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As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many therapists and patients have been required to switch to online sessions in order to continue their treatments. Online psychotherapy has become increasingly popular, and although its efficacy seems to be similar to face-toface encounters, its capacity to support the implicit nonverbal and embodied aspects of the therapeutic relationship has been questioned and remains understudied. Objectives. To study how embodied and intersubjective processes are modified in online psychotherapy sessions.Design. Taking the enactive concept of participatory sense-making as a guiding thread, we designed an interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine the experiences of embodiment in online therapy.Methods. We conducted phenomenological semi-structured interviews with patients and therapists who have recently switched from face-to-face encounters to online modality.Results. Adjustments in verbal and nonverbal behavior, gaze behavior, management of silences, and displacements of non-intentional and pre-reflective patterns onto reflective ones are reported as necessary to compensate for changes introduced in the online modality.Conclusions. From an enactive perspective, such adaptations manifest regulatory processes aimed at sustaining interactive dynamics and coordinating the primordial tension between relational and individual norms in social encounters.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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