Sight unseen -which of these is MOST likely to make you reject a potential therapist?

I think it's either the way they think will appeal to people or the way they think people expect them to be. You should join our consultancy staff!

First order of business for the consultancy -- replace journey with peregrinations?

Second order of business -- reserve a special place in hell for people who say something about "The Path" or "journey together" (am good with journeying alone, thank you very much).

Third order of business: No more than three question marks throughout the entire website (excluding new patient forms).

I would not be interested in any therapist that mentioned religion or anyone that looks earthy crunchy or wears too much make-up and looks fake. I tend to look for people whose pictures look mainstream and who look like normal everyday people. I would NOT like a foreign hard to understand accent either.

Fourth order of business: Eliminate an acknowledgement that the person is reading the website and is to be congratulated for taking a step toward reaching out (or anything they presume to be noble about visiting a therapist's website). It's a given that if someone is reading the entry, that they are reading it and are oriented to how the internet works, and can discern for themselves that they have, in fact, learned of this particular website and are reading it. And there is no need to be acknowledged or applauded for reading it, or having the act characterized as a step--especially not a step in a journey or path toward something vague that accompanies images lit by sun rays or any special sparkling effects.

yeah I didn't want motherly /fatherly looking. Honestly my T looked like my ob/gyn Dr whom I love and have great respect for.. so the association was helpful.. I also would not have picked female. He had everything I was looking for listed like anxiety, self esteem, trauma, psychodynamic... it was a slam dunk after the first call.

Okay, I think I may have found a supposably with each of the two potential No. 4's. Who wants to smack me upside the head and tell me I'm being silly?

First one, I went back to her website to print out forms to fill out. Glanced at the blog that I'd ignored before. Blog is on a separate site, it covers her recovery from a motorcycle accident a few years ago (crushed pelvis and legs, sounds awful). On the one hand, cool, biker chick. On the other hand, she links to the blog by describing it as showcasing her sense of humor while recovering, because her posts were written to entertain family and friends. I read the posts. They are not funny at all. Sometimes they do make an effort to be funny, but it's the funny people nod and smile at because they're being polite. So, she doesn't know what funny is.

Second one, I realized that I didn't know for sure she was older than me. This took some hunting to confirm. I eventually confirmed it, but it was via her high school reunion website, in which she explains a career shift from corporate work to psychology as due to her feeling of helplessness as she watched colleagues leave her company due to stress and wondered what she could do to help them so they wouldn't have to leave. On the one hand, cool, left evil corpiracy. On the other hand, that seems...simple-minded and naive, and also not a situation in which one's mind tosses up the solution, "get a Ph.D. in psychology!"

The first one would be right out for me. The first one I see thinks she is funny and it is very painful to endure.

Ack! I'd personally be less freaked out by her inability to recognize her own lack of true funniness, and much more by the fact that she's linking to a personal blog, intended for friends and family, from her professional website.

I don't want/need a blank-slate T, but that just screams "boundary issues" to me. Maybe it's just me? Or maybe her entire accident/recovery isn't really appropriate to use as advertising (i.e. it's fine for her to share with clients when she can use it to help them, and keep the focus on them, but it doesn't seem to make sense to me as something that would be referred to on a therapist's professional website - is she trying to say that recovering from an accident makes her a better therapist? While it's good that she recovered, I don't know if I believe that that translates to competence as a therapist, and I'd worry that it shows she doesn't have good boundaries and/or doesn't understand how to keep the focus off of herself, and on the client.)

(omg... sorry... lots of words there, it shouldn't have been that complicated!)

Regarding the second one...
Thanks, I needed a good laugh. I totally agree with you. I mean, who knows, it *might* be worth a phone call (perhaps she grossly oversimplified her career transition, maybe she thought it was funnier and read better for her peers? This was on her high school reunion website, right, not her professional one? So, depending on other factors (does she otherwise seem competent?) I might be tempted to call her and actually see if she's appears intelligent and helpful.

But, I'm apparently very good at finding reasons to dismiss therapists without meeting them too. Or, so implied the last therapist, who has since been dismissed (for other reasons).

