Getting to Know More Than The Profile

Now In Session | Before We Begin Series| Part 2

Telehealth therapy is a lot like online dating. It starts with me creating a profile, posting a picture, and figuring out how to describe myself and what I do in a paragraph or two, just hoping that whoever comes across it feels something worth clicking on. And on your end, you are doing the same thing, sorting through profiles, reading about strangers, trying to figure out from a photo and a few sentences whether this is someone you could trust with the parts of yourself you have never said out loud.

The humbling thing, from my side, is that people do click. And I am genuinely grateful every time someone sees something in my profile that leads them to believe I might be the person who could help them. That is not something I take lightly.

More than a Profile to Know

But here is what I also know about that moment when you clicked and decided to reach out. You made a decision based on a paragraph and a photo, which means you made a decision based on very little. And that is okay, because that is how this works. Therapy is a relationship, and relationships take time to know. Sometimes you meet someone and you click immediately, you are laughing and finishing each other's sentences before the appetizers arrive. Other times you meet and something is just a little off, not bad, not wrong, just not quite right, and no one is to blame for that. Two perfectly good people can meet and simply not be each other's person. Finding a therapist is much the same way as finding any relationship that works. It takes more than a profile to know. And just because a therapist has the education and the experience does not mean they are the right therapist for you.

What Best Serves You

This is why I ask every new client to give me three therapy sessions after the intake before deciding whether this is the right fit. The first therapy session is the initial assessment or intake, which is its own thing. It is a preliminary appointment where I gather the information I need to begin, and we will get to what that looks like in a moment. The three sessions that follow are where we actually start doing the work and where both of us get a real sense of whether this is working. I recommend meeting weekly for that first month, intake included, because the consistency and frequency of that first four weeks gives us both enough time to really know. By the end of it we reassess together, not just for fit, but for how we want to continue.

Some clients need weekly ongoing sessions because there is a lot happening and the regularity of that weekly conversation matters. Others find that every week is too much, either because the work is heavy enough that they need more time between sessions to process what we talked about, or simply because biweekly gives them two weeks of living and feeling and thinking to bring into the room. By the time that session comes around they have a full forty five minutes to an hour worth of conversation waiting. Neither is wrong. We figure out what serves you best. And if at the end of that first month it is clear this is not the right fit, there are no hard feelings. I will support you in finding your person. That is not a failure. That is the process working exactly the way it should.

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