Finding a Guide to the Unknown: How to Choose a Therapist
You’ve decided to take a significant step; you’ve decided to see a therapist. Yet there are so many to choose from, offering a bewildering array of approaches; one question arises: How do you actually choose?
There are as many reasons to see a therapist as there are challenging human experiences: grief, heartbreak or betrayal; low self-esteem, or loss of identity; feeling stuck or lost; burnout, anxiety, depression, addiction; trauma or a life crisis; a nagging disquiet or a search for meaning.
Committing to seek answers, to heal old and new wounds, and to gain new perspectives is a bold decision, and one that requires courage. But as brave as it is, it can also feel vulnerable.
Stepping Out of the Familiar
Many of us have been conditioned to project a version of ourselves that is strong, capable, has it all together, and has always “got this.” Choosing to stop playing that game is a step into unknown territory. When the fragile security of the known is shattered or becomes unbearable, the unknown is often all that we’re left with.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell mapped this threshold onto the Monomyth—a universal pattern of human growth and development embedded in the myths and stories from human cultures throughout the ages:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Something happens that calls the hero away from the comfortable and known.
Naturally, we often hesitate to answer that call. But when we do, help appears in the form of a helper or guide, someone who can enable us to overcome the challenges we'll face during this undertaking.
Our ancestors had the medicine man, the wise woman, the shaman. We moderns have the therapist.
What Actually Makes Therapy Work?
This journey matters, so choosing a guide isn't a decision to make lightly.
Decades of research show that the most important factor determining the success of therapy is the quality of the relationship between you and your therapist.
You could work with the world's most famous trauma expert from a top university, or a newly qualified counsellor from a local college. When you sit in the room, if you don't gel with the expert but you feel at ease with the counsellor and seen by them, the latter will yield far better results.
Practical Steps to Find a Guide
Test the waters with a few practitioners. Most therapists offer an initial consultation. Select three whose approaches or bios appeal to you and book an introductory session with each to get more of a sense of them.
Trust your instinct (or your best guess). Trauma can sometimes obscure our intuition. If you're unsure, simply make your best guess
Bring issues into the room. If after a few sessions something feels off, raise it directly. A skilled therapist won't get defensive; they’ll welcome the conversation and use it as an opportunity to deepen the work.
There are no ‘perfect therapists’; we are human, after all. But a good therapist, like a good friend, can acknowledge shortcomings in a way that actually strengthens the relationship.
We enter therapy with relational wounds, and it is ultimately through a genuine and effective therapeutic relationship that those wounds begin to heal. Finding a therapist you connect with, who gets you, enables the best start to this process, and this will always be unique to each person.
To support people to make this choice, I offer an initial free thirty minute introductory session, it would be great to meet you.