3 Quick Tips to Finding the Right Counselor for You

Finding the Right Counselor for You
I have always loved this pic…..Snoopy, Lucy, the counselor & Charlie Brown 🙂

Finding a good counselor or therapist that is right for you is paramount to helping improve your mental health.  Counselors or therapists should not just work with everyone.  They should specialize in a few disorders and not everything in the DSM.

For example, I help people recover from general mental health issues like stress, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and addictions.  Not everything and anything listed as a mental health disorder.  I help people learn coping skills that they can apply in their life to help them manage stress and circumstances that come up because guess what?… Life happens right?

Back to the topic who knows it all right?  No one, and the ones that do not specialize to me are more like a primary care physician, who fixes everything.  Honestly, I call my PCP, “my sore throat guy”.  I typically go to him when I have random health ailments that I need fixed.

A counselor or therapist should not be like that.  They should not be working on all things mental health because there is no expert on everything.  Plus someone who is more specific in what they help others with will more than likely be more passionate and effective in that topic than let’s say the “jack of all trades, master of none” counselor.

The counselor/client relationship is like a smooth running engine in the fact that if you start seeing the wrong type of counselor well you won’t find the outcomes or result you are looking for, feel worse and there will be bumps along the road.

The right therapist or counselor will help you feel more empowered, stronger and able to look at the past, acknowledge and accept it and then give it a wave goodbye and progress.  It’s like peanut butter and jelly, works well together 🙂

I created this post to help people discover the right counselor for themselves.  Here’s what you honestly need to look for.

  • Don’t Just Go with Someone On Your Health Insurance Provider List

If you have health insurance a good place to start is actually on the provider list.  You can call around and see who is available.  You can look on websites like Psychology Today which can help you narrow the search in your area.  Here’s a link to the Psychology Today website.  However, remember there are great counselors who do not take insurance and there is a reason for it.

Many times, insurance companies are difficult to deal with on the counseling business side.  They can be slow to reimburse the claims, and the reimbursement rates can be very low.  The problem with that is that many counselors/therapists feel the need to stack more clients in their practice to compensate for the low rates.  It becomes more like an assembly line of therapy of sorts and that is never effective.

So don’t just disregard the private pay type of counselors.  They will more than likely be able to provide a better, more effective service if their practice is smaller in the client numbers.  Also consider the fees which some are outlandishly priced.  Of course, cost will depend upon your area, credentials and expertise, but just look around and compare.

  • Try a few out

I highly recommend this to anyone.  The client/counselor relationship should feel right and if it doesn’t it is probably best to keep looking around.  This is best for the counselor and client because you want the right fit.

Go with your gut when you leave the first session.  Ask yourself a few questions like…. Does it feel ok?  Did I like the person?  Did I feel listened to and respected?

These are important questions to ask yourself because this is a trust-built relationship and if you feel like you cannot be honest with your counselor well you will not get the outcomes or end result you are looking for.

Also if you check out a different counselor, don’t fret or feel bad.  Any counselor or therapist worth their weight will want you to find the right fit.  And we will not be upset with you, I promise 😉 .  We got in this line of work to help others (ultimate goal) and it is not about the money.  If you find someone who feels the other way, it truly is time to walk away and find someone else.

  • Your Counselor Should Not Be Booked Out Months

If you are looking and find that a counselor is booked out months in advance that can tell you one of 2 things:

1) they must be good at what they specialize in

2) their caseload is too high.

Many counseling agencies don’t put a hold on new referrals to a caseload when honestly, they should.   A counselor or therapist should not have a caseload of 100 clients it’s unrealistic to think a counselor will be able to provide quality service.

Unfortunately so true when the caseload is super high at a community agency. Props to uniqueteachingresources.com for this meme because it’s on point

I will give you a real-life example.  I used to work for a community mental health agency that did just that.  And to be honest by the end of that 8-hour day at session 7 to 8-ish, I was mentally exhausted and spent.  I can tell you honestly I was not providing my finest, top of my game counseling.  No one can.

Hello behavioral health agency people if you are reading this, be realistic, counselors are people too.  Work and life are all about balance and when something is out of alignment like too high of a caseload, service is going to suffer.

If you call or find out the appointment is too far away (like 3-4 weeks), then you may want to consider looking around.  When you attend the first session with a counselor/therapist you can even ask how far apart are the counseling sessions typically? If they say 3-4 weeks that is too far apart, politely pass and move on to find someone else.

Initially when someone begins counseling it is more effective to see the counselor once per week for a while.  After the situation is becoming stable and you are learning coping skills to help manage the situation, the goal is to scale back the sessions to biweekly or twice a month and then after a period of time, monthly.

An effective counselor/therapist’s goal is to work themselves out of a job per se and it is not to be a lifelong commitment of sessions.  As you start feeling better, learn and apply the skills discussed in the sessions, you more than likely will not need to see the counselor as often.

Ok so the key takeaways from this post are:  look around and check your insurance plan but remember there are plenty of “out of network” or private pay providers, find a provider that is specific to your needs, listen to your gut about the whether the new counselor is a good fit and finally see how often you can see them.  More is better at first like weekly.

So I hope this article answers some of your questions about finding the  counselor or therapist for you.   

If you have any questions or would like to learn more, book a free 15 min recovery journey strategy call

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