TRANSCRIPT
So the question that I want to discuss here is: is my therapist good or not? I’ve been asked that by people so many times over the years. I’ve had people email it to me, I’ve had people leave it in comments on my YouTube videos, and I’ve had people ask it to me in person. And it’s not a question to answer simply and easily. There’s actually a lot that goes into it.
So what I’m coming here to do now is to try to see if I can parse it out of it and see if I can come up with a lot of different things that might help someone answer that question a bit more clearly. The first thing that comes to my mind though when people ask this to me is: I wonder, why are they asking that to me? Because I think if somebody really loves their therapist, if someone feels their therapist is really good and it’s really helping them, they don’t necessarily go and ask someone because they know it intuitively.
So that brings me to my first question I would ask someone: what does your gut tell you? And I think that’s the key question for anyone to ask themself. Everything else that I say after this is not really that important by comparison. And so what if someone’s gut tells them? What does your gut tell you about your therapist? And I think deep down people can kind of feel the answer if they’re really able to be honest to themselves.
And that’s something that brings a second part to this question about what does your gut tell you, is that a lot of people go to therapy because they’re in a lot of pain. They’re desperate, they’re hurting really, really bad, they’re suffering, and they want someone to help them. They want someone to see them, guide them, and mirror them, be an ally for them, really be supportive of them, ask them good questions, really get to know them.
And when people go into a relationship with a therapist from that point of view, from a lot of pain, from a lot of vulnerability, they often have to suspend their disbelief. Because it’s not a very normal thing to go and sit in an office with a complete stranger and start telling the most personal things about their lives. It’s not like we don’t do this in our regular life. It’s very, very rare to tell complete strangers lots and lots of personal detail, especially on an ongoing basis.
So to get over that feeling that, oh my god, I mean that’s totally weird, an artificial relationship, what they do is they suspend their disbelief. They suspend all the parts of them that say, “no, no, I shouldn’t be telling all this super personal stuff to a stranger.” And instead they just go, “you know, I’m just gonna have faith in the process. I’m just gonna trust.” Not everybody does this, but a lot of people do.
And the result of that is that a lot of therapists who aren’t very good can get people to trust them anyway, just because they’re so desperate to trust someone, too desperate to have an ally. And also, people don’t want to believe that their therapist isn’t good because if their therapist isn’t good, that can cause all sorts of problems. The first being, “oh my god, I have to quit this therapist, and then I have to go find a whole other new complete stranger and tell my story all over again.” I have to spill my guts and tell my most personal intimate details all over again, and who wants to do that? You want to believe really hard that your therapist is good.
A lot of times also, therapists who aren’t very good don’t encourage people to trust their gut. They encourage people to trust the therapist. And actually, if you think about it from a business point of view, it’s really not a bad idea: “hey, trust me, don’t trust yourself, and then you’ll keep paying me, and this relationship will keep going.” And sadly, a lot of people do just that.
So now I’m gonna try the second question: what is your therapist’s opinion on psychiatric drugs? Now again, this is my opinion, and this is my opinion based on my experience. I was a therapist for 10 years, after all, and now I’ve not been a therapist; it’s going on eight years. But I’ve had a lot of intimate interactions with therapists. I have a lot of friends who are therapists. I’ve talked to tons and tons and tons of people who’ve been in therapy, and I’ve made movies about therapy, so this is where I get my experience from.
So the question of what is your therapist’s opinion on psychiatric drugs, anyway, it’s kind of simple. She listened to nothing else about this when my reduced simple answer would be: if your therapist is pro-psychiatric drug, I wouldn’t trust them very much. Now does that mean your therapist should be against psychiatric drugs? I’d say pretty much yeah. You want a therapist who’s against psychiatric drugs because when do therapists want people to go on psychiatric drugs? When do they refer them to psychiatrists or doctors to put them on psychiatric drugs? They refer them to people who put them on psychiatric drugs when the therapist no longer feels they can help someone.
