I´ve seen a new counselor at a counseling center run by the Salvation Army and I didn´t have high hopes about it as the people there isn´t psychotherapists but counsellors with less education than a therapist. (This is Sweden and it´s partly different from educations in Britain and the US for example).

I´ve already asked for a new counselor but I´m feeling bad over what happened in contact with this first counselor I met with.

I saw this therapist three times and two out of three times she had me waiting in the stairwell outside their door. I clearly heard her inside and I got there about 5 or 10 minutes prior to our meeting. I rang the doorbell first once and then waited like two or three minutes and rang the doorbell again and she then opened. This happened twice so I assume she didn´t like I rang the doorbell some minutes before the meeting started. Inside was a waiting room with tea, coffee and so on so there was no reason for her to not let me in, I could easily sit there a few minutes and wait for her to get our from their staff room and into our counselling room.

At our third meeting I got there and then this counsellor thought our room we used the two other times was too hot as the sun shone right into it. Although she had had her lunch before our session and she had been in the locality several times before she started to look for another room just before our meeting should start. I sat in the waiting area and she went through a list of which rooms were booked and not. She could have prepared all this before our meeting instead of running around and see if she could find another room.

Instead of greeting me and start our session with focus on me, the focus went to her searching for another room.

When we sat down in that other room I saw she couldn´t sit properly in the chair that belonged to that room and she also said at the end of our session that "those chairs weren´t for me". That is, she hadn´t prepared that either, that the room had a chair that she found comfortable to sit in.

I see this kind of behaviour rather often, counsellors acting unstructured and unprepared and like they´re seeing you for coffee or a quick chat or something. I see there are a lot of unprofessional counselors and in Sweden many of them work just parttime with counselling and they don´t need to be licensed to do that.

It works in a similar way within our public healthcare where they often hire counsellors who aren´t licensed and by that they don´t know or care about the importance of being well-prepared, to start the session on time, to remember what was said the last time and so on.

Even if I´m not a counselor my common sense would tell me to look for a suitable room to use with my client well in advance before my client would show up. I would also count on that my client will possibly come to session some minutes before the sessions starts and I would be prepared to open the door when he/she rang the doorbell. That is, I wouldn´t start a phone call, make coffee, use the bathroom like five minutes before the session starts when I know there´s a great chance/"risk" that my client will arrive.

For those who like to critizise instead of showing understanding towards what happened to people in therapy I recommend to read a few posts by therapists like Nathalia Perevalova or David McPhee at the Quora forum. They are both highly professional and don´t look for ways of blaming the clients for what happened together with their therapists.