Oops.. forgot to include my stuff.

Unprofessional pictures are an immediate deal-breaker for me. Especially ones that look like they were originally meant to be used on a dating site. Or ones that look like the therapist is *glowering*. Seriously, I have one in mind that I've seen on the Psychology Today therapist finder where it almost looks like a mug shot, the woman looks SO angry and unhappy, I don't understand why anyone would want to go see her for mental health help.

Bad voices on the voicemail message can be a turnoff for me. I opted to not go forward with one last summer after calling to try to arrange a meeting, and freaking out at her voice on the message. It's actually terrible, maybe I should have just gone to see her in person (she was on my insurance, had experience with my types of issues, and actually had answered my email even though she was on vacation!). But... her voice just made me want to run away, and I'm not sure why.

Long intake forms that ask you to check off every terrible thing that has happened to you before you've even met the therapist are a big NOPE from me. I think they're awful and ridiculous, but almost everyone seems to be using them these days.

Therapists without adequate parking get nixed very quickly. Parking stresses me out a lot. One person that I had wanted to see appears to have NOTHING except on-street (parallel) parking, and there's not enough of that even. I can't parallel park, thus, I cannot see this person. Sorry. Parking is important... I also end up ruling out people that are just a bit too far away - unless they can give me a Saturday appointment. Traffic where I'm at is TERRIBLE, and I could easily spend an hour getting there (and longer getting back if I hit rush hour), and I can't really miss 3+ hour of work one day a week, every week.

I absolutely agree - I avoid anyone that advertises themselves using any references to religion. Not what I need or am looking for.

I rule out people who haven't been in practice very long too, b/c I know that I'm a difficult, challenging client (ex-T validated this for me, thanks ex-T!). I don't expect that a new T will have the skills and experience to deal with me, and I don't want to pay to be their learning experience (been there, done that).

I am having an impossible time finding a T that is a good match for me. I am actually wondering if I need to move? Maybe Ts are better in a different region?

Also I just noticed ex-corpirate, while otherwise having a decent website (no quotes, unusual pictures, clear information if not a lot of it, doesn't bang on about her specialties or modalities or therapeutic method, has only 3 question marks and no exclamation points at all, etc.), does bold certain phrases, like "self-discovery and growth." (Who can guess the first part of that sentence?). I don't understand why. They are not the most important phrases in what she has to say.

No. Mustaches. Allowed.

I didn't have the luxury of choosing what is want in a T in the beginning. I was so desperate.

Both seem......a trifle unseasoned?

Ugh. Well, the biker chick would at least get an initial session with me. I would have to see how the humor played out, though. Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

I wouldn't be able to see the former corpirate (not sure if that was a typo or slip of yours, but I like it), especially one who left because she was wanted to keep others from leaving. Why couldn't she just admit she didn't like the stress and left? Does she think having stress is a weakness? If she wanted people to keep from leaving due to stress, why didn't she just promote therapy to them? It doesn't make sense.

Minor bop upside head coming up, as requested: Not sharing somebody's sense of humour does not mean that they "don't know what is funny" - that being said, it is important to me that a T shares my sense of humour at least to some extent, and it would really turn me off that she would explicitly point to blog posts to show her sense of humour. It sounds contrieved and forced to me.

I have, or can have, a rather dark and edgy sense of humor (e.g., one of the ones I've seen once asked me what my plan was if something I was dreading were to happen, and I said, "cyanide capsule?"). So they at least need to understand that humor has many faces.

As for the second one, I've just realized English is not her native language, so that might explain some of that.

Website content mostly. If they sound unskilled or too full of themselves I'd avoid them.

Once I was looking for a t and one had picture of herself but in the picture she was eating yogurt. I thought that was unprofessional so I never saw her. But most pictures I'd be fine with, I just find it really odd for a t to sell their services while eating yogurt.

I'm referring to the overly large, teased hair with what I've heard called "skyscraper bangs."

I put down corpirate deliberately. I thought I invented it, but according to the internet it's the name of some banker supervillain who wears an eyepatch.