that into if you’re writing by email. It’s the same type of thing. Letter exchange is what’s going on, but of course that’s not evidenced in itself. I guess what I find really fascinating about the email communication is, you’re working more perhaps much more unconsciously, so there’s lots more unconscious stuff that’s sort of coming out. I guess for example if you’re with somebody in a room, you are affected by that person being in the room, so you might be more inhibited by having that person there. Perhaps you would have the social norms of what you would or you wouldn’t say in that situation. One of the things that happens by text is something they call online disinhibition which is documented and John Suler writes, he’s a good person too. He has a website that’s freely available to have look through some of these phenomenon. He’s a good place to look.
Clay: What was that name again?
Carole: John Suler, S-U-L-E-R.
Clay: Okay, I’ll put that in the show notes. Talk a little bit about online disinhibition because I found that as a fascinating concept.
Carole: Yeah. I guess the disinhibition is you don’t have anyone in front of you, so what often happens for therapists is that a person might, what they call go sort of deeper quicker, sort of write something in a text a bit quicker than they would get to it sort of face to face, so talking about the issue might happen in a quicker sort of way. You sometimes see this on forums where people are having arguments in a different sort of way.
Clay: They say things that they would never say to a live person.
Carole: Yeah.
Clay: You take that concept and apply it therapeutically. It’s just a less self conscious and you get deeper quicker, as you say.
Carole: Yeah, yeah, a more direct way. I’m not saying that this is good or bad thing. This is just something that can happen and does happen. One of the downsides of that is perhaps, somebody would then, because once you’ve written it and you’ve sent it, it’s gone. Somebody might then think, “Oh my goodness, I didn’t want to say that. I can’t take it back,” and people disappear easier as well online. It’s easier to disappear. There’s a bit of a cycle way you might encounter online disinhibition really sort of get into it in the moment and then think, feel some sort of shame or having not want to go there. That’s sort of the downside.
In my research, one of the things that I thought was really sort of fascinating about that was, there’s research evidence saying that clients really like working in this way, but if you think about client containment, which is one of the things that we get taught in most of our trainings, making a safe space for the client, that sort of thing, so we have quite a responsibility in that relationship. We can be quite worried the other end about having to let go of all of those things. We don’t know where the client is when they are reading or writing, anything, how quickly they are reading it, so pacing. We can’t be there to sort of contain that situation.
Clay: It challenges the therapist to get out of their comfort zone as well because there is a lack of control where you normally can have that in a face to face office setting.
Carole: Yeah, absolutely and it is one of the things that therapists who are quite anxious about, there was sort of a higher degree of anxiety, I would say, about working in this way and there was something about feeling the fear and doing it anyway type of thing. I think these things have to be taken into account and one of the things we need to think about as therapists are if we want to be an online therapist, what are we suited to and what can we cope with and online therapy is no different. Some people use our email therapists and don’t do other types of therapy like the other sort of web cam or instant message therapy. some do instant message and not other things and some people feel like they are not suited to it at all.
Clay: absolutely, just like with a client, what is best for them. What fascinated me was the case study in Philippa’s book and you mentioned that clients really love and are drawn to this type of connection, to the email counseling. There was an adolescent male. I think he was in college, away from home, dealing with a family crisis who, this type of male would never have probably gone to see a face to face therapist. First of all, his schedule did not allow him. He was studying and he didn’t trust the on campus therapist. This email connection which is perfect for him because he could read the therapist’s response in his own time and he could write over a matter of few days some of his thoughts on his own time and reflect on it, and he talked about how it was helpful for him to go deeper and to be alone with his thoughts and express that, but then there’s that fear of once you hit send, it’s out there. There has to be that trust with the therapist.
Carole: Yeah, yeah. I think the sort of things that you might think of naturally like the geographical problems and if you have a disability or you’re looking after somebody who has a disability so you’re a bit restricted in getting out of the house. Here we have the NHS offer counseling. They are looking to move more to online counseling to try and meet more people’s needs as it happens. They are sporadically doing that at the moment, which will affect the private practitioners as well, I should imagine, sort of coming up. Yeah, we’re thinking about that and I think with email, if you are somebody who enjoys expressing yourself by text then this is really suited to you but of course, it does restrict people who aren’t as literate.
