Assuming personal responsibility is one of the treatment issues that emerged in this period and created an opportunity for change. Many participants discussed issues related to change and personal responsibility in their clients and groups. Dimona, for example, wrote:
For some students, this period was an opportunity to flourish as they took upon themselves roles in organizing the meetings and reminding their peers to attend meetings on time.
Gil also described group work that resulting in group members assuming responsibility to initiate contact with other group members in need.
It is also interesting to note that, in many cases, the issues related to the Corona experience that arose in individual or group therapy served as a trigger and lever for deep individual work. Most important of these issues is flexibility — of therapists and clients both. The Corona crisis imposed many changes in people lives that required adjustment and adaptation. It is possible that the need for change and flexibility to cope with the constraints of the situation allowed people to reexamine and modify their regular behavioral patterns, and adopt a more fluid attitude and approach to life. Gil accurately described this opportunity:
The tension between flexibility to boundary maintenance is especially exacerbated during the lockdown. There was an enormous need to make changes in clients’ scheduled sessions: mothers…students… the therapist’s own personal daily schedule changed due to the need to care for family needs. The challenge of the conflict between flexibility and boundaries is a treatment opportunity to experience uncertainty and cope with this axis in life. This is also the case with respect to anxiety and loss of control, [which also constitute] treatment opportunities.
Ziva discussed the corresponding work that she and her client did on the issue of flexibility:
…I thought to myself that [as a therapist] I am very rigid. I don’t do anything that is against the rules… I feel that this is an important point. I feel that there is really some kind of rigidity in this specific client [an unmarried Haredi women, who, during the first lockdown, decided to explore the Internet for potential partners for the first time] …Especially in these times and in [our] capsule, you get this feeling that something is closing in on you…suddenly it afforded a kind of flexibility. For her, too.
Another manifestation of change related to therapists’ flexibility is described in Gil’s contribution. It seems that therapists developed greater openness to the use of alternative virtual media, when the need arose, even after the lockdown ended. Gil discusses how therapists developed much greater flexibility regarding changes in scheduled sessions and in the transition to virtual platforms as a solution to the restrictions, even when face-to-face meetings were permitted:
One interesting phenomenon is that after the lockdown when we [in the public sector] returned to regular face-to-face work, whenever a session was cancelled because the client or the therapist was unable to physically come to the unit, it was understood that the session would be conducted on video. That never happened before the lockdown… There were also efforts (by therapists and clients) to change the setting… for example, to schedule an alternative session on video in the evening, which would never have been considered an option before the lockdown. At some point it seemed appeared that the public service might even improve as a result of the Corona crisis.
