Letter to the New Client:

I’ve noticed that everyone comes into the therapy room with different ideas about what therapy is, what’s going to be helpful, and what to expect from the therapist. Some have had therapists in the past who have instilled in them certain beliefs that may or may not hold true with me. Some come in with internalized stigma about poor mental health and the therapeutic process. I wrote a letter to the beginner therapist, and it only seemed natural to write something similar to the beginner client. Not just my clients, but anyone thinking about beginning a therapeutic relationship.

Finding the Right Fit

The first thing to be aware of is that finding the right therapist for you sometimes takes some doing. A lot of client’s find themselves going from therapist to therapist or sticking with the first one when someone better suited might still be out there. Therapists are supposed to take personality and needs into account when deciding whether to take on a client or refer them to someone else. Most of the time, however, we just don’t know. It’s actually you, the client, who has the best chance of knowing whether you match. But enacting that instinct often takes skills that you came to therapy to learn: self-awareness, communication, boundary setting, etc. And as much as I hate to admit it, there are a lot of therapists out there that aren’t very good at their jobs. Which means it might fall on you to make the hard call and go looking elsewhere. All this means there’s an inevitable layer of trial and error you’re going to experience. This is normal, and even good. Because with each new experience you learn more about yourself and what you need. 

Dogs Are People Too

I also want to point out that it’s easy to come into therapy with preconceived ideas about what a therapist is and does. And that’s fine! To an extent. The one thing I really want to point out is how totally human us therapists are. We have training and experience and knowledge and resources that are helpful, yes. But we also have our own histories and traumas. We have parents we don’t speak to and friends that are unkind to us. We have good days and bad days and we are just as likely as you are to call last minute and cancel a session. We are not magically free of suffering or anxiety or exhaustion, and just because we may be able to apply our skills to ourselves doesn’t mean we remember to. The first thing I tell my clients when I meet them is that I’m going to make mistakes, and I often need help to know when I do. Otherwise, I cannot correct them. This means that, even though it’s really tempting to, a therapist cannot take responsibility for you outside (or in many ways, within) the therapy room. My training and resources and experience do not include any knowledge about you, not other than the information that is given to me. Therapy isn’t a magical process that will fix you, it’s a lot of hard work for everyone involved.

Your Responsibilities

This brings me to my third point, you may not know it but as a client you have responsibilities, too. Therapy is hard work, and some of that work is about how you interact with your therapist. You don’t need to tell them every uncomfortable secret, but you do need to be reasonably honest with them. Even if honesty just means saying ‘I don’t want to talk about this.’ Putting down boundaries are hard and sometimes just as important in the therapy relationship as any other. Especially if your therapist isn’t as practiced at checking in on your boundaries. And if your therapist isn’t able to hear or respect those boundaries, if they have a hard time accommodating your needs, then that’s probably a good sign that you’d do better elsewhere. Remember, you’re the one paying for this service. You’re allowed to (and should) demand the service you need. And that’s true for me as much as anybody. I don’t want to force a client to stay if our sessions aren’t benefiting them. And I’ve had clients that I simply haven’t clicked with. My approach is somewhat outside the main stream, it doesn’t work for everyone. That doesn’t mean I should change it, it just means some people are looking for me and some people aren’t. I do better work with the latter anyway. 

Therapy is a Learning Curve

My fourth point: therapy requires certain skills. Some clients come into therapy with those skills and see change happen much faster then client’s that don’t. Good mental health isn’t a race, but you might get more out of the process if you know that there’s a learning curve involved. Client’s who do well are client’s that are able to self-reflect and articulate their own thoughts and observations about themselves. Client’s who struggle with these skills may need to spend a few weeks or months (or years) building them before they feel like they really hit their stride. It’s far from impossible, I’ve seen it happen many times. And change can happen without those skills, it just doesn’t go as smoothly. You’ll notice therapy is a lot of just tolerating uncomfortable shit, like not knowing the right answer or the right way. (That’s true for the therapist, as well.) So treat it like one great big experiment: the least you can expect is to learn something. And the pace of how quickly you learn it is secondary.

The Parent Problem

There’s one more thing I want to mention: parents. It’s true that parents come out often and early in therapy conversations. There’s good reasons for this, parents are our first role models for everything from communication to anger expression to mental health care. We internalize their behaviors whether we realize it or not. And childhood is the time where everything gets intensely absorbed, only to resurface out of our subconscious years later. We can learn a lot about ourselves by considering our parents. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. And no one has to talk about parents if they don’t want to, it can be uncomfortable talking about parents because it feels so much like blaming them for our own problems. But there’s a big difference between blame and accountability. 

I can usually assume that a client’s parents had the best intentions at heart, that they were genuinely doing their best given their own history and resources. I can acknowledge all this and still ask: What could have been better? What did you learn from your parents that you wish you could unlearn now? What parts of your parents do you sometimes see in yourself that makes you uncomfortable? No one is perfect, and raising kids is one of those ambiguous processes that we still don’t know enough about. And so, mistakes will be made. We have to identify those gaps and flaws in order to grow from them. And that means recognizing that a person's love is not diminished by their inability to take care of you the way you wanted or needed to be taken care of. We can forgive, but not without first acknowledging that forgiveness is the appropriate response. Or we can walk away, but not without first admitting that protecting ourselves means holding people accountable. Every one of us is allowed to want better for ourselves. 

In a way, expecting better of our loved ones, holding them accountable to a standard that perhaps even they themselves don’t believe they can reach, is a powerful kind of love, too. Often, we need to get comfortable with the idea that other people are flawed enough to hurt us unintentionally in order to heal that hurt. And then we ourselves are able to take up the torch of modeling a healthier way of being. 

Conclusion

All in all, I’m a big believer that therapy is a process that has the potential to help anyone. And in a world where mental health is still regularly deprioritized, we need that kind of support more than we realize. So, I encourage you to consider it, and to go in with an open mind. And if you try it, and don’t like it, then you have all the power to walk away. Making that choice for yourself, informed and conscientiously, is kind of the whole point.