Trying to find a therapist and COMPLETELY overwhelmed? Finding a therapist is hard under the best of circumstances, and when does anyone ever need a therapist under the best of circumstances?! It doesn’t matter if you’re on therapist #92 or if it’s your first therapist rodeo, finding a new therapist can be A LOT. I go over my therapist search process and include some helpful hints and tips to help you narrow your search.

Helpful resources from this episode:

Organize your search

Therapist search Google sheet

Therapist directories

Psychology Today - under "find a therapist" in the menu, you'll find an index of all types of therapists with filters for location, types of therapy, specialty, ethnicity, sexuality, faith, and more

DBT-Linehan Board of Certification - index of DBT certified therapists and clinicians

Behavioral Tech - index of DBT certified therapists

University of Washington Behavioral Research & Therapy Clinics - DBT resource list specific to Seattle & King County, Washington

University of Washington Behavioral Research & Therapy Clinics - links to additional resources

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More resources are available at https://therapize.joygerhard.com/

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Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky

You've got shit. I've got shit. We've all got shit. So let's therapize that shit, with your host, me, Joy Gerhard.

OK, well, there's not going to be a great way to start this and that's just how that's going to go. So rather than waiting until I feel ready, I'm going to start without feeling ready.

I am currently in the process of trying to find a therapist, which is not an enjoyable experience under the best of circumstances, and I don't know how many people are looking for a therapist under the best of circumstances. Similar to folks who visit the ER, we're selecting for a sample of folks going through low points in this theoretical study here.

It's a shitty experience, and made more so by the current pandemic. The incredibly high demand for therapy and the incredibly low supply of therapists.

I don’t know if the number of therapists has stayed the same, or if it's decreased. It certainly hasn't increased, but it has made finding a therapist with availability that much more challenging.

So I thought I would talk a little bit about my process, how I'm going about finding a therapist, and what that looks like for anybody who is trying to find a therapist and doesn't know how to go about doing it.

So, for me, I know what kind of therapy I'm looking for. It's called dialectic behavioral therapy.

Also, DBT for short – and it's the type of therapy where there are 4 main components of it: mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal communication.

And the therapy focuses on both teaching you those skills and then having you practice. It's really, really super structured compared to kind of your more traditional talk therapy insomuch as there's actual homework.

There's, you know, “here are the skills, use these skills,” in the same way that if you go to a calculus class, you know you're going to learn calculus. You're not going to learn history or botany.

Doing DBT, the skills are very specific, and they're already determined and laid out for you. It's a matter of practicing them when you don't need them so they are available to you when you do.

I first came across this therapy several years ago when I was having really horrible PTSD symptoms, and I was seeing a talk therapist.

I was struggling with self harm and suicidal ideation, and she was the one who said, “you really need to go to get into a DBT therapist.” So it was her recommendation. That's how I found DBT. And knowing how effective it was the last time around, that's what I'm looking for this time around.

If you are brand new to therapy and have never had any experience with any type of therapy, it can be a lot harder to figure out what you're looking for, which I so empathize with.

If you don't know exactly what the problem is, it's very hard to know what expert to go to.

It sucks. I mean, that's pure and simple. It's really, really challenging. And there's no real clear cut way to be like, “here put in your symptoms and we'll spit out the type of therapy that you should have.” Because so much of it depends on you and also your relationship with your therapist and your life situation.

DBT for me was 2 1/2 hours of group therapy, and then an hour of individual therapy, and then an hour and a half of prolonged exposure therapy every week, plus 10 to 15 hours of homework.

It basically was a full time job and I was very, very, very, very lucky and very privileged to have the ability to do that because I was in between jobs and had a lot of savings saved up. So I could take both the time and could afford to pay for those things.

So for somebody who works 2 full time jobs, DBT is not going to be as accessible an option unfortunately.

It's hard to figure out what type of therapy is going to be the most effective for you. It really depends on what your experience is of what symptoms you're having.

I respond really, really well to behavior hacks. I've tried cognitive processing therapy, which is a type of therapy where you basically investigate your thoughts.

Like, here's a thought - something like “I'm not good at anything,” and it'll have you ask: Are you over generalizing? Are you catastrophizing? Are you fortune telling? Are you mind reading? It'll actually look at different cognitive biases. And have you examine what that thought is, where it comes from, what evidence supports it, what evidence does not support it.

