My friends regularly tell me I should be in therapy. I’m a workaholic with crippling decision anxiety. I can turn the simple choice of whether to take a flight at 2.45pm or 4.30pm into a week-long deliberation that morphs into a meditation on my flaws as a human being. I constantly doubt my own intelligence and often put in longer hours than necessary to compensate for my low self-esteem.

In sum, my friends are probably right.

But since I’m busy with a full-time job and many freelance assignments, self-care usually takes a backseat to work. If I can’t find 20 minutes for the elliptical, I can’t find three hours a week to spill my problems while sprawled on plush furniture. So when I heard about text therapy, which allows you to message a counsellor via phone while you answer an email and eat lunch at your desk, I signed up.

For $100 a month at Talkspace, one of the many apps that offers digital therapy, I could chat in real-time with a therapist for half an hour a week (we usually went way over time). The price is right – a typical one-hour long in-person session can cost between $100 and $300 – but I had reservations about my 30-day experiment. The solution to any workaholic’s problem is never more screen time, and just like the 10-minute pilates videos I watch on YouTube, this seemed like another half-assed attempt to take care of myself. Yet I never paused to worry about what kind of therapist actually believes they can solve complex mental health issues with the most surface form of communication.

At first things started out well. I was paired with a woman I’ll call Barbara, based on Talkspace’s “matching process”. We covered the basics. She asked questions such as: “Have you ever thought about where these thoughts about yourself come from in your life? How long have you noticed these type of feelings of inferiority?” And I responded in large blocks of text in which I made connections to my childhood and admitted that I rarely feel as smart as the people around me. I knew it was therapy 101, but it felt powerful to write down the issues that I usually trivialize.

The first major red flag with Barbara was her use of emojis

In the early days, text therapy was a great spot treatment for my decision anxiety. One afternoon, Barbara talked me through the paralyzing choice of whether or not to attend an awards show in Toronto. Over the course of a few weeks I had exhausted my boyfriend, friends and family with my inability to say yes or no. “Just without thinking about right or wrong … what do you want?” Barbara asked. The question made me think clearly and led to the breakthrough that I rarely trust my own intuition because, well, I don’t really like myself.

So my pocket therapist could troubleshoot small problems, but I quickly discovered she could not tackle the roots of my low self-esteem.



The first major red flag with Barbara was her use of emojis. After our second session, in which I listed my many negative qualities, she said my long-term mission was to accept myself – a statement she ended with a winking face. I tried to stay cool. I told myself it’s 2016 and bright yellow faces are a valid form of expression, even for a paid therapist. But then I remembered she had already used a few “LOLs” and the meaningless phrase, “I truly believe that the authenticity of our true self, is in our life story...”, and I seriously began to question her intelligence.



I realized that if I didn’t bring Barbara a specific problem to solve, she became a self-care bot. At the end of one session she recommended I buy an “interactive journal” from Amazon that features “inspirational quotes” to help readers “appreciate the world around us and achieve our dreams”. She sent me worksheets with kindergarten-like prompts such as “I like myself because” and cheesy TED Talks to help replace my negative thoughts with “positive daily mantras”. When I tried to explain that journalists tend to be cynics, she responded: “Pride in being a skeptic, that is an interesting thing. Can you explain that a bit more for me.”

Oh Barbara, I thought, we will never bridge this divide.

Once I realized her and I weren’t simpatico, I stopped prioritizing our sessions. As we texted, I kept working with 19 tabs open and threw in my own platitudes such as “How can I better accept myself?” to keep the conversation moving.

At one point I even began using punctuation like an overly enthusiastic mother. When she suggested I take 30 minutes away from the screen for lunch, a suggestion I could find on any subpar lifestyle blog, I responded:

“Okay will do!!! I will suppress my anxiety that I am wasting time!!”

Her response was even more embarrassing.

“lol! How about RELEASE your anxiety and give yourself permission to ENJOY time? Just a slight rephrasing.”

A few times I was overwhelmed with work and blew Barbara off (she bailed once or twice on me as well). I never felt guilty because, unlike an office visit, our “appointments” were easy to reschedule. She usually responded to my cancellations with a classic winking emoji.

Perhaps Barbara was just matching her message to the medium. Maybe she’s decided clients who pay less for mental health than for takeout deserve little more than Oprah-esque cliches. Maybe she was doing her own juggling, cutting and pasting sappy slogans to me and five other clients while she sipped a martini and got a pedicure.

But the world of text therapy likely attracts a certain kind of counsellor, the optimists who believe staring at a poster with the words “You are enough” below a sunset can alter brain chemistry.

In our final session, I thanked Barbara and she wished me well. Her final text was a smiley face.