How to Find the Right Therapist
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
Finding the right therapist can be challenging, so it’s important to make the process manageable. While everyone’s situation is different, based on socioeconomic factors and individual needs, here are some general suggestions for you to consider:
Filter therapists based on the presenting issue: Among therapists, professional specialities widely vary. Some therapists are generalists, working with a variety of common mental health conditions. Other therapists tend of focus on a limited area of expertise. Consider whether the therapist is best suited to address your particular condition. For instance, if you are seeking help for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, it will likely be unhelpful to select a therapist who has only treated anxiety and depression. They simply do not have the training or clinical experience to address your presenting issue.
Do some light research into treatment modalities: As a consumer, it’s helpful to get a basic sense of the differences between modalities (i.e, psychodynamic approaches, cognitive therapies, and somatic practices). Clients who lack this information may be disappointed by the therapist’s approach when it does not meet their initial expectations or preferences. For clients who highly desire to talk about their past experiences, a purely somatic approach may not be a good fit. For those who want a more structured therapeutic approach, a psychodynamic approach may not be the right choice.
Provided the therapist offers you a free consultation call, you can ask them to describe their chosen therapeutic modalities and how they are used to treat your presenting issue. Before speaking to the therapist, you can often identify which modalities they use on their website. It may be helpful to read brief descriptions of those modalities on reputable websites, blogs, or Youtube channels prior to speaking to them.
Ask for recommendations: Ask friends, family members, or healthcare professionals for recommendations. They may be able to recommend a therapist who they have worked with and trust.
Therapist reviews are not always a helpful screening tool: After visiting a restaurant, people are often willing to share their experience with the public through online reviews. If you look up restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area on Yelp or Google, you will likely see a mix of positive, neutral, and negative reviews. You are also likely to see a high amount of reviews as well. Therapy, however, is different from most services because people are far less willing to publicly share their experiences around their own mental health care. If you look at therapist reviews on Google or Yelp, you’ll likely notice that many therapists have few or no reviews. Those therapists who do have reviews may have received some of them from past colleagues.
There are also cases when a therapist has only one review and it’s negative. One explanation is that people who are dissatisfied with a service may feel more compelled to post a review than if they had felt satisfied. While a therapist may have received positive feedback from their clients while in session, it is highly unethical for therapists to ask those clients to leave public reviews due to confidentiality concerns and other ethical reasons. Overall, the very private nature of therapy as a service results in limited public reviews, making it hard for consumers to access client perspectives on a therapist’s services. This may be worth keeping in mind as you search for a therapist.
Check qualifications: Ensure that the therapist is licensed to practice in your state and has the appropriate qualifications and training to provide therapy. For the State of California, you can find their licensing information here.
Consider logistics: Determine whether the therapist's availability and fees fit within your schedule and budget. On many therapist directory websites, you can filter therapists by virtual or in-person availability as well as their rate or insurance accepted. If you try to make an arrangement work that doesn’t fit into your lifestyle or needs, it will likely impact your ability to continue therapy. To grow beyond your current symptoms or presenting issue, you must be able to consistently attend therapy.
Schedule an initial consultation and make the most of it: Many therapists offer a free initial consultation, which can give you an opportunity to get to know the therapist better and determine if they are a good fit for you.
A) Ask important questions: “How can you help me improve x condition?” “What tends to be the most challenging aspect of treating them and how do you address that?” Questions like these can give you important information about what therapy with this particular therapist might be like. It will also give you insight into how they respond to clients who ask them questions about their practices and knowledge. Do they welcome your questions? Are their responses vague or notably brief? Or do they elaborate on the topic, providing some depth or nuance? It is my opinion that a therapist should be willing to answer questions like these during the consultation because it’s in the best interest of potential clients to learn whether the therapist is approachable and knowledgeable about the issue that is impacting their life.
B) Does the therapist seem mentally ‘present’ during your consultation: While most therapists are pretty busy between trainings, administrative tasks, and providing therapy to their clients, they should be mentally plugged in during your consultation call. Does the therapist appear to be running through the motions? Or are they interested in learning a bit more about you, even if it’s only a ten-minute call? A consultation may give you better insight into how the therapist might interact with you in session.
C) Does the therapist express interest or curisosity: While perspectives on this vary in our field, I believe that therapists who don’t ask you questions during the consultation call are showing a lack of interest in the potential client and a lack of basic screening practices to determine whether the client is a good fit for their practice before the client pays to see them. It’s understandable why some therapists choose to conduct the basic screening during a paid session; after all, they are conducting work through assessing the client. With that said, I believe that some basic screening questions during a free phone consultation can help identify poor fit in advance, saving the client time and money.
D) Does the therapist oversell their chosen therapeutic modality: Yes, some modalities are more effective than others, but as trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk has said, no single therapeutic modality works for everyone. So if a therapist tells you their modality is THE modality or if they are immediately confident that it will work for you, be cautious. The truth is, we don’t know how you will respond to a given intervention until we use it with you. On a therapist’s online profile, I have seen them describe one modality as “EMDR on steroids.” If you’re feeling desperate to treat your mental health condition, that language can sound more than promising. While that modality might have been impactful to the therapist or their clients, using extreme language can potentially result in you assuming that it will indeed work for you; as if you have stumbled across THE solution. If you do not see steroid-level results, you will likely leave feeling very disappointed or even mislead. I recommend finding a therapist who doesn’t oversell their chosen modalities.
While there’s no way to quickly identify the best therapist for you, the strategies I mentioned above can help you eliminate those who may be a poor fit.
