On Choosing a Therapist
If you liked the description of therapy in I wrote in this post, here are some follow-up thoughts I had and wanted to shared on how to choose a therapist:
Choose a therapist who seems to have an open heart. This is a prerequisite to locating someone who can provide us with acceptance. This is fundamental to healing and thriving.
Choose a therapist who is not attached to outcomes. If your therapist is attached to outcomes, if things do not progress as quickly as their own attachment dictates, negative judgment will appear. This collapses the most valuable part of therapy: feeling esteemed independently of what we do.
Choose a therapist who has expertise. This will allow them to be more effective more quickly. Expertise usually comes from a combination of education, experience, and self-openness (the latter is necessary to allow therapists to integrate the material deeply enough into their own humanity).
Choose a therapist who has discernment to know when which piece of knowledge applies to which piece of your experience (and which do not).
Choose a therapist who welcomes that there are things they do not know. A therapist who “knows” will put you, or your loved one, into an already-made category. If doing so they will miss who you actually are, and be unable to welcome the parts of you that do not fit into the category (unfortunately when this happens shaming tends to be evoked, which is opposite of what constitutes effective therapy).
Finally, choose a therapist whom you feel comfortable with at a personal level, that matters too :)
As you can tell, only one criterion can be evaluated by looking at formal credentials. The others cannot. They need to be evaluated through interaction. For those, I would recommend interviewing different therapists (a typical way to do so is to engage in dialogue about what you would like help with). If something does not feel right in your therapy encounter, especially after having shared your discomfort (if you felt comfortable doing so), trust this. We may know or may not know this, but we all have within us, in moments of calm, the ability to detect profound human truths.