My best advice is to just give it time before you decide good or bad.

I had a couple of very bad therapists in grad school who left me scared of therapy. But in 2002 there was no choice but to go to therapy. The woman I saw then was nice and did not do anything awful like the grad school therapists. She wasn't extremely effective with bipolar but I didn't realize this at the time. It was someone who was nice to me when I needed that.

After 4 years she moved to Europe and I had to change pretty abruptly. It was hard to leave someone I liked and move on to someone very different from her (I chose him and I liked him the first time I met him but he is soooooo different than her). So I went in with a friend promising to hold me accountable for sticking with him for 3 months.

It turned out that it didn't take 3 months to know things were fine with him but I am so glad that I didn't let myself judge based on early interactions because our transition was not easy. He was very different than anyone I'd ever seen before and much more willing to put his foot down and say things like "You need to be in the hospital". We had some big disagreements in those early months and there were a few times that he got very firm with me and I felt like he was mad at me. As it turned out that was not true but we had some arguments where he got pretty clearly frustrated and did not approve of my decisions and nobody had ever done that with me.

Having that 3 month period that I knew I wasn't going to quit gave us time to get used to each other and time for us to learn how each other worked. And in March it will be 10 years since those first awkward months and it still works well.

Keeping myself pretty neutral for those first months though really let me see what he was like and if I thought we were a good fit instead of trying to judge in the first few weeks like I had done in the past (always comparing them to my first psychologist who was really, really good and in some ways quite similar to this therapist).

I don't know, but it did work for me. I don't think by the terms of my agreement with my friend that I was allowed to say things like "I like him" "I don't like him (without following up with something that let my friend help me decide if there was a real problem)" etc. It was just neutral and feeling things out for those months for both of us.