And then asks you to come up with a thought to replace that one with. So every time you have the thought, “I'm not good at anything,” you could replace it with something like, “there are things that I am good at.”

That's a true statement that will be true for pretty much everybody. I've really struggled with that one because I didn't arrive at any of my more problematic thoughts logically, by using logic.

I didn't come at it by putting together a pros and cons list.

I came at them either through trauma or repetition or any variety of other things. So I didn't think that logic would be able to get me out of them. The more I interrogated those thoughts, the more entrenched they became.

That's why I love DBT so much, because as my DBT group leader says, “We aren’t going to think our way into a new way of behaving. We're going to behave our way into a new way of thinking.”

Which feel felt to me much more accessible, as somebody who was really struggling with and continues to struggle with my thoughts. Having someone say, “OK, we're going to change your thoughts,” feels impossible, or at least very, very challenging. Changing behavior felt more accessible to me.

Oh! Here are things I can actually do! I can use paced breathing. I can put my face in ice water. I can name 5 things I see, five things I hear, five things I feel. I can name the thoughts that I'm having. I can name the emotions and where they are in my body, how they feel in my body. I can identify the urges that I'm having.

Like all of those things are behaviors, actions that I could take. It felt really accessible to me because of how entrenched my thoughts were. It didn't feel like just interrogating those thoughts were going to be enough to undo them.

But hacking my behavior, certainly... I mean it made a huge difference. It saved my life many times over.

But getting back to my original point about how to find therapy that you like.

It doesn't have to be as complicated as going in and looking at all different therapy types. It can be as simple as starting to call people or starting to go to therapists’ websites and just reading about them.

Part of part of what's nice about the incredibly high demand and low supply of therapists right now is it does kind of mean like beggars can't be choosers.

It's not like you know, Tinder, where you can just keep swiping. It really comes down to who has availability and starting there.

But reading some therapists’ websites and listening to them describe the sorts of therapy that they do, and their approach to it, can be really helpful.

And it also might be helpful if you know of any types of therapy you're not interested in doing. There are some people who would hear about exposure therapy and run for the hills, and I wouldn't blame you. At some point I will talk about my experience doing prolonged exposure. It's an amazing therapy.

And it is extremely challenging. That's my partner that you're hearing screaming in the background.

And you're going to hear all manner of street noises because there's construction near my apartment.

Let's see. OK. So where I was, was talking about how to figure out what type of therapy you're interested in.

Oftentimes you can just start talking to a therapist. Pretty much every therapist will be trained in a variety of different things. You can just start talking about your experiences and saying, “here's what I'm struggling with.”

And the two of you can come up with what – it's called “modality,” what type of therapy, what modality would be most helpful. And it's also possible to start with one therapist and switch.

I have had, I think, 9 therapists now, since 2015, which is 6 years.

I don't know if that's normal or not. I know that my favorite true crime podcasters – Karen and Georgia over at My Favorite Murder – both of them have mentioned on each of them having multiple therapists over the course of their lives. So there’s no... it's not like you're getting married.

You can have a therapist and have it work for a really long time, actually, and then eventually grow out of them and need somebody else. Which certainly was my experience with my very first therapist.

I started seeing her for PTSD and saw her for about a year and a half, and that's when I had my first trip to the ER for self harm.

And that's when she said, “Hey, you really need to go see a DBT therapist.”

Because DBT therapists... the full program (which I described earlier where you have the skills group and then you also have individual therapy), it also includes 24/7 availability with your therapist, like for texting.

For somebody who is dealing with self-harm and suicidal ideation, that was incredibly helpful and necessary because there were times, you know it's 11:00 at night or two in the morning when I needed a lifeline.

So I certainly didn't start there ,though. I started with kind of a more traditional talk therapist who did... lifespan integration was the modality that she was skilled in. And eventually she was like, “OK, you've outgrown this. It's time for you to go get some more help someplace else.”

It really is kind of... you try different things on, and that sucks because it's not free. As somebody who has been at or below the poverty line for most of my life, just experimenting is expensive. And when you don't have a lot of money, it can feel really dangerous to gamble on: “OK, I'm going to pay this person to help me and I don't know if it's going to work, and my mental health is on the line.”

That's really scary. It is really scary. And not just with finances, but if you also don't have a lot of time. If you're working multiple jobs, or if you're a parent and have kids that you have to take care of, your time can feel really, really limited. And to spend an hour a week with somebody who you don't know is actually going to be able to help you, that's also really scary.

