Deciding to Meet

If you're on this site, chances are you've made a few attempts, on your own, to manage some sort of tricky circumstances without quite getting the better of them. Now you’re considering talking to an, "expert" with the hope that they have some understanding to add that you haven't yet considered.

Deciding who to meet with- especially if you've never done it before- can be confusing and intimidating, and certainly feel like one of those decisions it's especially important to get, "right." A useful bit of information is that it’s not entirely your job to know who the right therapist is. It’s actually the therapist’s job- my job, when you first sit down, to help determine who or what is the correct fit for you at the time, and to help get you to the right person if I'm not it.

Finding a good fit is, fortunately, not as difficult as it might sound. Specialized knowledge can be important, but what usually counts most is the therapist's ability to bring perspective to your challenges that has, so far, escaped you. This is the job description I think most therapists would acknowledge and comes somewhat from where they sit- across from you and outside of your day-to-day world, their understanding of human emotional life and, what I believe is the most, “therapeutic” part- a careful and thoughtful way of helping you to see what they believe they’re seeing when you meet. These points, put very briefly here, are foundations of good therapy and can offer a starting point for thinking about whether a particular therapist is a good choice.

If and when you begin, expect change to come gently- and then perhaps a bit more quickly as the process and the therapist grow more familiar. You'll know the therapy is working when, over time, particular experiences and judgments start to take on a different cast and your familiar- perhaps overly familiar- landscape begins to shift its shape and color. You’ve always made a “left turn” at a particular moment and now you notice an interesting road to the right that seems worth checking. This is really the point. It’s the process of expanding options to do things in ways that weren’t previously on the map. This is why you’ve started the process of looking for someone with whom to begin this sort of conversation and it’s the promise of helpful psychotherapy.