I mean, you don’t have to be brilliantly Shakespeare literate to write. Ask me now, in our communications with friends and family I imagine, but we do need perhaps to be able to express ourselves and find a way to communicate online. There are sort of clues in, I mean, one of the things in the training I think where they advocate training particularly for text based therapies because it is so different and attuning to somebody means it doesn’t necessarily mean what you think you have to think a bit outside yourself about how you work with text. Say, for example, somebody put something in capitals, only writes in capitals.
In online etiquette terms, I don’t think you’ve heard of an etiquette which probably you are, so we would probably think that person was shouting or sort of expressing something really hard, but they may work only in capitals anyway. It’s a matter of attuning to how that person expresses themselves through their text.
Clay: Do you try to match your style or in response in your emails back to that client?
Carole: To a degree I think you do because also, we as therapists express ourselves as well, but say, for example, somebody uses a lot of emoticons then you might consider using emoticons because that is how that person works. If they didn’t ever use an emoticon, you wouldn’t necessarily start doing that because that’s how you work, but not necessarily how they work. Colors, there’s loads of great ways to express yourself by text.
Clay: Bold, font styles, pictures, that type of thing.
Carole: Color, yeah.
Clay: What about the idea of – one of the fears when I started thinking about this was misunderstanding and I think that many times in a therapy session face to face or online, I’ll say something or make a reference to something in my own cultural history and there is a misunderstanding, and I can see it on their face of, “No, it’s not exactly what I meant,” but through email, there’s that possibility that my client would misunderstand me or I would misunderstand what they have written. How do you address that?
Carole: Well, there’s a higher degree of checking out that goes on and more tentative sort of writing perhaps by email. How therapists were interacting sort of that way. I mean, the first thing to say is that yes that this is probably more prone to misunderstanding because you don’t have the social cues and we have to live with that. That is one of the things we have to live with and what I thought was quite, one of the most interesting things that people talked about in my research was intuition and saying, “I used my intuition. I had a gut feeling,” the sorts of things that if you were in a therapy room you might be talking about, but when we dug into that, intuition is based on two things.
One of the most, the experience that the person already has and the other one was picking up on all of the social cues, so really, you only have that one side of it. When they talked about intuition, they would say something like, “Trusting something but tie your camel to a post.” Well, I think the phrase comes from, as far as I understand it, it is sort of an Arabic phrase that was trust in God but tie your camel to a post was an old sort of saying, but this is what the person said to me and I guess that was the feeling that I had. You couldn’t be sure and there was a great deal of checking out and there was some anxiety with sort of sitting with having sent off that email and waiting for your response.
Lots of people said that the way that they knew a therapeutic relationship was happening was if somebody responded to their empathic writing. If you were trying to connect empathically then somebody would say, “Oh, you know, I heard you said that” or somebody write it. If the client noticed that you were being empathic, that was sort of how you knew. What was the original question, please? Sorry about that.
Clay: No, that’s okay. This is all fascinating. I think there’s the fear of misunderstanding from the therapist’s point of view and of course from the client as well and that that’s going to happen regardless, but what I hear you saying in the email is that you do a lot of double checking. I think this is what you mean and I’m responding it with this type of understanding. If that’s not what you meant, please clarify. I could be going in the wrong direction. I may be getting it wrong, but here’s my response.
Carole: Yeah.
Clay: It’s a lot of double checking and clarifying, which, I think, is helpful in all communication.
Carole: Yeah, absolutely, but it could be that you can be clearer in text. I also do sort of face to face counseling and one of the things that I learned quite early on and did quite a bit of research into is what the therapist takes away as a brilliant intervention and something they think they’ve changed someone’s life with can be very different to what a client takes away.
Clay: There’s so many times a client will say, “I’ve been thinking about that thing you said last week and I’m thinking, “I don’t even remember saying that and I don’t think he understood exactly what I was saying, but whatever it was, he took it in and it really affected him.
Carole: Yeah. They are resonating with something and I think it’s sort of, bearing those things in mind, there are lots of sort of similarities, I think, between how we work except we feel safer somehow if we have somebody in front of us and we can check people out, and also, that’s how we’re trained, which is why I think additional training is sort of crucial especially for text base and over here certainly, the BACP and the very up to date guidelines are suggesting that.
