Seeing is believing: comment on the special issue concerning online interventions.

Abstract

The collection of papers about online attachment-based interventions reflect the wellworn saying “necessity is the mother of invention”—had the COVID-19 pandemic not happened, the need for these online interventions might not have arisen. However, the resulting development of these online interventions not only reveals levels of efficacy similar to in-person interventions but also offers benefits that in-person interventions cannot provide. These benefits include ease of scheduling, savings in terms of transportation (minimizing the carbon footprint of the clinicians), and increased accessibility (across all parts of the lab where web connectivity is functional) making the intervention available to families living far away from providers of the intervention and increasing the number of families who can be reached by the therapeutic services. The papers in this Special Issue (e.g) were initially presented at an online conference sponsored by The Society for Emotion and Attachment Studies (SEAS) termed “Attachment-based interventions for pandemic times” that took place on Zoom, hosted by SEAS and The Center for Attachment Research at The New School for Social Research, over 2–3 December 2021. The authors of the papers in this Special Issue were among those who presented their work at the Dec. 2021 Zoom conference.