How to Choose the ‘Right’ Therapist

Choosing a therapist is not like choosing which restaurant to eat at. Finding a therapist can feel incredibly difficult. Hundreds of practitioners, endless qualifications and approaches, and many different personalities – all competing for your attention whilst you’re likely in distress, or stuck in a pit of despair you don’t know how to crawl out of.

You might start by considering what exactly your worries or goals are, and filtering from there. If you want support with birth trauma, but the therapist you’ve chosen specialises in disordered eating, that might not be the best fit.

Budget is another consideration. Private therapy is a privilege, of course, and what might be affordable for you right now needs to be factored in.

Availability. Busy 9-5 job with no flexibility? You’ll likely need to find someone with evening or weekend availability. Parent with young children at school? Evenings likely won’t work for you, but school hours will.

Face to face, online, phone, text or even email? You will likely have a preference on how you want to receive your sessions. If you want face to face but the therapist you like is 100 miles away, that likely won’t be practical.

Personality. Ah, the biggest filter of all. The therapeutic relationship is robustly agreed and empirically studied to be the biggest determinator of ‘successful’ therapy. They could be the most highly qualified therapist orbiting the universe – but if you don’t gel with them, don’t feel like you get along or that you trust them? It probably won’t work.

This is why offers like introductory calls or sessions can be really useful. Most people know fairly soon after meeting someone if they’re going to get along. Of course, having multiple introductory conversations with multiple therapists can be time consuming and tiring.

This is one of the reasons we offer a guided matching service. It’s not a precise science, of course – these things rarely are – but at a time when you’re already heightened, anxious or in distress, it can make it even more challenging to know who might be the best fit for you.

When you reach out to us, we’ll ask for a tiny bit of information so we can support you to connect with one of our therapists who is likely to be the best fit. And if no-one fits the bill? Always happy to signpost you to other therapists or services. We won’t try and square-peg-round-hole it. If you don’t quite feel your match is working? No problem. Get back in touch and we’ll help you to find an alternative.

If you’d like to know more, or just start an informal chat about what you might need – do get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.