And I keep thinking of... I hate quoting Gandhi because he is a problematic figure. And he did say a wise thing here and there, one of which is, “Whatever you do in life will be insignificant. And it's important that you do it.”

When it comes to therapy, I think it's important that you try. It's important that you fill out a couple intakes, fill out some contact forms, call some people, and get in to see somebody.

And there's no there's no guarantee that it will actually be the silver bullet. I don't know that there is a silver bullet. There are things that can feel like a silver bullet. For me, certainly DBT and prolonged exposure were more the things that saved my life.

Who's to say that there weren't other things that would have been helpful? Don't know. And who's to say that, had I not had those, that I actually would have died? I can't tell the future. I can't tell the alternate futures.

Sadly, Kevin Feige has not deemed my life worthy of a “What If?” series to examine alternate realities? But you know, here's hoping.

Yeah, it is. It is really... If the experience feels overwhelming, it's not just you.

It can be very, very overwhelming, especially when you feel like you're drowning and you don't know how to swim. You don't know how to ask for help from someone who does know how to swim.

I have used the analogy many, many, many times, that for me, when I'm drowning mental health wise, there are a lot of people who will want to help. Your friends and family who want to help, they're like people who know how to swim. They've taken swim classes, so they can do breaststroke and freestyle and what have you. And yes, they can swim, but that is distinctly different from knowing how to be a lifeguard.

And the way I know that is because being a lifeguard requires special training, because saving somebody's life who's drowning is a distinctly different skill than being able to swim out past where your feet can touch the ground. And then in my more dire situations, I don't even need a lifeguard.

I need a Navy SEAL, somebody who will parachute in and just snatch me out of my shitty situation.

It sucks to be in that situation and need help and either not know how to ask for it, not know how to find it, or to be surrounded by people who really who try to help and only end up making things worse. Like the best thing a person who can swim but is not a trained lifeguard, the best thing they can do for somebody who's drowning is to go and get a lifeguard.

So the most effective thing your friends and family can do if you're drowning is to support you in finding a therapist.

My folks were actually really helpful. They made a lot of phone calls a year ago when I had to switch therapists again. Because I've had four in the last year, which really, really sucks. But yeah, they would make a lot of phone calls on my behalf, because it felt so overwhelming.

I gave them the criteria of what I was looking for in terms of, “Here’s the type of therapy I'm looking for.” At that time, some of the criteria I was looking for: somebody who could do medication management (because I needed some psych meds), somebody who was doing telehealth because it was the pandemic.

There were several different criteria that I gave them and said, “Hey, can you just start calling people?”

So if your friends and family keep trying to insert themselves into your mental health... what's the word? Journey? If they keep trying to “fix you,” or they're just trying to help and you are becoming more and more frustrated and finding that their help is not helpful, give them... there may something that they can they can actually do that is supportive is to make phone calls on your behalf.

If you know a few things, if you know a few criteria, like you want a therapist who's a man or woman, or if you want a therapist who specializes in LGBTQ folks, or if you want a therapist who has the same religion as you, or what have you.

Those are criteria that that your friends and family can use to narrow down your search for you and start contacting people.

For me, my most recent therapy... (There he is, cackling away) my most recent therapy search, the things that I was looking for was DBT therapy specifically.

And because everybody's on telehealth right now, I basically could include the entirety of Washington state. Usually you can see a therapist anywhere in your own state, because therapists are licensed and their licenses are state specific, you won't be able to see a therapist outside of the state.

Let's see what other criteria did I have? Actually DBT therapy is a narrow enough focus that that was pretty much the only criteria that I had. And I know of a couple different DBT “,ac daddy” organizations. Marsha Linehan, who's the woman who created DBT, she has a website called Behavioral Tech. Is that right?

I'm looking through my list here: https://behavioraltech.org is her website.

And then she has a research group at the University of Washington in Seattle. They have the behavioral research and therapy clinic at the UW. They have a list, a PDF of therapists who have been certified through their program.

And then there's also a website, called https://dbt-lbc.org, which is also, I think, run by Marsha Linehan, or at least adjacent to her. And those are the three organizations that I went to those websites, and they have lists of people who they've certified or who've been through their training.

