Letting your client draw on the canvas

By default, the whiteboard is yours — you draw, the client watches. When you want them to participate (mark where they feel anxiety in a body diagram, add their own evidence to a thought record, sketch their family map), flip Two-way ON and their pointer becomes a pen. It’s a deliberate toggle, not always-on collaboration. You stay in control of when the client is drawing and when they’re watching, because most clinical moments call for one or the other — rarely both at once.

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The Two-way toggle

The toggle sits at the bottom-center of the whiteboard, labelled Two-way: OFF when collaboration is off. Tap it.

• The label flips to Two-way: ON with a green indicator (the same green you’ll recognize from the “client has control” cue in EMDR).
• Your client immediately sees a small toolbar appear on their end with a pen, color picker, text tool, and undo button.
• Their cursor turns into a drawing cursor over the canvas.

Tap it again to flip OFF — their toolbar disappears, their cursor goes back to a normal arrow, and any strokes they’ve made stay on your canvas.

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What the client can do (and what they can’t)

The client’s tools are deliberately minimal. They’re annotating your canvas, not co-editing the worksheet itself. They can:

• Draw with a pen, choosing from 5 colors picked to read well on a clinical canvas.
• Type text — tap anywhere, type, press Enter to commit.
• Undo their own last mark.
• Use Apple Pencil pressure if they’re on iPad.

They can’t:

• Move, resize, or recolor the elements you placed (preset boxes, your text, your shapes).
• Delete anything you drew.
• Drop a preset, drop a sticky note, or open the worksheets library.
• Erase. Their tools are pen and text only.

The boundary keeps clinical authorship clear. The presets, the formulation, the diagram shape stay yours; the client’s marks ride on top as annotations you can see and incorporate.

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Cursor pills

When Two-way is ON, you can see your client’s pointer position on your canvas as a small dot with their name beside it. They can see yours the same way. This matters more than it sounds — when you’re explaining something and they’re following along silently, the cursor tells you they’re on the right part of the diagram. The cursors update about ten times a second, smooth enough to feel live without flooding the connection.

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Clearing client marks before export

A common pattern: you and your client co-build a diagram during the session. You want to keep the structure but not their handwritten exploratory notes (or vice versa). When Two-way is ON, a Clear client marks button appears beside the toggle. Tap it.

• Every stroke and text element your client added this session disappears from the canvas.
• Your own elements stay exactly where they were.
• The client’s overlay also clears on their end — they’re back to a clean canvas with just your content visible.

This is reversible only by undoing — there’s no “restore client marks” button. Use it once you’ve decided what to keep.

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Native viewing

If your client is on an iPhone or Android, they see the whiteboard as a video stream — they can watch you draw, but the drawing toolbar doesn’t appear on their end. Two-way collaboration is designed for clients on a laptop, desktop, or iPad. Most clients are; for the ones who aren’t, they still get the visual you’re showing them.

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When to use Two-way

Most of a session, you’ll be the only one drawing. Two-way fits the specific moments when the client adding to the canvas is part of the clinical work:

• Thought record — they fill in their own automatic thoughts.
• Evidence for/against — they add the evidence rather than you transcribing.
• Body diagram / trigger map — they mark where they feel something.
• Genogram or family map — they label the relationships.
• Stages of change — they place themselves on the line.

For psychoeducation (window of tolerance, polyvagal ladder, upstairs brain), you typically stay in single-author mode — those diagrams land better when one person draws and the other watches.

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