So I don't much great advice for finding a new therapist except keep on an open mind. If you don't mind, I'll tell you my story of keeping an open mind coupled with desperation. It has a happy ending.
I was really crashing last year around this time, my bipolar really coming out to play. I was seriously depressed all the time. I was seeing a therapist, who was very assembly line. A friend of mine who holds religious office got very concerned about me. I was really getting desperate for someone to talk to and help me figure out what was going on. My friend said maybe she could ask her son's therapist for recommendations. I was so desperate I would have taken her dry cleaner's recommendations. So I got word the child therapist only had one name to recommend, J.
When I looked at the contact info, I realized J was in a religious counselors group. They are all licensed and everything but I was on my guard. If I hadn't been so desperate, I wouldn't have made an appointment. I didn't know how to find anyone else new, so I thought I had to make a go of it.
I went in; the first thing i thought was that J was a bit...odd. But I thought again, I need to keep this going and try to get help. It's funny, because we didn't have an instant connection. J does have an uncanny knack to know when I was hedging around the truth. She was very blunt, outspoken, and didn't seem to give on whit whether i liked her to not. She fearlessly called me on all my games.
So, I kept the next appointment and kept going back. Only a month or two later, I had a really bad depressed day. She had told me they had a 24 answering service. That weekend when I talked to her on the phone, sniffling and probably not making much sense, something changed in me. I started to realize I really could talk to this woman and that I could make progress in talk therapy.
So almost a year later, I still see J every week (sometimes twice if needed). She is the best therapist I have ever had, no contest. I really can tell her anything. Yes, she is still a bit odd and calls me on all my games. It's not a perfect therapeutic relationship and she has no magic wand to fix me. But I have made more progress with her in 11 months than I did with a bunch of different counselors for the last 18 years.
(For the purposes of disclosure, we never actually talk about matters of faith. In fact, she counsels people from all sorts of religions or none at all. It doesn't seem she actually cares.)
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