And I basically created a list, a spreadsheet of everybody on those lists, and their contact information, their website, e-mail, phone, their location, an individual's name or an organization's name depending on how is written out in those lists.

And I then wrote up basically a blurb that I would cut and paste and just over and over again every time I filled out a contact form on somebody's website. It was the same thing over and over and it says basically this:

“Hi so-and-so. I found your information on (and then I would fill in whatever website I found them through). I'm interested in individual DBT therapy services. I've done the full DBT group therapy, and have had individual DBT therapy and prolonged exposure. That was a few years ago and now I'm back in a DBT group and I'm looking for an individual DBT therapist.”

So I start off by saying, “Here's my experience.” If you've had a therapist before, if you've had experience with a certain modality that you didn't like, or that you did like, it's a good idea to just have a sentence that says, “Hey, I've tried this and I didn't like it, or I've done this and it was awesome.”

And then I say, “I struggle with PTSD and was recently diagnosed with major depressive disorder.” So you give them a sense of where you're at. “I've had two week-long psych hospitalizations in the last three months and I'm very much in need of a consistent, reliable therapist.

“Most acutely, I want to work on, 1) handling future based conversations, 2) setting goals, and 3) communicating my emotions with my partner. Do you have availability? Please let me know. Thanks so much, me.”

So again, what I did, the format of my inquiry is: here's how I found your information, here's what I'm interested in. Because a lot of therapists will have on their website, you'll see that they offer different types of services like individual therapy, couples therapy, family therapy, adolescent therapy. They sometimes have groups.

So to specify what service of theirs they have or that you're interested in, that's key, because that will allow them to say whether they have availability in that particular thing. Like if you have a group therapy group that meets once a week, it may be full, but they may have space for individual therapy.

So just asking, “do you have availability?” without specifying what type of therapy you're looking for – what type of service, rather – it is more effective to be specific. So I start with, “I'm interested in this service. Here's my experience.”

And if you don't have any experience, you can say that there too. Like, “I've never had therapy before. This is my first time.”

And then I get into, “Here's what I struggle with.” And if you have any diagnosis, it's a good place to put them. If you have any symptoms that go undiagnosed – you say, “I have a lot of anxiety, I have racing thoughts, I have intrusive thoughts, I have suicidal ideation, or I feel really hopeless a lot of the time, I feel sad a lot.” Any of those sorts of things, it's a good idea to put them there.

And then, I end with saying, “Here's what I want to work on. Here are my goals.” I didn't list all of my goals for therapy, I just listed the three top ones that are most pressing for me.

Things like: I want to be able to regulate my emotions better, I want to have hope, I want to set goals for the future, I want to be able to parent more effectively, I want to be able to talk to my partner. Whatever is not working in your life that you would like to address, it's good to put that there.

So I have this message that I would copy and paste into different people's contact forms when I was reaching out. And then I would write down how I contacted them and what date so that I could keep track of who I contacted, who I had yet to contact.

“How I contacted” simply means: some people have a contact form on the website, so if I send something through there, there will be no record of it anywhere. Like there won't be a message in my ‘sent mail’ in my e-mail account. So that's why, again, I copy and paste my message. So I have a record of what I sent to people.

And then there are some folks who don't have a contact form and you just have to e-mail them. So I would specify that.

The process is not great, as I have said and I will continue to say.

And the initial sending out of all of those inquiries – I sent out 101. No, that's not true. I haven't sent out 101. I have sent out 64. There were 33 that I didn't actually contact because it says explicitly on their website that they're not accepting new clients.

So there's 101 people that I've looked into. I've been to their website, I've read over their qualifications and whatever.

I have contacted 64 of those. I'm waiting for 31 to get back to me. I've gotten a “no” from 22 of them, and I've gotten a “maybe” or like I'm starting to go back and forth with them for 11. Like I'm on a waiting list or we're scheduling a first call just to get to know each other.

That's a lot of people and it sucks. And it is a huge amount of time. Part of the reason why I kept the spreadsheet is because you start to kind of go in circles. Like I would message somebody and say, “Hey, do you have availability?”

And they get back and said, “No, I don't, but try these three folks: X, Y, and Z.” Then I would e-mail X, Y, and Z, and they would send me back to the first person or send me to each other. You kind of get the same people over and over again because therapists run in circles.

There's groups of people who either went to school together, or who work in the same building. So they kind of cross-refer to each other. So again, I had to keep a spreadsheet because otherwise I'd end up messaging the same person over and over and over again, not realizing I'd already messaged them.

