How To Pick A Therapist

how to pick a therapist

A friend recently asked how I found my therapist, who I absolutely adore. I was in a bad place when I first started seeing her, and she has helped me completely turn my life around. The fact is that I saw a lot of bad and mediocre therapists, then finally got lucky. That said, now that I know what a really good therapist is like, I do have some advice for finding one:

Do interview sessions with multiple therapists and take notes on what you like or don’t like. It’s not high maintenance or pushy to ask a lot of questions. You’re a customer looking for someone to provide a service - an expensive service, possibly for a long time. This is someone you will trust with your secrets and your health. Sometimes, your life.

If you’re in a dark place while searching, try to find a level-headed friend or family member to help you interview. The most frustrating thing about mental healthcare is that patients are often too vulnerable and ill to self-advocate and, as a result, often tolerate unacceptable behavior from their mental healthcare providers. Bad providers will blame patient dissatisfaction on patients being unstable. There is little accountability for their performance. If you can’t stand up for yourself, it helps to have a trusted third party that can either come with for interviews or, at the very least, who can talk with you after about your concerns and options. If a therapist asks why you want to bring someone with, simply say, “I’m not mentally able to self-advocate at this time. I am more comfortable having someone with me for support.”

Look for someone who does holistic therapy and/or who talks about using a variety of methods, depending on patient needs. Ask what types of methods they use and if they prefer one over others. A big part of therapy is teaching you a variety tools that will help you cope with stressors. You should expect your therapist to have more than one tool in their arsenal as well.

Ask their opinion on medication. I have met therapists who don’t believe in medication at all and some who won’t even work with patients that aren’t willing to medicate. Personally, I feel the only correct response is, “Medication is an important tool for some people, but it’s not the answer for everyone.”

Ask them what successful therapy looks like to them and what they think the most important things are to be successful in therapy. You want someone who talks about how different patients need different things. For some people, stability is the goal. Others have more specific objectives. The worst sort of therapist is one that uses the same structure for every patient because they’ve decided it’s the “right way.”

During interviews, you do want a therapist to mention that a patient has to be willing to change and give effort. However, you don’t want them to spend an excessive amount of time going on about how YOU have to do the work and “this won’t work if you’re not willing to give it your all” and blah, blah, blah. That is the sign of a therapist that will see therapy not working and immediately say, “Ah, not my fault. They weren’t doing the work,” absolving themselves of any extra work or creative thinking.

The final item is tricky to spot in an initial interview, but it’s crucial. Therapy requires a delicate balance. A good therapist can guide a session and push their patient without being domineering or dismissive. You can spot the domineering therapist fairly easily: they will tell more than they ask, make you feel uncomfortable or self-doubting, and will minimize your wishes or concerns about therapy. The lazy therapist is much more common. They’re not as harmful or obvious as the domineering therapist, but they probably won’t help you. They let you guide therapy, don’t ask many questions, and don’t challenge you. They will let you use therapy as a venting session or allow you to rehash the same handful of traumas without doing any work to process them in a new way. If you find yourself with a domineering or lazy therapist, fire them.

What has made my therapy successful is that my therapist is flexible, adaptable, and willing to try new things and new methods. There were periods where I was actually too ill to do any work, but she never addressed it like, “Ah, She Won’t Do The Work.” She just scheduled us for very frequent sessions and kind of quietly came up with things to keep me busy and stable, monitoring my state for safety until I reached a place where I was able to do the work.

When something didn’t work, it was never my fault, and she never spent any time lamenting that it hadn’t worked. She would just immediately say, "Okay, not this, then. I have something different planned for us to try next week.” Just like that, we were talking about what we were going to do next instead of thinking about the thing that failed.

The mental healthcare world, at least here in the US, is pretty fucked up. For a time, it was definitely doing me more harm than good, and I have trauma from my experiences with bad mental healthcare providers. I think it’s important to talk about patient self-advocacy and provider accountability. I hope the list above will help someone avoid bad providers and get the help they need. If you would signal boost this, I’d really appreciate it.

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stubbytime

10 months ago

notes from nicole piastri's interview on red flags pod

oscar started playing monopoly and chess when he was 4-5 but he was too good at chess (relative to nicole) that she boycotted it

nicole opened her twitter account because oscar wasn't replying to her at boarding school and she needed a place to chastise him ("can you not answer... i KNOW you're on your phone") (it worked because he started replying to her there)

instead of unflappable she calls him "conservative"

even during christmas and birthdays he was never super excited, one time they went with a group of 5 mums and 5 kids to a hi-5 concert (popular australian kids' musical group) and while all the kids were "going nuts" oscar just sat there "focused the whole time" and didn't smile or move lmfao. they were like 3 years old

