By
Adam Simmons
· Last checked
October 2026
A whiteboard in a session is the paper pad you'd reach for in the room. Same purpose, same moment: the concept has stopped landing in words and it needs a picture. Reach for it when you would have reached for paper, and leave it closed the rest of the time.
The specific moments are consistent across modalities. Psychoeducation where the diagram is the teaching — the window of tolerance, a nervous-system ladder, the upstairs and downstairs brain. Cognitive work where the client needs to see the loop rather than hear about it. Formulation you're building together. A worksheet you'd otherwise have printed.
What doesn't work is opening a blank canvas because it's there. A drawing surface hanging mid-session with nothing on it reads as "where is this going," and the client starts watching the tool instead of the conversation.
What does a virtual whiteboard do better than paper?
Three things, and only one of them is about drawing.
The client actually sees it. In the room, a therapist sketching on a pad angled towards themselves is drawing for themselves. On a shared canvas, the client watches it being built, which is most of why the picture works — they remember the thing they saw appear, not the thing they were shown at the end.
It survives the session. A drawing you can save or export goes into the chart, or to the client, and comes back out in week six when the same pattern shows up again. A pad sketch usually doesn't.
It's legible. Typed labels on a diagram beat handwriting held up to a webcam, which is the alternative most practitioners start with and abandon.
What doesn't work well?
Anything requiring fine drawing with a mouse. Freehand with a trackpad is awful. If you're drawing a lot, a tablet with a pen changes the experience completely; if you're not, stick to boxes, arrows and typed text.
Clients on phones. A canvas on a phone screen is small, and if the whiteboard and the video are competing for the same screen, one of them loses. Ask what device the client is on before you plan a session around a diagram.
Detailed worksheets built live. If the structure is fixed — a thought record, a five-part model — build it before the session or use a template. The client should watch their content go in, not watch you draw the grid.
Should I let the client draw?
Sometimes, deliberately, and not by default.
Clients drawing changes the exercise. Marking where in the body the anxiety sits, adding their own evidence to a thought record, sketching a family map — these are different interventions from watching you draw, and often better ones. But a client with a pen also has to manage a tool while they're talking, and for some people that's a cost.
The useful habit is to keep it a decision rather than a setting. Turn it on when there's something for them to add, and turn it off again when there isn't. If the tool lets you clear what the client added separately from what you drew, that's worth knowing before you're mid-formulation.
Watch for one thing: clients who start drawing to avoid saying something. It's information, and it's easy to miss when you're looking at a canvas instead of a face.
What happens to the drawing afterwards?
Decide this before you start, because it determines what you're comfortable putting on the canvas.
Ask three questions of whatever you use:
Does the board persist between sessions, or start fresh? A canvas carrying last week's material into this week is a confidentiality question if you ever have two clients on the same board.
Can you export it, and in what form? A file you can put in the chart is worth much more than a picture that disappears when the call ends.
Where does it go if it's saved? A drawing containing a client's formulation is clinical record material, and where it lives is the same question you'd ask of a progress note.
If the drawing is going into the record, it is worth being deliberate about what goes on it. A client's name and a trauma narrative on the same canvas is a document you have now created.
Should I give the client a copy?
Often, yes, and it's one of the more useful things a session produces. The diagram you built together is a thing they can look at on a bad Tuesday.
Two cautions. Send it the way you send everything else clinical — through whatever channel your consent covers, not by whatever is fastest. And think about who else sees their phone or their email before you send a picture with "panic cycle" and their name on it.
Ask, rather than assume. Some clients want it and some very much do not.
Is there a simpler option?
Yes, and it's fine.
Hold a piece of paper up to the camera. Prepare a diagram in advance as a PDF and share your screen. Send an image afterwards. Draw on paper and describe it. Practitioners did all of these for years and clients understood the window of tolerance perfectly well.
A whiteboard earns its place when you're drawing often enough that the friction adds up, or when the client drawing is part of the point. If you sketch something once a month, paper and a camera is not a compromise.
The short version
Use it the way you'd use a pad: with intent, at the moment words stopped working. Keep the structure prepared and the content live. Decide in advance where the picture goes afterwards. And if you only draw occasionally, holding up a piece of paper is still a completely respectable answer.
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.
$29 CAD a month per practitioner for the practice line, or $65 with video sessions and clinical tools. Fourteen-day trial, no card.