Laura, is a fully qualified, insured private counsellor trained in personal talking therapy. She provides personal counselling to adults on a multitude of subjects and issues. Laura is based in the U.K. She recently shared a blog post that we thought our readers would enjoy.
Fitting counselling into their busy schedules is probably the thing that my clients struggle with the most.
Often the people whom I see work full-time and aren’t able to ask for regular time away from the office to attend therapy. Or they don’t want to admit to their work that they are in therapy at all, which is understandable. But as a result, my evenings are incredibly busy and evening slots are highly sought after.
To the point where I have a waiting list.
So I started to rack my brains for ways to make counselling work for those clients who either can’t get an evening slot due to demand- or who might have a gap in their day but don’t have enough time to travel across Bristol to Southville and have a face-to-face session.
This is where my decade of experience in the IT industry comes in. I know that telemedicine is a big emerging market and that people can use apps to access all kinds of help and support from healthcare to mental health professionals. And with my qualifications and knowledge, why not integrate that into my business model and the offerings which I have?
Meeting online saves you travel costs, the inconvenience of taking time off work, and it’s easier to fit therapy into your life. It’s also totally confidential – as the platform is developed for medical use, and so must adhere to the highest levels of data protection.
But those aren’t the only reasons to consider online therapy. There’s also a compelling therapeutic reason for offering this kind of work arrangement and it goes beyond convenience. It’s the opportunity to address problems when they arise rather than allowing our lives to become so difficult that we are compelled to seek therapy – not because it would greatly benefit us to do so – but because we can no longer function in the way that we used to. Because life has become so unmanageable that we concede to look into therapy despite trying to fix ourselves for so long,
I meet many clients who enter therapy at this crisis point. And it’s a great shame – a shame that they have suffered when potentially the issues that they’re experiencing could have been addressed earlier if the route to accessing therapy had been easier .
And so, now it is.
Read the post here. You can connect with Laura on Twitter here.