It took about a week before I started getting responses back from anybody. And I started doing intakes. There's all the... you agree to privacy, and that you'll be on telehealth, and you agree to pay, and all of those sorts of documentation things.

And then there's the actual questionnaire. And the questionnaire is also a bit rough. I don't think it's just me. I think it's going to be rough for a lot of people. The closest thing it feels like is like going swimsuit shopping.

That experience of being in a cramped dressing room under a fluorescent lighting that is flattering to no one. No person in existence looks good under fluorescent lighting.

And you then take off all your clothes. You get to stand in front of a mirror – you have to stand in front of a mirror. Oftentimes there's multiple mirrors. So you're seeing all your dimples and cellulite and stretch marks, and all of these things that are natural and normal.

But you're seeing them magnified in bright light with multiple angles, in a situation that... Like, swimsuit shopping is never fun. So it's already like “eugch” sort of situation. And you get just dropped into this really unpleasant atmosphere while you're doing it.

And that's kind of what an intake form feels like for me. It's a very long, hard look in the mirror and it's very specific. So I'm going to share with you some of the questions that I have gotten on these intake forms

“Briefly describe the problems you're experiencing that led you to seek therapy at this time.” I wrote probably 6 or 7 sentences about that. And then it asked, “How long have you been having these problems?”

And, “Have you experienced any major life changes recently? What are your goals for therapy? Have you ever experienced suicidal thoughts or urges? Please describe the thoughts you've had, how frequently they occur, and when was the most recent occurrence?”

When you when it starts to be date specific, that's where it goes from being a 20-minute intake form to being a 3-hour intake form. At least for me, because I have so much history to go back and look through.

So... “How frequently it occurred, when the most recent occurrence was? Have you ever engaged in self harm? Please note the method, when it began, and when was the most recent occurrence, and how frequently it occurs. Do you drink alcohol? Describe the type, amount and frequency.” And there's no way to answer that question in a way that doesn't make you sound like an alcoholic.

I have like a drink at night, maybe two nights a week. So, one to two drinks a week. Assuming it is not a holiday, like Christmas or what have you.

One-to-two drinks a week ends up sounding like a lot when it asks you, “how many drinks do you have a month?” and it gives you the options: 1, 2, 3, or more than 4. With your one drink a week, that ends up being four or more. And to lump in four or more, I mean 30 is more than 4, but so is 5.

So and then the questions like, “Have you ever received mental health treatment? Please specify the dates, with whom, for what problem and what was helpful or what you didn't like.” And so I had to go through and find the date ranges for all of my different therapists, their names, what license they have, what organization they're with, what type of therapy we did together, what was helpful, what wasn't helpful.

And that's a lot. Of course, then: “Have you ever been hospitalized? When and where? Are you taking medication? List the medication names, the dosage, how long you've been taking them, why you take them? Who are all your medical prescribers?”

In my case, I have 3. I have a psychiatrist, I have my primary care, and then I have a specialist from my urogynecology stuff.

“Have you ever been diagnosed with any mental conditions? Please describe the condition and the approximate date of diagnosis.”

It is a long hard look in the mirror under fluorescent lighting. And I understand why it's necessary. Part of it's just so that you don't have to spend the first 12 sessions bringing somebody up to speed. Part of it is just a data dump: “Give me all the information that you can.” (By “me,” I'm the therapist in this scenario.) “Tell me everything I need to know so that we can just hit the ground running.”

Which I appreciate and I understand and it also still sucks. I have a period app that I use to track not just my period, but also mood-related stuff, which ended up including any self-harm, any hospitalizations, any major depressive episodes and whatnot. It also includes anything having to do with my reproductive system.

And in my case, I have pelvic floor spasm. So it's every instance of that, every UTI, every yeast infection, like all of this stuff. And going back through it, it's a lot. And again, a long hard look in the mirror, that when you're kind of going through a day-to-day, I don't... at least for me, I don't see the entirety of it.

It’s like being in the front row of an IMAX theater. You're not going to see it the same way as somebody in the back row would, because you can't zoom out far enough.

So anytime somebody asks these big, overarching questions, I'm forced to zoom out, and actually look at how frequent these things are, how frequent my chronic pain episodes are how frequent self-harm is, how many times I've been hospitalized.