Clay: You offer additional training. You train therapists, is that correct?
Carole: Well, I offer. There are training, in this country at the moment, there’s very little, if anything, on any of the core therapy courses, counseling of psychology, especially psychology to some degree. There are courses that you can take, additional courses that you can take from certificate to diploma, courses that are already set up, but where I’ve sort of situate it myself and really sort of coming out of my research was that I realized that some of why perhaps people would say they would never do online counseling and whatever was through not really knowing what was involved in it and being a bit afraid of what was involved, just through the not knowing.
I run a working online workshop which is aimed to help therapists look at the considerations that you need. I put something about the process, the practicalities, and the responsibilities which are sort of almost three separate things, so like the different processes and one of the things with my research was it was sort of identifying a process that happens in email therapy that’s very different than other types of therapy. Of course, there’s still a process with working by webcam and instant message. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried instant or it’s how you work, but I do remember with my training, I think they are sort of three very separate types of working.
Clay: I agree.
Carole: Having to read in the moment, read what somebody has written have to think about that what you’re going to write and then actually write it. That is really big up form and takes practice and things.
Clay: I just want to clarify for the listeners that your trainings, are they weekly? Do you have a specific course, or are they ongoing?
Carole: Yeah, well, I run a workshop. It’s a one off workshop. I mean, it can be, because I’m work with private, well, I would work with those people but this workshop particularly is aimed at private practitioners. Of course they have to pay for their own. Being by myself, I know, you usually have to pay everyone for everything, and you have to pay for your own training. I offer half day or full day workshop for practitioners to come to. That is growing and that is sort of ongoing. I do want to have one very two months and have people come, but I can do that to smaller or bigger degree, and I have sort of inquires along that line.
Clay: I’m going to put your contact information in the show notes so that if somebody listening wants to inquire about those training, they can contact you there, correct?
Carole: Yeah, sure. I mean, I’m running it locally but I am actually looking at perhaps running it through the Private Practice Hub TV channel.
Clay: Yes. That’s a good transition, Carole. Let’s talk about the online therapy hub and our dear friend, Geoff Simons and the TV channel that he’s developing for online therapy. How did you get involve with that?
Carole: Well, do you know, I have a conversation with Geoff a couple of years ago about something that was on the Private Practice Hub and our conversation, I think I was talking about my research and I think this was when the Online Therapy Hub was being thought about in terms of being set up. I had another chance meeting with him, I don’t know, I think it was two years ago and then this was about a year ago where we started chatting and he was saying, “Well, would you be interested in helping out?” Which of course I am and I sort of been meeting with Philippa and Kate, and we’ve sort of knew of their work as well. We have quite interesting conversations.
The funny thing is that sometimes, we feel like we’re sort of, were’ quite geeky about it and we love to talk about it. It is quite hard to find somebody. All of our families glaze over us if we’re talking about how interesting it is. It’s great to have that but yeah. I guess Kate and I have very similar interests and her research was very similar to mine but she did a different type of research methodology, so we came out with different sort of parts of the same phenomenon.
Clay: For those that have not listened to the interview podcast with Geoff Simons on the Private Practice Hub and his new venture, the Online Therapy Hub, give me a quick snippet on what is the Online Therapy Hub?
Carole: Well, the Private Practice Hub was set up for private practitioners of all different types, therapeutic practitioners really to sort of help with all sorts of difficulties because you can feel very on your own when you’re setting up your own practice. That’s where I encouraged. It’s very useful. When Geoff asked me to be involved, I was thinking, well, helping future therapists will be great. We’ve had a lot of brainstorming sessions about what would be really useful. The Online Therapy Hub is a free resource that people can access who are therapists and hoping to move into online therapy or have been online therapists for a long time and want to look up information about security, about the process, to keep up to date with what’s happening. One of the things I’m involved in is reviewing different things that are related to online therapy. For example the different webcam sites and some of which have directories and some of the things. It’s a one-stop sort of shop.
Clay: He’s really building it out well. They have a lot of education and that’s one thing that I found incredibly helpful were the reviews that you all are doing going to practice with Zoom. What are some of the other ones that you have kind of tried out?
