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Top Ten Ways to Make Your Therapist Like You
If you’re like most people going to therapy for the first time, you’ll be sure and want to make your therapist like you. Don’t worry, this is normal. It’s a symptom of what you came to therapy for and, with any luck, you’ll get over it in due time.
(By the way, I’m being totally facetious as I write this, except for #1.)
In the meantime, here are the top ten ways to make your therapist like you:
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When You Get Better, They Might Get Worse
Client Lecture #57: As you become more healthy, those around you may become less healthy.
This is something I find myself saying to clients after they’ve worked hard and start to feel better about themselves. It is a warning that sets their expectations so they don’t start to believe they are doing something wrong or that they are not actually becoming more healthy.
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Your Psychiatrist Works for You!
Why are many psychiatrists (medical doctors who prescribe medications) such fearsome creatures? Why do many of my clients have attacks of anxiety before their next psychiatrist appointment? Aren’t psychiatrists supposed to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem?
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Top Ten Ways to Know You Have a Good Therapist
Unfortunately, not all therapists are the same, or even of the same quality. When you walk into a particular McDonald’s, Starbuck’s, or Home Depot, you can pretty much expect to have the same or similar experience as at any other location. The same is true, although less so, of walking into any doctor’s office. You know the drill, and there are few, if any, surprises. Not true of a therapist’s office.
To guide you in knowing, albeit after the fact, whether or not you are working with a good therapist, here are some important things to watch for:
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Therapy as a Subversive Activity
It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
What? You thought psychotherapy was a way to help others to become “normal,” that is, to conform to social norms. When someone tells another, “You need professional help!” it usually means the other is not behaving in a way that is acceptable. The “bible” of mental health, the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition), is chock full of labels for socially unacceptable behavior we need to treat and cure, if possible. Give ‘em drugs, talk some sense into ‘em, make ‘em see their “distorted thinking,” and so on.
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