10 Tips for Therapy from your Car
With the rise of telehealth, folks have to find creative ways to have confidential interactions with their therapist. Depending on your situation, engaging in therapy from your car is often a necessary choice. Having engaged in telehealth as both a client and a therapist for several years now, I have seen the benefits and the downsides of doing therapy from your car. Please keep reading to learn some tips on how to make teletherapy from your car work for you!
Safety
Before considering privacy, one must take safety into account. Here are some basic reminders:
Park your car before you begin! Take the few minutes before a session to find a comfortable place to park and make sure that your car is no longer moving throughout the duration of your appointment.
If doing the above mentioned makes you a few minutes late for your session, that is ok. Your therapist would much rather you be safe than on time.
Privacy
Location of your vehicle is an important thing to consider when you think about privacy. Think through these different elements before choosing where to park your car for a therapy session.
If you are engaging in car therapy due to a lack of privacy in your workplace or home, think about how close you are parked to these places and the chance that you could be overheard. Driving a bit down the road or to a different parking lot may be worth the time.
Do you lose focus and get distracted easily? Does it feel uncomfortable for you to notice that strangers may be walking by and looking at you in the car? Consider your comfort levels - perhaps a street with less foot traffic or the less populated part of a parking lot feel better for you.
Temperature
The biggest culprit for sending a car session into chaos tends to be temperature and the impact that sun exposure has on temperature. While our phones are magical devices that do a lot for us, the combination of zoom + sun exposure creates a circumstances where phones tend to crash and burn about 30 minutes in. Read below to try to avoid this.
Think about having your device fully charged before the session, sometimes the heating up from the car temperatures seems to be accelerated by the heating up of your phone due to active charging.
Sun exposure is the key problem here! If you are sitting in the front of your car, the sun is likely bouncing into the back of your phone. Consider moving to the backseat for your session. Not only does this give you extra leg room, but it will likely keep you and your phone cooler.
Sitting in a car with closed windows can often feel stuffy after a while. When choosing a location, think about if you want to have your car running for AC or heat. If possible, try to choose a location where you feel comfortable having the windows open a bit for air.
Audio Concerns
Some of the things that we may like about the speaker quality in our cars may not necessarily work well for therapy sessions. Think about implementing some of the ideas below to get the best sound quality for your session.
You might have your phone autmoatically paired with the bluetooth for your car. While this may work well for short calls with friends and listening to music, the audio quality is not ideal for a 50 minute therapy session. Consider disabling your bluetooth before the session begins.
Another downside of having your therapist’s voice blasting through your car speakers is that it makes it far more likely that somebody passing on foot outside of your vehicle could hear the content of your session - something to keep in mind for privacy.
Think about using a headset or earbuds with a microphone while in the car. You won’t have to talk so loudly because there is a microphone, and you will be able to hear your therapist easily.
That about covers it! I hope these are helpful things to consider if you want to have safe, confidential, and fruitful therapy sessions from your vehicle with minimum interruptions.
