5 Tips for Seeing a Psychologist

1. You don’t need to worry about whether I’m going to judge you negatively.

It would be really hard for me to not like a client. The nature of the psychologist-client relationship is that psychologists tend to have quite protective feelings towards their clients. I want to see the best in you, and want you to be able to see the best in yourself.

2. You don’t necessarily need to see a psychologist for a long time.

There are two types of good therapy. One is when people go to therapy, say for depression, and follow a full course of therapy, usually for 12-20 sessions.

Not everyone wants that. You might never want that. Or, you just might not be ready for that yet. It’s fine to not be ready.

A second type of successful therapy, for when someone doesn’t want to devote 3-6 months ish to working on their problems in a systematic way, is this: It might be that all you want to do is dip your toe in the water of therapy at this point. You might want to come to therapy for a few sessions, learn some things about yourself, get some new insights and ideas, and that’s all you want right now. Lots of people aren’t in a space of wanting to commit to the time, effort, and focus needed for therapies like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. So, instead of that, the other type of good therapy is when people come to therapy to get some insights about themselves and some new ideas, and then go away and process that information on their own. You can always come back later if you want.

3. The therapist and the client need to be pulling in the same direction.

A very major component of what makes therapy effective is what’s called “behavioural experiments“. These involve you trying out different types of doing or writing activities. Some behavioural experiments can be done during therapy sessions, but mostly they’re planned and discussed together but done at home or in other parts of your life.

The types of behavioural experiments I’ll suggest is determined by what’s called your “psychological formulation” and what’s agreed between you and I. A psychological formulation is a personal psychological model of why you think, feel, and behave the way they do. (It’s more complicated than this but that’s a basic explanation).

I’ll develop your initial psychological formulation (i.e. personal psychological model) based on the assessment information I get from you. Then I’ll discuss it with you so I can check that I didn’t misunderstand anything, and you can start making sense of why you’re having the problems you’re having.

Based on your psychological formulation, I’ll recommend a treatment plan. Sharing the formulation with you ensures that you understand why I’m recommending particular treatment activities.

Here’s the tip part of this.

There are LOTS of different options for behavioural experiments, but you, the client, are the one who has to actually do them. To have effective therapy, you need to be an active participant in helping figure out what types of behavioural experiments are going to be do-able and useful for you. As the name “behavioural experiments” implies, you’re not going to know for sure how useful a particular behavioural experiment is going to be for you until you try it, but there’s no point in you agreeing to do a particular behavioural experiment if you’re not going to do it. Your role is being an active participant in figuring out which behavioural experiments are within your time and psychological capacities to do. It’s kind of like an architect and client working on house plans. You need to be a very active participant.

Another part of this tip is that therapy sessions are NOTHING like what’s depicted in TV dramas. They’re much more structured and focused than people expect. This ensures that something useful gets done during the sessions. If you want to spend some time “just talking” in sessions that’s a totally valid thing to want. But, if you want this, you’ll need to say that’s how you want to spend the session or part of the session. It’s totally cool to do this, and get back to the therapy plan the next week.

4. You’re going to need to tell me when I’m screwing up.

At some point in any therapy relationship, you’re probably going to need to tell me that I’m not understanding something that’s important to you, I’ve got something wrong about you, or I’m doing something annoying.

What people don’t realize is it makes me really happy when people do this because it helps me to help you, and it’s a sign of

a) a healthy therapeutic relationship. It shows that you trust and know me well enough to be open with me.

and

b) that you have enough self esteem that you think that asserting yourself to help someone accurately understand you is an important thing to do.

If you can get comfortable doing this in the therapy relationship, hopefully you’ll get comfortable and skilled at doing it in your relationships out in the world. Hopefully you’ll think that you’re worth that.

5. Seeing a Clinical Psychologist

The training for a Clinical Psychologist involves conducting your own scientific studies while also doing the practical, ethical/legal, and psychological theory training for becoming a therapist. For PhD level Clinical Psychologists, training takes 8-9 years. For Masters level Psychologists, training takes 6-7 years. When you’re choosing a therapist, it’s reassuring to know that the person you’re going to see has had this level of training.

Moreover, when your therapist is a Registered Clinical Psychologist it’s also reassuring to know that we’re legally required to stay up to date with the latest scientific psychological research in our areas of practice. Unless someone has had research training, like the kind Clinical Psychologists and Psychiatrists do, it’s very unlikely they’ll have the skills necessary to thoroughly understand the results of scientific psychological studies published in academic journals. Being able to do this is important because we use the research we read to provide effective therapy for people.