Online Therapy and Telehealth

The research supports it, and people make real, lasting change this way. What surprises most people is how much translates. EMDR works over video. So does somatic work, art therapy, and skills-based work like DBT. The list of approaches that need a shared room is much shorter than you’d assume.

It isn’t identical, and we won’t pretend otherwise. The clearest difference is nervous system regulation. Part of what happens in an office is that your system takes cues from a calm one sitting across from you, and that carries less well through a screen. For some people, being in the room also builds a felt sense of safety faster, or gives relational patterns somewhere to show up naturally. Both formats work. The question is which one works for you, and that answer can change over time.

• Anyone in a rural community without local options
• People who don’t have an hour and a half of driving in their week
• Winters, storms, and roads that close when you need the appointment most
• Privacy in a small town where everybody knows everybody
• Parents and shift workers fitting sessions into narrow windows
• Social anxiety, where being observed in a room is the hard part
• People not ready to drive yet, including after a car accident
• Anyone who’d rather do this work from their own home

It runs on any computer or phone with an internet connection. If your connection drops, and it will eventually, that’s not a crisis. Call your therapist and you’ll sort it out on the phone or pick it up another day. Nobody is going to let bad internet become the reason you stopped coming. Where you sit is worth a conversation.

Some people need a room with nobody around, some use their car, others don’t mind family in the next room. Your therapist will ask about headphones, partly for privacy and partly because it lets you speak freely when the house isn’t empty. If you log on and it’s obvious you won’t have privacy that day, say so.

Available anywhere in Colorado.

There are whole pockets of the Four Corners without an in-person therapist, and even where one exists, small-town life is intertwined enough that reaching a therapist from slightly outside your own community can feel safer. Plenty of people go without entirely, because the drive is too long or the town is too small. Meeting people where they are sometimes means a small office in a smaller community and sometimes means a screen at their kitchen table.

Holly Brooks began her career in telehealth and has watched it do things an office can’t. She had a client who lived two blocks away and worked with her virtually for two years before coming in, building up to it as its own kind of exposure work, and some days that client still sits in the parking lot and decides it’s a screen day. Holly has also done EMDR virtually with people not ready to get back in a car, which is how they became ready. On the practical side, she works with headphones and a noise machine regardless of where she is, and if a client logs on without real privacy she’ll cancel on the spot rather than run a session where they can’t speak openly.