Covid-19 has thrown our world into turmoil, not only how we live, but also how we work. Hypnotherapists have also had to adapt. Is this the way of the future?
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, our lives have changed dramatically. For months we were trapped in our houses, barely daring to stick our noses out the front door, as lockdown restrictions forced us to rethink how we live and work. I for one desperately hoped that this would be a temporary situation and that normal life would return at some point. Now, almost a year later, it is becoming quite clear that we will most probably never go back to how things were. We are going to have to adapt in so many ways.
In fact, we have already adapted our lives because of this virus. We are washing our hands way more often than usual and we have stopped kissing all and sundry. Education has moved online to a much larger degree than before as we’re opting to stay at home to avoid crowded spaces. Many people are postponing elective medical treatment and shopping has become an online affair too. And when you see a person not wearing a mask, you tend to panic and avoid them like the plague. Literally.
Many people have found that working from home is the best option and have started working online from their bedrooms, attending Zoom meeting without pants and with cats and children zooming in and out of these virtual sessions. And more and more people are opting for tele-consultations and virtual consultations with health care providers. A friend of mine is a psychologist who had fancy offices in Hyde Park. He has since moved his practice online and works from home, literally saving a few million rand in rental every year!
Hypnotherapists have also moved online and I recently was privy to a WhatsApp conversation on a Hypnotherapy group where it was reported that Zoom-notherapy (to coin a phrase) works extremely well. It has also meant that therapists can now consult with clients worldwide and are therefore no longer constricted to seeing clients from their hometowns only.
Of course this is all fine and well if you are well resourced and can afford a laptop, Internet connection and the fees attached to these services. But as we know, the digital divide is a real phenomenon, especially in South Africa with its huge income discrepancies. It is estimated that only 7.9% of South Africans have a computer. Only about 10.4% of South African households have access to the Internet at home. Some 64.7% of South African households have at least one member who has access to, or use the Internet either at home, work, place of study or Internet cafés.
It seems most people use their mobile devices to access the Internet. According to Moonstone Information Refinery, this includes “access to cellular telephones or using mobile access devices such as 3G cards. Mobile access to the Internet has made it much more accessible to households in rural areas. Nationally, Internet access using mobile devices (60.1%) was much more common than access at home (10.4%), at work (16.2%) and elsewhere (10.1%). Although the use of mobile Internet access devices in rural areas (45.0%) still lags behind its use in metros (67.5%) and urban areas (63.7%), it is much more common in rural areas than any of the alternative methods.”
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the Coronavirus has led to an increase in Internet traffic in South Africa. SEACOM, which operates one of South Africa’s major undersea fibre cables, said it has seen a 15% increase in Internet traffic across its network since the lockdown started in March 2020. It expects that figure to increase even further.
We all know how prohibitively expensive data is in our country. This is of course another negative factor, which constrains how people use the Internet, specifically on their cell phones.
All these factors challenge the ways in which we can connect to our clients. While well-resourced and well-connected households may have easy access to online hypnotherapy services, there are a great many people who do not have such easy access and who are still in need of our services. As hypnotherapists we are obliged to consider which ways would most fit our client. I believe that as client-centered hypnotherapists we should not only adapt our therapy methods to our clients, but also the way in which we deliver that therapy to them.
For myself, I stay in an area where there is no fibre and where the trees around the property I stay in are in the way of the local Internet Service Provider’s tower. Cell phone signal is poor at best of times and not suitable for Zoom sessions. In order to host such online sessions, I need to go to the local shopping centre, but the Wimpy is much too noisy to use as an office. I am in the process of finding a new therapy office so as to once again see clients in person and hopefully have a more stable Internet connection, but at the same time have had to creatively adapt to the new online reality forced upon us by Covid-19.
My solution has been to consult telephonically and to then make recordings for my clients, which are tailored to their specific needs. These are then sent as MP3’s, either via email or as a WhatsApp sound file. I have found this to work quite well and the feedback I have received has been very positive. Luckily I am a trained actor and have vast experience as a voice over artist, so making these recordings come quite naturally to me. You do not need a fancy studio in which to make these recording either. I use an acoustic shield and a USB microphone to record and edit on my laptop.
Whatever the solution, we as hypnotherapists have to adapt to the new realities so as to best serve the interests of our clients. There may be other ways to do this too, ways that we are yet to explore (hypnosis by post, anyone???)
I recently had the privilege of being a guest on the 180 Degrees Podcast where I spoke about stop smoking, hypnotherapy in general as well as the way in which I am working. I had helped the host to stop smoking using my method of telephonic consultation combined with recordings, which I used in a two-hour session as I would during an in-person session. I am happy to report that she is a happy, healthy non-smoker and am quite proud of her achievements
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