Plan the session around the connection instead of hoping the connection holds. That means three decisions made in advance: what the fallback is, who calls whom, and what clinical work you will not attempt on a line that keeps dropping.

The fallback is the easy part and the one most often skipped. Agree it in the first session — "if the video drops, stay where you are and I'll call you on your phone" — and a dropped call becomes an interruption rather than a crisis. Without it, a client who was mid-disclosure is now sitting alone wondering whether you hung up.

The rest is mostly triage. Audio is far cheaper than video, so dropping your camera often rescues a session that was about to fail. A wired connection beats wireless every time on your end. And some work — reprocessing in particular — should not be started at all when you cannot count on seeing the person's face for thirty seconds at a stretch.

What actually improves a bad connection?

In rough order of how much they help.

Turn the video off. Audio needs a fraction of what video does. A session that keeps freezing becomes a clean phone-quality conversation the moment one or both cameras go off. Offer it early rather than as a last resort.

Plug in, on your side. A cable to the router removes the single most common source of instability in a home office. If your laptop has no port, an adapter is inexpensive and is the best video-quality purchase available.

Move closer to the router. Signal strength that reads as two bars is already at the edge of what a call needs. A different room can be the whole fix.

Stop everything else on the network. Someone streaming in the next room, a backup running, a phone updating. Video calls lose to backups.

Refresh both sides. A stale connection sometimes fails to recover on its own after a bad patch. Rejoining takes fifteen seconds and often resets it.

Use the phone network instead of the internet. Mobile data is frequently better than a poor home connection, and a plain phone call is better than both.

What can I not fix?

Your client's connection, which is where the problem usually is. You can offer suggestions and you can wait it out, but you cannot solve their rural service or their building's wiring from your chair.

That is worth saying to yourself, because the alternative is spending the first ten minutes of every session on a technical problem that is not yours and does not get better.

What work should I not attempt on a bad line?

Anything where continuous observation is part of the intervention.

Trauma reprocessing is the clearest case. If you cannot reliably see the client's face for the length of a set, you cannot judge when to stop, and a stimulus running while you're looking at a frozen frame is not something you're delivering — it's something happening to them. Stop the set yourself, and don't start another until the picture is back.

Exposure work and anything that raises distress deliberately has the same shape. You are the regulator, and a therapist who intermittently disappears is not a regulator.

Risk assessment needs a channel you can rely on. If the video is failing, move to the phone before you start rather than partway through.

What travels fine on a poor connection: most talking therapy, psychoeducation, planning, review, and a great deal of the ordinary work of an hour. Audio-only therapy is real therapy, and clients often find it easier, not harder, for difficult material.

Should we just use the phone?

For some clients, yes, and permanently.

If every session begins with three minutes of "can you hear me now," the video is costing more than it adds. Switching to phone as the default format, rather than as the thing that happens when video fails, removes a recurring small humiliation for a client who is already apologising for their internet.

Discuss it as a clinical choice. Some clients will be relieved. Others will want to keep trying, and that preference is worth respecting too — a face matters to some people in a way no bandwidth argument overrides.

How should I handle the drop when it happens?

Have a script, because the moment is disorienting for both of you.

1. Call them within about thirty seconds. Not a text. The phone.

2. Say the obvious thing first. "We got cut off, I'm here, take a moment." The client's nervous system does not know the difference between a dropped connection and being walked out on.

3. Ask where they got to. Not "carry on" — they may not know where they were.

4. Decide the format for the rest of the hour, out loud. Going back to video, or staying on the phone. Deciding once beats renegotiating every two minutes.

5. Come back to it later. For some clients a mid-session disappearance touches something. Worth a sentence at the end.

Anything to say about billing?

Worth having a position before you need one. A session that ran twenty minutes of its fifty because of connection failures is a conversation, and having already decided what you do — prorate, reschedule, complete on the phone — keeps that conversation out of the clinical hour.

Whatever you decide, put it in the same place as your cancellation policy so it is a policy rather than a judgement made about one client on one bad day.

The short version

Agree the fallback in the first session. When it starts failing, drop video before you drop the session. Don't start reprocessing on a line you don't trust. And if it happens every week, change the format rather than the expectations.

About Rivet

Rivet is a Canadian practice line built for therapists — a separate number for calls, texts and voicemail, with video sessions and clinical tools in the same place. Your data stays in Canada, and transcription runs on Rivet's own hardware rather than a third-party AI service.

One plan, $65 CAD a month, everything included. Fourteen-day trial, no card.

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