Carole: Yeah. Well, I tried VSee, Zoom, PlusGuidance, which I think is not just UK as far as I know.
Clay: But then you write up these reviews. You tested out on different platforms, Mac, Windows, and you use to practice with it for several days and then you write a review, and then they can sometimes respond. Zoom will get back to you and go, “Oh, that’s a good idea. We’ll update it this way,” that type of thing, right?
Carole: Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s what happens. The thing is, there are so many different times of Mac and Windows and whatever, so I can only do so many, but in doing that, because I have a Mac. I have what I call a big Mac. It’s my private and joy. I got it for a big birthday which I won’t tell you which one. Anyway, it is probably all of these like Zoom and other places. They are catching up with combinations of things and some of them are quite glitchy and some of them aren’t, and it’s moving on at quite a rapid sort of rate. So yeah, I did the reviews and then I was in communication with companies. We send the reviews to the sort of companies. One of them was Coaching Spaces. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that.
Clay: Yup.
Carole: That was quite interesting because it’s a place that you can go and you can create pictures. It’s this sort of very creative space. You can also talk to each other, but you could, say, if you were working with constellation or a bit more visually but somebody could create something in front of you and then you could change it together. Anyway, sorry, that was quite interesting.
Clay: Is there one platform that stands out for you? I mean, You’ve looked at a lot of them and when you think of that private practitioner sitting maybe in a home office that knows that they probably shouldn’t be using Skype, they need something that’s encrypted, is price point and the flow, the stream, it’s a good question, is there one that jumps out that you could recommend?
Carole: I have also included a review of Skype to be fair, but yeah, people know that, but including the obvious sort of worries about using Skype. Skype is quite often, in this country, is still used and it’s still used in the NHS and different places as well. The message is slowly getting out there about it. Some of the ones that I reviewed, Geoff is connected with and there are offers for using it through the Online Therapy Hub and the Private Practice Hub. I think that’s quite interesting. It’s worth a look. At different times, I find that some of them are more stable than others. It depends on what you want, Clay. You did appear in these reviews to let people choose, but I have spoken to people like, say, for example, who have very good connections with VSee and then not so much. The same with Zoom and all of them, so I think really you need to test your equipment, where you are with your broadband.
Clay: That’s a really good point because when I’m in a different part of the country and then trying to connect with one platform, it’s brilliant but then in another, I come home and I have to use something else. Maybe the take away is that people should play with the different platforms and many of them have a 30-day free trial and some of them are just free apps now.
Carole: Yes, they are and have a little collection of them. I think that’s the take home message for working in this way anyway is have a backup plan. In fact, have three or four backup plans.
Clay: That’s a really good point, isn’t it, that if you only have Skype and that’s what you’ve been doing, okay, and if that fails, what do you got? You should have some other platform available to you.
Carole: Yeah and some of these platforms are good. I don’t require downloads on your computers, so you could safely work with clients by sending them a link in an email. Also if a client doesn’t want to download something on the computer or it looks difficult to use, then that’s not fair on them as well.
Clay: Yeah. I just had the training yesterday actually on the Online Therapy Hub TV Channel and that’s going to be one of those platforms where you can host a webinar and have as many as people as possible and guest speakers, up to I think five or six guest speakers and then as many people that want to participate in this webinar can attend and it’s free.
Carole: Yeah.
Clay: Unless you’re charging for the webinar then I think they take a small percentage of that. they only make money when you make money, but if you’re not charging for the webinar, it’s completely free and it had a really good connection. I think I want to start using it.
Carole: Yeah.
Clay: Alright, Geoff, there’s your plug from Carole and I that we wholeheartedly endorse the Online Therapy Hub TV Channel.
Carole: Yes. I was live at one yesterday as well. I sort of practiced by going up on the screen and asking a question and going back in. It is very clear and very easy to use. It was probably, I’ve sometimes had that with Zoom, VSee, and PlusGuidance, but yeah, you need that stability, don’t you, if you’re going to be working in that way?
