COVID.   What have you been experiencing?

Thrust into delivering digital supervision, I experienced the most anxiety I had in years.

Anticipatory anxiety: I worried about technical details.  Which platform?  Or more than one?  What about on-line connectivity?

Performance anxiety: What should I wear?  How would I sound?  What would it be like watching myself (literally) perform, gazing at that thumbnail.   And the other people – their faceless avatars in Team – how they dress – untrammeled access to how they live.  Did I want to know any of this?

How would we do role plays, especially role plays that would be more active than sitting, being talking heads.  Or did that matter, since after all, the patients and the therapist had the same limits and I should just replicate those limits?  What about my white board!!!???  I’ll need to prepare notes ahead of time instead of surfing the conversation, adding detail to detail in real time; and if I don’t prepare notes, then what?

What about all the questions supervisee-therapists would ask me – about the ethics, the practice, the sheer new-ness of it all, questions that I didn’t have the answers to myself?

Three months later….

Did I mention those web platforms?  I am getting the hang of it, a few hours on Zoom, an hour or two on Doxy.me, two hours on Microsoft Teams.  Practice is making me – us – more skillful.

I think I’m ahead of some people – by no means all the people – clinically – because I had a year of telephone crisis counseling experience and some time working in front of and behind the one-way mirror.   I’ve attended to ‘set and setting.’  For setting – the ambience – I’ve carefully read articles on how to manage lighting, what to dress in (don’t wear white shirts), and selecting your background.  I’ve done my best to apply those learnings.

I’ve sent out more articles and I attend closely to following up from previous sessions’ material.  I’ve gotten into the habit of using legal pads to write notes – it’s simply easier to scrawl something down (rather than use my standard supervision progress note).

I still miss my whiteboard.

And most of all, I miss you.