Is and putting it all down in a summary is like, “Oh shit. There's a reason I feel overwhelmed. It actually is a lot. And I am somebody who chronicles this stuff kind of religiously because I'm so used to being asked questions by the mental health people that I see when I go to the ER, by my pelvic floor specialists and stuff.

I had to start writing everything down. And it makes it slightly easier to be able to fill out one of these forms, these questionnaires, but it doesn't necessarily make it more pleasant.

It's just... ugh. Which is the understatement of the year. Just ugh.

Once you submit one of these questionnaires, you may or may not have access to your submissions, which is why I use, again, a spreadsheet – anything you can copy and paste.

So I have the question and my answer. There are questions that get asked in the exact same way every time. Like, “What are your goals for therapy?” I get that exact same question on every questionnaire.

And then other ones are slightly different. “What is your relationship status?” versus “If you're in a relationship, please describe the nature of this relationship and months or years together,” versus – let's see, what else do we have here?

“If you're in a relationship, describe the nature and months or years together. Please briefly include any relationship challenges you'd like to work on, or challenges that you're aware of?”

So, you know slightly different flavors, so I'll copy and paste and then edit. But for me, having to conjure up answers, like actually remember answers, feels almost painful, which is why I have these spreadsheets where I keep track of all my answers so that I don't have to regurgitate it from scratch.

Like the act of actually having to dig in and come up with the answer each time feels more painful, feels more overwhelming. I know I'm not in danger when I'm doing it. I know no one's actively harming me. It's just the experience that I have –it hurts in my brain. So that's why I copy paste. It just makes it ever so slightly easier.

So yes, so we're getting into the weeds here of what applying – it's not even an application, but more like doing an inquiry – inquiring as to the nature of... or the availability of a therapist. This is kind of the process.

Your initial inquiry, you'll just write a paragraph saying, “Hey, this is what I'm dealing with. Do you have availability?” And if they do, that's when they send you the intake paperwork.

Sometimes they'll want to do a phone call first, like a 15-minute consult, and then send you the paperwork. I've had people do it in either direction: paperwork first, then the consult; consult first, then the paperwork.

Some therapists will do a proper intake, like a full on, 2-hour sit down, go through everything with a fine-tooth comb. Some people don't do that. I don't know that one is better than the other.

“Proper” is not a juxtaposition to “improper.” I mean just a formalized intake versus a “we'll figure each other out as we go” sort of situation.

There are other resources. I don't know how helpful they are. I've been to an ER multiple times and seen social workers and they've given me recommendations.

A lot of them will give you community health recommendations, which are usually nonprofit. Think kind of like the YMCA, but for mental health. They are kind of always underfunded and understaffed and while they are more accessible if you're on lower income, you don't have access to the same level of care.

Part of the frustration – because I've been with a community health organization for about a year now – part of the frustration is that they don't set expectations effectively. There's this expectation of, “OK, we've got you now. We'll take care of you.”

But you know, your therapist gets another job offer and has to leave. Or it's just not a good fit and there's nobody else available. You just don't have as many options.

And if that's all you have access to, that's all you have access to. And it sucks. It really does. If you're privileged enough to have enough discretionary income to be able to afford a private therapist, consider yourself lucky.

There's struggles with that too, insomuch as private therapists tend to be kind of off on their own. Sometimes they are in little collectives or little groups of people who work together. But by and large, most private therapists just have their private practice solo. Which means that if it doesn't work out with them, they don't necessarily have anybody to refer you to. So, there's pluses and minuses to both, certainly.

If you do go to a community health organization, oftentimes those are covered by Medicaid or Medicare. Most private practices will not take insurance. I shouldn't say “most” – there actually are a lot of private practices that do take insurance, it’s just that the insurance that they take is very limited. Like, “We take these four plans and nothing else.”

And that can be another search criteria. If you have a particular type of insurance and you have to find somebody who will only take that – or who will take that, that's an important criteria to include whether you're doing it yourself or you're offloading it and asking somebody else to help you with it.

You can also call your insurance or go to your insurance's website and see who's in network. That being said, that process sucks. Oh my God. I don't know if it's different for each different type of insurance or each insurance company. I have Molina.

Their website is... it sucks. It's like trying to drive a toaster through a car wash. It is not user-friendly. Their filters are just ugh. Psychology Today actually has a great search. Not every therapist is included, so it's not comprehensive. It won't have every single therapist in your area.

