Virtual Reality Therapy

Immersion! It’s all about your mind believing you did the thing. Much of therapy is based in “Imagine if you were to…” and this can be incredibly effective. The challenge is there’s a difference between doing something difficult in a therapist’s office and doing it “in the real world.” We use virtual reality to create an immersive therapy experience where your mind feels like you are practicing the skills you’ve learned in therapy in the real world, with real people, and real things. We focus on the parts of your mind that aren’t very good at telling the difference between virtual reality and real life.

The answer is…it depends. For treating specific fears, such as flying, it’s usually 6-12 sessions. For everything else the answer gets more complicated because each issue is unique and the therapy for it is tailored to what’s going on for you, what’s important to you, and what “better” looks/feels like to you. This is something we will talk about in one of your first sessions, which can give you a better idea of how long the process will be.

Using virtual reality has been around for about 25 years. The Veterans Administration (VA) was one of the first to use virtual reality on a regular basis starting in the 1990s. The VA often uses exposure-based therapy for treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) so they use virtual reality to allow their patients to feel like they are back in conflict areas without needing to transport the patient overseas. As technology has improved and the cost has dropped, more organizations are using virtual reality as part of therapy. Recently the American Psychological Association dedicated an entire research journal publication (Translational Issues in Psychology) to research supporting the use of virtual reality in therapy. Since the start of 2022 over 17,000 research studies/articles on the topic have been published.

The therapies used as part of virtual reality therapy are based on the same therapies we would use without virtual reality. This means that if what you are looking for help for is covered by your insurance, and Ellie works with your insurance, your therapy will be covered by insurance. If you wish to pay out-of-pocket, please discuss options when you speak with a member of our team.

Assuming therapy is delivered well, and you are willing to do the work involved, there is very little chance of it making symptoms worse by the end of therapy. That said, as part of therapy we will guide you to do things that will make you feel very anxious as part of the process. For you to learn new ways of dealing with parts of life that are making you anxious we need you to learn new ways of approaching these things, to feel the anxiety, to use your new tools, and experience the triumph of how you were able to work through them.