didn't know what she was doing with oscar as a baby because he was her first child and her mothers' group was her only reference and they went "isn't the best part of the day when you wake up and go to their crib and they smile at you?" and she was like ??? because oscar would wake up and just SCREAM every single day needing to be out of there immediately and she thought that was just normal... then she had the girls and went "ahhhh... so that's what they're talking about"

when he was younger than 2 he needed them to read car magazines to him and was already obsessed with all things automotive and while they were driving would just name off and point out car brands by their badges

for a long period of time he behaved like he was a car and would "spin" his wheels and pretend to accelerate and run like a car lol

did a big burnout the first time he was on a bike (it had training wheels but he still learned very early)

as a mum she wishes he'd chosen golf or tennis since it's much safer than f1 and sometimes people tell her that she technically had a say in that when he was a kid and she said "but i didn't! it was just in him!!!"

won an academic award when he was 13 and she was president of the parents' community so she presented it to him, normally these events are super formal and you simply shake hands but she gave him a big kiss and instead of acting embarrassed or spluttering he looked at the crowd, nodded silently, and walked off

came back for the summer a few years ago and they were biking on the beach together when she had to brake hard to avoid a kid and went over, when she recovered and got back on he went "are you all right?" very deadpan but after they got home they checked his heart rate monitor and saw that he was totally steady the whole time except for when she crashed and his heart rate went through the roof, told him "ah so you do have a heart... we just don't see it"

"there's no sibling that can piss him off?" "well he's a boy with three girls so he just doesn't go there because he's never going to win"

met lily in person for the first time when he came home for the melbourne grand prix (was still alpine reserve), at midnight oscar was like "hey mum you know the dts film crew are coming tomorrow morning right?" and she was like WHAT... and he was like yeah it'll be chill they just want to film us having breakfast like a normal family or whatever and she was like Mate you haven't lived here for 5 years now do you know what breakfast looks like. it looks like your sisters storming downstairs and grabbing an inappropriate breakfast and storming out the door giving me the finger!!! and then the next morning lily comes down and nicole is like "oh is oscar up?" and lily is like no... i think he's still in bed... (many such cases) and then mae refused to be in it so she got dressed and ran off to school 2 hours early to escape them. and then the mclaren fiasco happened and the whole thing got cut out of dts anyway

when she said "oh my god you met matt damon!" he was just like (shrugs) "yeah... yeah..."

they communicate by facetiming and he's Always lying in bed. one time in bahrain he was leaning back on an ornate tapestry and she asked what hotel he was staying at and he was like oh i'm at the royal palace i'm like a guest of the crown prince. she freaked out and was like "oh my god!!! get your head off the tapestry!!!" and he just looked back like ? no it's fine it looks pretty old lol

called her to tell her that he signed his f1 contract and when he said mclaren she Realized and was like oh no i love daniel!! and he straight up deadpanned "yeah everyone loves daniel. that's going to be a problem..." and said verbatim "of all the f1 drivers ever daniel is the worst one to be replacing"

one time in f4 chris couldn't go to a race and billy monger had just had his crash so she flew to the uk for the weekend to support him and when she was driving him back to boarding school she was happy because she had 2 hours to spend with him and she wasn't sure when she'd see him again but instead he slept the whole way through and the moment they got back to school he went "ahhhh... home sweet home" and she wanted to slap him lmfao

first day of primary school when he was 5 years old he said he didn't need her to walk him to school and she was like "well i actually do mate" so he forced her to walk behind him the whole way and the moment they got there he turned to her and went "all right i'm here you can go now" 😭

the chinese & italian & yugoslavian is on chris's side of the family while nicole's is scottish & irish ("that's where the pasty skin comes from")

red flags pod sent her a shirt with oscar's face composed of His Tweet and she showed it to him and he immediately said he wanted it

he gave her a small warning before he posted the tweet but it was just like "mum so this is going to happen just don't worry about it. it's all under control. it'll be fine" and was very calm the whole time

"we just had to trust that his personality would come through at some point, because the way he came across was not at all what he's like. people will work out who the real you is so just continue to do what you do" 🥺

all of the kids were obsessed with Cars (2006)

likes his mum's golden syrup dumplings and grandmother's rumballs

AT THE SINGAPORE GP IN 2023 HATTIE DISAPPEARED FOR HOURS TO GO SEE A K-POP CONCERT 😭😭😭😭 i think it was p1h lmfao (nicole was asked for her favorite group and went "i have no idea. five boys") ((it's txt)) meanwhile oscar is only into house music and she thinks everything he plays is the same song

did pilates when he went home but never with her and thinks it's a lot harder than it looks

takes him minimum 24 hours to respond to anything she sends

she had an exact conversation with oscar where she asked who he wanted to be teammates with and he said "well if i go up against lando i don't even have to get close the first year because everyone knows how good he is" 😭

oscar you are so you 🧡

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