But it does actually give a really lovely starting point. If you know one or two things that you want in a therapist, you can search by that and just start looking at those folks. And then if there's not enough hits, not enough options, you can Google those filters that you've just come up with for yourself and see who shows up in your area.

Godspeed, man. Like the process of actually trying to find a therapist... oy. I will say this: if you talk to a therapist and you have something in the back of your head that goes, “I don't know...”

I understand the lack of certainty or the... I don't know what word I'm looking for here. The uncertainty? Sure. We'll go with that... that comes from trying to find a therapist. I've actually never had this experience of talking to somebody, and being like, “Yes, done. You're my person.”

More often than not, it's like, “This could work. Let's try this out.” So there is that kind of uncertainty of like, “I'm not 100% sure, but I'm willing to try.” That is distinct from, “Something is off.”

It may not mean anything negative about your therapist. It may just be there's something that's rubbing you the wrong way and someday down the road, it will be a great learning opportunity to work through those issues with somebody and tackle whatever judgments or whatever's coming up for you around that.

Your first therapist is not the time place to do that. If you can, if you are lucky enough to have options, aim for the ones that you don't have that kind of red flaggy uncertainty around. Stick with the uncertainty that comes from just, “I don't know how this is going to go.”

Because therapy is challenging enough without having to also hold space for whatever is going on in the back of your mind. So yeah, those are those are my thoughts on finding a therapist.

And I continue to fill out these godforsaken intakes. Which is what prompted me to actually just start recording, and tell you my thoughts. Because if you're going through this, well, you sure as shit are not doing it alone. There are a lot of folks out there who are also trying to find a therapist.

Oh, and before... just as a side note, there are those online... like BetterHelp and Talk Space, I think, and a few other services.

Those websites will tell you themselves that they do not recommend their services for people who are dealing with extreme mental health issues. There is a distinction between dealing with a mental disorder, like if you have bipolar or depression or chronic anxiety or PTSD or borderline personality disorder, or kind of the more...

I don't like to use the word “serious,” because everybody's own issues are serious to them. But these take a very specific type of treatment, those disorders.

Those websites will say that they don't recommend their services for people who are dealing with like self-harm ideation or suicidal ideation. Because you just can't get enough of the help and the quality of the help that you need through those places.

I mean, I know that there are folks for whom they work. And it's great – you can just whip out a text to somebody when you're on the bus or on your lunch break or whatever. And that's great.

I cannot fathom that would work for me. Not only because of the mental disorders that I'm dealing with, but also because there's...

To try to take everything that I would say in a therapy session and transcribe it and put it into a text, it sounds excruciating. Not my jam. It's too much.

Of course, the lovely thing is then you have a record of it. But you can always ask your therapist if you can record your sessions.

If you're doing it via telehealth, you can record your screen with something like OBS, which is a free app or free program that you can download onto your computer and it just records your screen and whatever audio. So you can watch it back later if you want to.

And if you're in person, you can get a free voice recording app on your phone and record it. To me, that's priceless for a couple different reasons. One of them is: when I'm in a good therapy session and we're doing a lot of really great work, I will spend a significant amount of mental energy trying to remember everything.

And then I'm suddenly not fully present in the same way that like, if you're taking notes, you listen in a different way than if you're actually fully engaged with somebody. And so recording basically takes that pressure off of me to try to remember everything, and I can actually be fully present and, therefore, I don't end up needing to try to remember everything.

I end up being able to remember most of it because I was fully present. It's the worrying about, “Oh make sure you remember that!” that takes me out of the moment. So that's one thing.

But then the other thing is if you do want to listen to it back, if it was amazing, if you had a huge epiphany and you're like, “Oh my God, this explains so much,” you have access to that. You can listen to it, to your heart's content. So don't hesitate to ask your therapist if they're cool with you doing that.

And some states are one-party recording – you only need one person's approval to record, and some states are two-party. I don't know what the deal is, if it's just for your own private use, but couldn't hurt to ask.

So yeah, those are my thoughts on finding a therapist and, yeah, I will be chronicling my whole process here and what it's like and what sucks and what's awesome and, yeah, we're in this together. Let's do it.

Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky

This has been “Let's therapize That Shit!!!” with your host, me, Joy Gerhard. If you like what you heard, please rate, review, subscribe, and tell your friends about it. We'll see you next time.