Clay: I want to take you back because this is a question that I think is important, going back to the email therapy. Let’s talk about a couple of things, one is – and I’m not going mispronounce this – it’s asychronous. It’s not synchronous, not at the same time and that can be odd, I think. You don’t know when the other person is going to respond. Talk to me about what framework you put around it because a therapist, if this person writes a novel, they are spending more than an hour, if they are charging by the hour, do you say, “I will respond to what I can read in 30 minutes and then respond in 30 minutes or however much I get into it.” How do you put the framework around the actual email sessions, for lack of a better world?
Carole: Well, different people do it in different ways. The first thing that you were talking about there was another phenomenon called the black hole phenomenon where you can feel quite sucked in to that black hole. Say, if you’re a therapist and you’ve sent an email. You don’t have boundaries about when you’re going to receive one. You can’t really have boundaries about that, but you can have boundaries about when you’re going to respond. One of the people I spoke to – I’m sorry. I will answer your question, Clay. You’re encountering my scattered mind. You can really have people disappear.
Somebody I was talking to was saying that they were talking to a lady from the Philippines when that awful tsunami sort of hit and they never heard from her again. That’s a real life possibility of a black hole that somebody can go into, but quite often is the black hole that we’re drawn into because as therapists, we’re worried about that other person and it’s a very unboundaried place to work. It’s sort of like that looking glass, through the looking glass distortion of time’s upside down, everything is upside down. It’s so important to put boundaries on how you work and exactly that. Lots of people work in different ways.
Some people in their contract because it’s so important to have a contract when you start working with somebody of what they can expect from you, which will be different face to face working. Some people say they will respond to so many words. If you had a 10-page email, for example like you said, that wouldn’t fit into what somebody was going to pay for in any sort of session, but more so people have a time sort of issues. In my contract, for example, I put the same amount of time into a response as I would a face to face meeting, and then I encourage people to prioritize what they want.
If they are going to respond with something that I can’t respond with everything to, have that first in their email. On my website, I’ve written something up about what you need to think about if you want to work by email and how I work by email so that it’s very clear from the onset how I work and what you can expect, and also agreeing a time and a day that you are going to respond to that person so that they can send that email in the week whenever they want or two a week depending on what you’re contracting with. I would say, “Please let me have your email at least 48 hours before you want me to respond because I want to have some processing time to respond to you and I will respond to you by this time on this day” so that they are not in a black hole at the other end wondering when you are going to respond.
There’s something about being boundaried and contracting for the specifics of how you’re going to work with them and that is boundaried for you and it’s boundaried for them.
Clay: Okay. That’s exactly the answer that I was looking for. We need to put some structure because people are thinking, “Okay, what is email therapy and what’s the how here?”
Carole: Yeah.
Clay: You have explained this brilliantly, I think. Thank you so much for kind of withstanding some odd questions from a novice in this area. Any other thoughts as we wrap up that you think people should be aware of?
Carole: I don’t know about you, Clay, but I feel like therapists are going to be very drawn to working in this way because clients want it. There’s some sort of responsibility there to at least have a look at what that would mean for you and how you work, kind of seek something out to help with that even if it’s a book or information online and the Online Therapy Hub has some information to have a look at in that degree, so don’t be afraid of it, just have a look into it. If it’s not for you or while in guidance, stick with what you feel happiest with and you can build up as well. If you’re going to work by text, it’s good to have some additional training. There are good trainings.
Most trainings are online so you can access them from wherever you are and do what you feel comfortable with, but be aware probably that you don’t know what you need to know. There’s sort of, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Johari Window where there’s four blocks and the first thing is you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s a sort of a learning thing. You know what you don’t know. You don’t know what you know. One of the blocks says, “act of your awareness.” If you don’t know what you don’t know and everybody that I spoke to regarding the training said that there was a blind spot. Just going into working online, you’re probably doing it with a blind spot. Seeking information and sort of training in whatever sort of form is a good idea, I would say.
Clay: Good, I totally agree. Thank you very much. I hope you didn’t melt. I did a little bit here.
Carole: Yeah, I can hear you melting. Get that air con on.
Clay: That’s right. I’m on it, but for those of you who want to contact Carol, it’s carolefrancissmith.co.uk. That address will be in the show notes as well. Carole, thank you so much for joining us.
Carole: You’re welcome.