Virtual psychotherapy is now the standard way of delivering services. If you've been in therapy and switched from seeing your therapist in person to seeing her online or on Facetime, you may miss the personal presence and setting. But you are grateful that your work continues with the person you trust and with whom you have developed a history.

If you are new to psychotherapy or new to the psychotherapist you are considering, what's it like to start work online? Your questions may include:

1. What's it like to be with this person?
2. How will I feel with her?
3. I get a sense of a person when I am with them. How will I get that sense over a monitor?
4. I need support and warmth. Isn't virtual psychotherapy cold?
5. How can I share intimate personal information to a stranger on a screen?
6. How can she know me if she just sees my face on a screen?
7. What happens in online psychotherapy?
8. I need help. Can this kind of therapy work?

 Shared activities with friends are fun and boost your health.

How to make friends is a skill we need as we move through life. Plus, friendship plays an important part in continued eating disorder recovery. Isolation can be familiar and life-draining.

Wandering through grocery store aisles in a state where you feel invisible, just looking for foods that will be good for a binge, is practice for continued isolation. You feel invisible, but what's happening is that the people in the store seem almost ghostlike. It's not that they don't see you. It's that you don't see them.

When you are on the path to recovery, your eating or not eating may be more in harmony with your body's needs. But without friendship, you may roam through your days looking for stimulation and not seeing people.  You may miss opportunities to make friends. You may believe you are as invisible as ever.

Shadows of the mind. Light and darkness. Active and passive. More in our depths that we can develop and use than we know.

People usually come to psychotherapy for the first time because they are in pain, bewildered and because everything they know about problem-solving no longer works for them. Going inside their psyches seems like the last option. Even then, they do not know what to expect. At first, they want to know how long it will take to fix their lives.

This is a normal response when a person is plunged into an unrecognizable world where their well-honed talents and skills do not bring desired results. They feel angry, lost, frustrated and afraid.

We need our internal structure to hold, especially when we can't see ahead.

Values

We define ourselves by our personal values. We know who we are and live by our personal code. At least, that is what we convince ourselves.

But some of our values are what we wish we supported. Some of them are based on what we are told to support by respected others. And some of our values may be based on our fear of disapproval.