As interpersonal boundaries have grown more flexible in a culture dominated by digital technology, traditional psychotherapeutic boundaries of time and space have become harder to maintain. In-depth interviews with 28 psychotherapists led to the emergence of a grounded theory to describe the challenges and changes that therapists have made to therapeutic boundaries and the frame of treatment: Collisions and collusions with new norms: Renegotiating time and space in a pre-pandemic digital era. It is argued that therapists are faced with somewhat unprecedented challenges to incorporate new norms into their clinical practices, including expectations of increased availability and access to people on-the-go; increased contact through text or email; and fewer boundaries between work and leisure/personal time. Meanwhile, there is little training or supervision to help therapists think through the implications of their actions on clinical encounters. Implications for the field and for training of future clinicians are discussed.

In the digital age, the cultivation of a public self—both personal and professional—is increasingly common and even expected. This undermines a norm of psychotherapy, in which therapists traditionally maintain a degree of privacy that aims to protect the individualized needs of their therapeutic work. This study aimed to explore how therapists navigate the curation of public self(s) and the treatment implications that come with this shift. In-depth interviews with 28 therapists were conducted and coded according to tenets of grounded theory methodology. Findings showed that digital technology is operating as a marketplace disruptor to the field of psychotherapy, presenting unprecedented challenges to long-held norms and assumptions about therapists’ behavior. Increased pressures to network online are more transparent, and curate digital selves have resulted in significant challenges to maintaining separation between public and private selves. This has led to fundamental changes in core elements of therapy, including the process of generating referrals, the nature of self-disclosure, the therapeutic relationship, and the overall clinical process.