How can I best meet the challenges of working therapeutically in a remote setting?
Routledge authors are committed to helping mental health practitioners from all professions as you face new challenges resulting from the global pandemic. Whether you are experienced in remote working or are looking for advice in improving your practice skills in a time of tele-working and social distancing, you’ll find advice and answers to relevant questions from our trusted experts.
Please click on the dropdowns below to freely access a range of short videos and other content designed to provide solutions to help with your practice. Topics include: keeping connection alive in a time of lockdown, working with attachment issues when not face-to-face, how to help with stress and trauma when at a remove, and how to make meaningful progress in treatment via remote working.
We will add to these offerings on an ongoing basis, so we hope you’ll check back when you’re looking for more advice!
Cate Campbell provides top practical tips for couples both during and after lockdown.
How can a practitioner incorporate the use of touch in teletherapy? This is a brief illustration of how to include breathing exercises and a sense of touch together in teletherapy video chats. When clients manifest anxiety and trauma triggers, practitioners can neutralize panic attacks and adrenaline rushes by combining breathing and touch together. Touch can anchor calm in the body. Breathing can savor that calm in the soul. These bring back rational brain functioning for problem-solving and centered emotional process for greater resilience.
Jill Scharff shares insights from her extensive experience of using telework with patients, and suggests practical tips on effective working as well as implications of remote work for theory.
Helen Dent discusses how attachment style will have an impact on how well people cope in the current context and outlines strategies to use when working with clients remotely.
The video explores how the normal developmental grieving that both generations experience during the transition into young adulthood is exacerbated by the Covid-19 global pandemic, examines the ways in which the pandemic has thwarted the process of leaving home, and creates a treatment framework for families struggling through this crisis
Times of crisis take people out their comfort zone, as they are required to have conversations they are not used to having with a range of people. Evan George describes the 3-step, simple guide used by BRIEF which provides a direct route to having a useful conversation.
During COVID and beyond, it is important for play therapists to revisit the basics – what are you doing and why are you doing it? Once you understand these components on a deeper level, you can apply them along with any highly motivating material to the play therapy process to move toward the therapeutic goals and connect with your whole client.