Online therapy has become mainstream. That's mostly a good thing — it has made quality care accessible to people who couldn't easily get to an office, and research consistently supports its effectiveness for a wide range of concerns.
But not everyone will have a good experience with it. And not every therapist who offers telehealth is the right fit for every person who books online.
After years of working exclusively online with individuals and couples in Colorado and California, I've developed a clear sense of who tends to thrive in this format — and who would genuinely be better served by a different kind of care. I think it's worth being honest about both.
What Online Therapy Does Well
For the right person, removing the commute, the waiting room, and the fixed geography of in-person therapy creates something genuinely useful: consistency. You can show up from your home office in Denver on a Tuesday, and from a hotel in Los Angeles two weeks later, without interrupting the thread of the work.
That continuity matters more than people expect. Some of the most meaningful progress in therapy happens in the weeks between sessions — in how you carry a conversation forward, how you notice a pattern mid-week, how a shift starts to show up in your daily life. The work doesn't stop when the session ends, and online therapy tends to blur that boundary in a productive way.
I also find that people often feel a different kind of ease working from their own space. There's less performance involved. Some clients are more themselves on a screen than they ever were sitting across from a therapist.
Who I Work Best With
After 14 years of practice, I have a clear sense of where I can be most useful — and the depth-oriented, somatic, and relational work I do works best when there's a certain foundation already in place.
The clients I work best with tend to be:
People with enough stability and support in place to stay engaged with the work, even when it feels difficult. This doesn't mean you have everything together — it means you have enough ground under you to tolerate discomfort without it becoming a crisis. Therapy asks a lot of the nervous system. The clients I work best with are often overwhelmed — but they're not in crisis. There's enough stability in their lives to do the kind of deep, careful work that that can lead to meaningful change.
Self-aware and genuinely motivated. Not people who have everything figured out — but people who are curious about themselves, willing to look honestly at their patterns, and there because they actually want to change something, not because someone told them they had to.
Navigating complexity, not emergency. My practice is not the right fit for someone in acute crisis or who needs a level of support that goes beyond weekly outpatient therapy — intensive programs, crisis intervention, or very high-frequency contact. That distinction matters because good therapy depends on the right level of support, and where I can actually be useful.
Couples who are struggling, but still have enough willingness to participate in the process together. I work with couples navigating real pain — disconnection, communication breakdown, recovering from betrayal, managing the transition to parenthood, or rediscovering each other after years of distance. What I'm not the right fit for is couples in sustained high-conflict where the primary issue is safety or co-regulation rather than the relationship itself. If you're not sure which category applies to you, a consultation is a good place to figure that out together.
Why I'm Telling You This
Because I've seen what happens when someone starts therapy with a provider who isn't truly equipped to work with what they're bringing. It doesn't help, and sometimes it makes things worse — not because the therapist isn't skilled, but because the match isn't right.
The best outcome of reading this isn't necessarily that you book with me. It's that you look for a therapist — whoever that ends up being — with enough self-knowledge and honesty to tell you clearly what they do well and when they'd refer you elsewhere.
That transparency, in my experience, is itself a sign of a therapist worth working with.
What the First Sessions Actually Look Like
The first session isn't an intake form brought to life. It's a conversation — one where I'm genuinely trying to understand who you are, how you got here, and what you're actually carrying. We'll talk about what brought you to therapy right now, what you're hoping for, and what change could actually look like for you. And we'll look at that in context — your personal history and your family, your environment, your culture, the larger forces that have shaped who you are and what you're facing.
I'm paying attention to a lot that isn't said — the pauses, the hesitations, the moments where something shifts. I'm also quietly assessing something important: your nervous system's capacity, and how much you can tolerate before we need to slow down or resource first. If it would help, we'll also practice some simple tools early on — breathing techniques, grounding exercises, ways of calming and regulating the nervous system — so you have something concrete to work with between sessions.
Think of it like a personal trainer who first assesses where you are before deciding whether you should start with 5 pounds or 40. The goal in those early sessions isn't to dive into the deep end — it's to find out what the water is like for you, and build from there.
What I Specialize In
For the people who are a good fit, here's what I actually bring:
Anxiety and the patterns underneath it — not just symptom management, but understanding what's driving the anxiety and shifting it at that level
Life transitions and identity — the disorientation of major change: career shifts, relocation, loss, becoming a parent, renegotiating who you are in midlife
Relationship patterns — both in couples therapy and in individual work exploring how relational history shapes current dynamics
Trauma — using EMDR and somatic approaches with clients who are stable enough to do that work and ready to move through something that has been stuck
Cross-cultural and bicultural experience — I work in English and French and have a particular understanding of the complexity that comes with navigating more than one cultural context
Getting Started
If what you've read here resonates — if you recognized yourself in the description of who I work best with — I offer a free 20-minute consultation to talk through what you're looking for and whether my approach is a good fit.
It's a real conversation, not a sales call. If I don’t think I'm not the right person for what you need, I'll tell you.
Book your free 20-min consultation
Valerie Abitbol, MA, LMFT offers online psychotherapy for individuals and couples in Colorado and California.
