Well, not quite psychoanalysis--it's "only" twice a week (hah), and while we've discussed using the couch I'm sticking with sitting up face to face for now. But I don't think there's that much of a difference between psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalysis when it comes to this particular difficulty. I've seen (good and bad, though mostly bad) therapists who worked psychodynamically before, but my current therapist is the first who's also an analyst. A lot of why I work well with him is doubtless unrelated to that--he's also a good fit personality-wise, and he has another area of expertise that's unusual to find that's important to me. But I also don't think it's a coincidence that he seems to have a much better grasp of countertransference issues than people I've seen in the past.

And where some past therapists seemed to take my difficulties with vulnerability and/or other resistance personally, and either got openly frustrated/upset or tried to bludgeon the resistance away, my current therapist has taken an entirely different approach to figuring out where the resistance is coming from, respecting its utility, and only pointing it out directly when therapeutically useful. Which I now realize is a therapist’s whole damn job--making sound judgments about when and how to bring something up or make a connection vs. recognizing when it’s not the right time! My current therapist is of course not perfect, and he makes mistakes like any person does, but he treats the whole endeavor of therapy with the carefulness and skill I feel like it needs, and is open to the possibility that when there are issues he could be the one causing them.

A stroke of mostly luck, where I was looking for a psychiatrist who took my insurance and recalled a name a friend of a friend had mentioned in another context. When I then looked him up, I liked what I read (including some published papers that I found interesting and insightful) and I decided he might be worth talking to even though he clearly preferred to do therapy rather than just the med management I’d been looking for.

It’s funny you should ask whether it was obvious early on that things were a good fit, because it was actually weirdly intensely obvious. It sounds kind of ridiculous and impossibly cheesy, but there was a moment halfway through the first evaluation/consultation session where I distinctly thought to myself that this was what I needed, and that I could imagine looking back on this appointment someday as the beginning of something significant. Which has weirdly proved to be the case. That said, with a previous therapist who was very helpful, I hated her passionately for at least the first month or two. So there’s obviously a variety of different ways that can go!