Therapists for 200
What if your next months-long life experiment were to find a therapist that clicks with your particular ways of being?
It can be such a slog (in America at least, in more ways than one) to find a satisfying connection with any sort health care provider. That goes double for mental health professionals.
It might take meeting with three, four, fourteen different therapists. But one of the rules of your experiment could be that you won’t worry whether you disappoint the therapist when at the end of your first visit you say, “I’m just not that into you.” Because that comes with the territory and it’s not the first time it’s happened.
I used to despise medical professionals, across the board. Know-it-alls! But I ran so hot and was in such a bad mental rut—stressed, irritable, angry (I was once described as being “a little tightly wound”). That all went on long enough that eventually my pancreas up and called it quits.
When I finally mustered up the willpower to find—and talk to—a therapist, I didn’t know where to start. I eventually found my way to a page on my insurance provider’s website showing all the psychologists and therapists ostensibly available to me. Okay, my insurance must cover some amount of the costs to see one of these providers, that’s a low-enough bar to clear for now.
But wait, what’s this, why do they all have the same phone number? I have a sneaking suspicion this is not going to go the way I thought it should.
I was at work, on a mid-morning break, downstairs in an empty meeting space open to the big cafeteria-style break room, sitting as far removed from anyone else as I could be, looking out the windows onto the back parking lot.
“Hi, I’m calling to make a therapy appointment with doctor so and so.”
“Oh, well that’s not really how it works.”
I welled up. Choked up. (Am choking up now thinking back about it.) Utter defeat. How is it supposed to work?
“I’m just really trying to get some help.”
At that point, emotionally exhausted, I broke down and threw myself at the mercy of the receptionist—metaphorically threw myself off the side of a metaphorical skyscraper, metaphorically speaking.
Fortunately, it was not the receptionist’s first day. They knew exactly what to do and set about doing it.
At the time (pre-pandemic), the insurance company contracted with a third-party group that offered app-based, remote therapy services with licensed mental health providers. Real turnkey stuff. The receptionist got me on the phone with someone I would now assume was called an intake specialist. They asked me some questions, got me onboarded into their app, and got me scheduled with a therapist. That was the easy part.
I did not make progress for a long time. I’m talking many months of weekly sessions. (Maybe even twice-weekly to start, I can’t recall.) I’d join the Zoom and lift my giant ball of mental and emotional knots out of my bag, plop it onto the table, then we’d spin it around and look at it from different angles, pulling here and there to try and loosen the threads, and then 45 minutes later, knots fully intact, I’d put it back in my bag and we’d figure out a day and a time to do it again.
Talk therapy worked best for me once I realized it was teaching me to recognize patterns in how I think and feel. It was giving me a vocabulary and a new kind of self-awareness. The therapist wasn’t there to fix anything, they can’t really fix it anyways, it’s not even something to fix.
Your mind is a river. Your thoughts and feelings are the water. The water has to flow somewhere somehow. Maybe some mental beavers started building a mental dam out of mental sticks and such. Or you’ve subconsciously erected a network of emotional culverts using emotional concrete and rebar.
My first real breakthrough came when I decided I was willing to try medication. I had been staunchly opposed to it. But, we just weren’t getting anywhere. Major depressive disorder manifests when the chemicals in your brain are out of balance. Medication helps restore that balance. (Everything is chemicals.)
The medication stage is the challenge inside the challenge of your months-long life experiment. Second, because it’s all a matter of trial and error. Try this, talk about it, keep trying it, keep talking about it, see if you feel better, when you don’t feel better, try that, talk about it, try more of that, talk about it, try less of that, try that and this, try more of this. Until one day you talk about it and you feel better. And first, because there’s a chance you need to add a psychiatrist into the equation. Or loop in your physician. Because prescriptions.
I’d say I’m doing much, much better now than I was down in that basement break room.
At one point, sometime in the middle of my third year of treatment, my therapist suggested I might be ready to “graduate”. Which is just a nice way of saying they need to spend time on more critical cases. I was out of the red zone. And I was so grateful. Am so grateful.
I had lots and lots of help. But if I can attribute that turn around to anything I did, it’s that I kept showing up. Week after week. Wading waist deep into turbulent waters, pulling muddy clumps of twigs and leaves out of my mental beaver dam.
If you’ve made it to a point where you’ve got a phone number to call or a calendar event for an intake, I hope you keep going and keep showing up. Enter the Zoom. The therapist will see you now.