I hesitate to say this, because I am definitely not offering my services. But I have done counseling/therapy by email on one occasion and my "client" (I didn't charge money) seemed extremely happy with it.

This person wrote me in acute distress. She had been in therapy for about fifteen years and felt that her present therapist was not helping her with her problem of greatest concern. Initially, she indicated that she was looking for another therapist and asked if I could give her an NLP referral, which I was not able to do. Since I liked her and was especially interested in the problem she mentioned, I offered to discuss it with her.

I started out by suggesting some self-help techniques that might be worth trying, but very soon our discussion turned into something that I would have to definitely characterize as therapy. We did between 15 and 20 "sessions" (an email letter from her and a reply from me) over a period of less than three weeks, resulting in a major breakthrough for her. In her first or second letter, she had written "I'm so despondent over this that sometimes I just think of hanging it all up," something that immediately got my attention since I've done suicide prevention work. (In fact, one of the first things I wanted to check was that there was not an immanent danger of suicide.)

In one of her last letters she wrote, "I can see that I still have a lot of work to do on this and you've given me a lot of things to talk about with my therapist. But now, I can no longer even understand why I let myself get so upset about it a few weeks ago."

Obviously a licensed therapist would have had a lot of qualms about doing this sort of thing. Since I'm a mathematician and don't claim to be a therapist and don't charge money, I'm willing to take more risks than a licensed therapist would if I think I can really help someone. (One obvious risk is that in counseling someone I've never even met in person, I have to be much more cautious about the possibility that I might be harming my "client," since I have few clues to know whether this is happening and fewer resources to rescue this client if it does happen.)

> in order to catch up on items that seem of interest to the client, in
> order to not let the conversation drift off, the therapist needs to be
> an active part of the exchange of words.

One of the things about email is that it makes it very easy to quote someone's words back at them. This was one of the main things I did in this case. I would write "In your last letter you said , but two days ago you said . Doesn't it seem to you that it's going to be a little difficult to satisfy both of these desires?" In this way, the therapist does indeed become on active part of the exchange of words.

It turned out that in this case, there was also something crucial, which led to this person's major breakthrough, which could only have happened via email. Namely, I finally realized something which would have been obvious if I had seen her in person, and when I wrote back to her with my insight it had a tremendous impact and brought up all sorts of stuff from her past. (In our letters, I was not concerned with her past but her present.) I know that it's a fact that tears cannot be transmitted electronically, but nonetheless I received her tears via email.

> therapy through the internet seems to me to be one step further towards
> alienation. you want flesh and blood. you want to be met by the
> therapist. mere words is not enough.

As an NLP trained person, up to that time I would definitely have agreed that mere words are not enough. Non-verbal communication has always been extremely important in what I do. And yet in this case, words did the trick.

Many people on the net have had fairly intense relationships through email with people they've never met. Communication in written form doesn't have to be alienating, especially when an exchange of letters can be done in less than a day.

--Lee

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The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. --- Anne Lamott, BIRD BY BIRD