Finding therapy where your reality is taken seriously
Finding a therapist can feel especially complicated when you continue to take COVID precautions.
You may wonder whether a therapist will respect your choices or interpret them as anxiety. You may already have people in your life minimizing your concerns, pressuring you to take risks, or treating the way you live as a problem that says something about you or the way you think.
COVID-conscious therapy offers a place where you can talk openly about your life, relationships, health, and values in the company of someone who supports and understands the precautions you take to care for yourself, your community, and public health more broadly.
Will a therapist treat my precautions as anxiety?
Some therapists may assume that masking, avoiding crowds, requesting virtual appointments, being concerned with air filtration, or carefully assessing risk are signs of excessive anxiety. That assumption flattens a much more complex reality and gets in the way of creating a healing space.
People take COVID precautions for many reasons. You may simply be committed to collective care, aware that COVID continues to circulate, immunocompromised, disabled, chronically ill, caring for someone vulnerable, or concerned about long COVID or reinfection.
The way you organize your life does not need to be pathologized in order for therapy to help you feel more supported within it.
COVID precautions can affect your relationships
COVID-conscious living often involves much more than deciding whether to wear a mask.
Differences in risk tolerance can shape relationships with partners, family members, friends, coworkers, and community. You may find yourself negotiating gatherings, community spaces, travel, medical appointments, shared air, testing, masking, or what happens after someone has been exposed.
These conversations can bring up power, consent, trust, reciprocity, and belonging. You may feel pressured to participate in situations that do not feel safe, experience the pain of no longer feeling a sense of belonging, or discover that maintaining a boundary causes some people to fade away.
A COVID-conscious therapist understands that these can be deeply hurtful experiences. Therapy can help you explore the impact of these dynamics, tend to conflict, loss, and grief, strengthen boundaries, and support you in maintaining and building the kinds of connection that are possible.
Making room for grief, isolation, conflict, and betrayal
The pandemic has brought many forms of loss. Some are widely recognized; others remain largely unspoken.
You may be grieving a person, your health, a former level of functioning, a sense of safety, community spaces, or relationships that changed when other people stopped taking precautions. You may feel isolated from family, friends, workplaces, or communities that once felt accessible.
There can also be betrayal in watching people or groups you trusted minimize ongoing risks or withdraw accommodations. COVID-conscious therapy can offer space to name these experiences, understand their impact, and explore what they mean for your relationships, your sense of belonging, and your relationship with yourself.
Your pain may hold information about what you have lived through, what matters to you, and what your body has learned.
What does COVID-conscious therapy actually look like?
COVID-conscious therapy begins with respect and understanding of your reality and your right to make informed choices about your body and how you navigate the world.
It may include exploring:
- Grief, anger, loneliness, or exhaustion
- Changes in health, energy, capacity, or identity
- Conflict with partners, family members, friends, or coworkers
- The ongoing process of assessing risk
- Support for your boundaries around masking, gatherings, travel, and medical care
- Experiences of dismissal, ableism, or abandonment
- Ways to create connection, enjoyment, belonging, and possibility
In virtual therapy, you can meet from a space where you have more control over exposure and physical comfort.
In-person COVID-conscious therapy may include clear communication about masking policies, including policies for clients using the space before you, air filtration, ventilation, regular testing, illness policies, and options for switching to virtual sessions. Specific practices will vary, so asking beforehand for information that allows you to decide what feels workable for you is important.
How can virtual therapy support accessibility and safety?
Virtual therapy can reduce exposure while making care more accessible for people living with disability, chronic illness, fatigue, caregiving responsibilities, or limited transportation or time.
Meeting from home can also allow you to arrange the space around your needs. You may have medications, mobility supports, sensory tools, blankets, pets, or other resources nearby. You can spend your energy on the session rather than on transportation or recovering from the trip.
For some people, being in a familiar environment makes it easier to settle into the work. Virtual therapy can create meaningful flexibility while allowing the therapeutic relationship to remain present and connected.
What should I ask a prospective therapist?
A consultation can help you notice whether a therapist responds with respect, curiosity, and openness.
You might ask:
- What kind of COVID precautions do you take personally?
- What are your thoughts on the idea that the pandemic is “over”?
- How do you understand clients who continue to take COVID precautions?
- How do you work with anxiety while respecting a client’s assessment of real-world risk?
- How do you approach differences in COVID precautions within families, communities, and relationships?
- Do you offer virtual sessions consistently?
- If you work in person, what precautions and illness policies do you currently use?
- How do you approach disability, chronic illness, and medical trauma?
- Can I discuss conflict around precautions without being pressured to increase my exposure or repair relationships that no longer feel trustworthy?
Pay attention to the content of the therapist’s answers and to what happens inside you as they respond. Do you find yourself preparing to argue your case? Does the therapist become dismissive or make assumptions? Or do you sense that there will be room for your whole experience?
You deserve care that supports your agency
COVID-conscious therapy can offer a relationship where your precautions are understood within the larger context of your health, values, relationships, and lived experience.
You deserve space to explore grief, fear, conflict, joy, connection, and possibility while remaining the person who decides what safety and care mean for you.
You can also search the COVID-Conscious Therapists Directory for therapists who identify as COVID-conscious.
If you’re looking for COVID-conscious virtual therapy in California, you can learn more about individual therapy or contact me to see whether we might be a good fit.
About the author: Erica Berman, LMFT is a queer trauma therapist, EMDR Certified Therapist, and EMDRIA Approved Consultant. Her work brings together relational, somatic, and trauma-focused approaches.