women’s health
southern@hadassah.org Hadassah Southern Supports Medical Research for Melanoma
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3000 18th Street, Metairie, Louisiana 70002 Office: 504-518-4126 Email: lisa@louisianapeaceofmind.com www.louisianapeaceofmind.com 34 Southern Jewish Life • July 2017
Having an honest-to-G-d quality relationship. And having conversations about this, about their bodies and about sex. Not making it this taboo, terrible thing. Without scaring them, let them know there are people who would take advantage, and what that looks like. What love looks like as opposed to manipulation. Those are hard communications to have. Let’s talk about your work at Talkspace.com. What attracted you to that model of online therapy, rather than an in-person clinical setting? To be completely honest, convenience. Not having to have an office, overhead, I’ve been able to do it from home. I have flexibility. I had my reservations, because it’s new. The vast majority of my career, I’ve done trauma work. And the thought of doing that work digitally, virtually, confused me. But I was willing to give it a try. And I think also I was excited about it because Talkspace’s mission is to make it more accessible, less stigma, more affordable. Just in terms of accessibility, rural areas that don’t have any services, or have one therapist that if you’re seeing, everyone knows you’re seeing. And the time it takes. If I live in a busy city, and to get to a 50-minute appointment you have to leave 30 minutes early so by the time you get back, that’s two hours of your day. That’s a lot of time and a lot of people won’t invest the time because they have other pressing demands, so they don’t invest in themselves what they need to. In terms of how the world is moving, this is how people communicate. I don’t think and I don’t hope that face-to-face therapy gets replaced. There are just some people who need that. And for me, there’s some work I can’t do that way. I do a lot less trauma work now. I personally don’t care to do trauma work that way. For me, there’s no substitute for being present for someone when you’re doing that work. So I’m not saying it can’t be done, but my practice has shifted more to relational work. Life work, balance work. Besides individual therapy, the platform is also offering couples therapy, therapy specifically geared for people with social media dependency, and therapy whereby businesses offer the opportunity to their employees. What kinds of therapy are you doing right now? I’m only doing individual therapy. And how are you matched with a client? There’s a consulting therapist, so they get things started. And there’s an algorithm, so we put in our theoretical orientation, what kinds of therapy we do, and the client gets three choices matching what they’re presenting. At any time, they can switch therapists. What does the interaction look like? The client and the therapist are matched to a virtual ‘room’ that only they have access to. And the client has 24/7 access to it. So that’s one of the benefits of this type of therapy. A lot of people have found that if you’re in therapy, something happens and you tell yourself you have to remember to tell the therapist that next week. So with this type of therapy, 3 in the morning, you’re like “oh I have to tell Valerie,” so they log in, write it out, and there it is. Isn’t one of the big plusses for people going to Talkspace that they can be anonymous? For sure. They can be Frank from Kansas for all I know. If that’s how you want to present yourself to me, yeah. Not always, but to a large extent, I think people open up quicker, because they don’t have to look me in the eye. From my personal experience, people sometimes don’t say things because they don’t want to disappoint their therapist. That happens to all of us. It’s like how people will clean their home before the maid comes over. Right. They don’t have to look me in the eye and I don’t see their body language. And that’s another big thing. I don’t see their body language, but I’ve learned to be more sensitive to their language.