I wouldn't call it prejudice, but I would say that there was some external tidbit that I knew about my T that made me concerned about whether he could help me with my problems.

His name gives him away as Jewish, and while this itself is not a problem, I was a little worried about his bias -- my husband and his family are Jewish, and I am not, and when I started therapy, I was going through what I will call the "adventure" of seeking acceptance into his family (I will say nearly everyone was totally cool, but a few key characters were NOT). I was pretty concerned about not accidentally offending him, and was kind of worried that he'd secretly be against my marriage as well.

Eventually, and I will say this pretty much just takes time and trust-building, I had to accept that while I may know that fact about him, there are a lot of things I can't know, and his views and experience around intermarriage is one of them. Like everything else I don't know about him, I have to trust that no matter his experience, his interests lie in my finding happiness -- so what I need to determine is whether he has my interests at heart. Lucky for me, he does.

This reminds me of another thread from a while back (http://forums.psychcentral.com/showthread.php?t=211811), where someone with a thin therapist wondered how her skinny shrink could understand her (the patient's) weight problems. So, just think -- if you were a therapist and you had an overweight client, your client might think to herself, how could this T understand my issues when she looks so healthy? Not knowing, of course, that you understand very well.

No matter what things look like on the outside, there's always an awful lot you don't know about someone!