So right away, if the therapist really believes in using a lot of psychiatric drugs or even a little psychiatric drugs, it shows the limits of their ability to be helpful. Now you could say, of course, “oh, what about someone diagnosed with schizophrenia or someone with bipolar? They need medication.” That’s a pretty standard answer in society. Well, it’s not that simple. I mean, you could look at my movies, but you could also look at the work of a lot of other very respected people in the field who have a lot of comments on people who are in extreme states, people with extreme diagnoses, and the non-use of medication. Quite a lot of people actually who have extreme diagnoses, schizophrenia, bipolar, other ones like that, actually do better without medication.
The question is, they need to find a therapist who is willing to work that way. And it takes a lot of skill, it takes a lot of talent, it takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of dedication for a therapist to really work with someone who is really in an altered state and extreme state or has an extreme diagnosis without medication. It’s tough. It’s a lot more work on the therapist, but that’s also a sign that the therapist is a lot better if they’re willing to work without medication, if they have experience working without medication.
Now what about diagnoses that are not so extreme? Let’s say depression. Not saying in some cases it is an extremely extreme because it can be, but what about just regular day-to-day life, anxiety, sleep problems, things like that? Is your therapist willing to work without medication? Are they quick to prescribe medication? For me, again, definitely when a therapist is quick to prescribe medication or even slow to prescribe medication but willing to suggest that medication might be helpful, it’s a sign that the therapist is not usually all that skillful. They really don’t know how to help people.
And what does help people? If medication is really not that helpful, because we all hear the stories of the horrors, the addiction of the medication, the withdrawal symptoms when people try to come off, the horrible side effects that people have. And of course, things like the medications often block people’s ability to feel their feelings more, which is what you need to grow, which is really what therapy is all about: feeling your feelings, grieving, knowing your history, and growing.
So this leads into the third question: what is your therapist’s opinion on psychiatric diagnosis? I mean, in the last one I did talk about psychiatric diagnosis. I used the words like schizophrenia and bipolar and stuff like that, but do I really believe that those diagnoses exist as actual things? Did I tell my clients, “you have a psychiatric diagnosis, you have schizophrenia, you have this”? Actually, no, I didn’t believe that. I used those because a lot of people do get those diagnoses and believe in them, but for me personally, no, I don’t believe in diagnosis. I don’t like diagnosing people, and it’s one of the lovely things about not being a therapist is that I don’t have to. In New York State, where I was a therapist, they actually legally had to diagnose people, especially if you’re gonna bill insurance companies. But I don’t believe in diagnosis. I don’t believe diagnosis is really a helpful thing.
I see diagnosis has, and what I’ve seen that other good therapists had as an opinion is that psychiatric diagnosis is a very limited pigeonholing thing that doesn’t really tell a person anything of significance about themselves. It certainly doesn’t do much, if anything, to help someone heal from their problems. Usually, it’s just a big distraction, and on top of that, it’s very stigmatizing, and it can be very humiliating and painful.
I personally have been diagnosed by therapists, and I did not find it a pleasant process. I found it actually a very disrespectful process. So when I hear that therapists are into diagnosing people and believe in the diagnosis, and believe that this diagnosis requires this kind of treatment, especially or especially this kind of medication, it’s like, mmm, this is a therapist that’s probably worth being very skeptical about. Also, because if therapists get into diagnosis and really believe in it—and sadly most do from what I’ve seen—it’s a sign that they really don’t have that much else to offer because they’re not getting into the deeper stuff that people are really going through. And, or if they are getting into it, they’re seeing it in light of the person’s diagnosis, which again isn’t really very helpful as a therapist.
So if a therapist is really focused on something that’s not very helpful, it’s a sign that they probably themselves won’t have much ability to be all that helpful.
My next question is, how do they work with someone who is suicidal? Someone who’s feeling like they want to kill themselves? Someone who’s having thoughts of suicide, maybe has a plan, maybe has intent—both being the words used in the mental health field and in the standard practice of therapy.
What most therapists do when they hear that someone’s suicidal, especially if they start getting a person who really has some intent to kill themself, is, “Oh my god, I need to refer them to a higher level of care. I need to send them to a psychiatrist for medication, or maybe even I need to hospitalize them. I need to call 911 or whatever the number is, call for an ambulance, call police on someone, and get them locked up.” Now why would a therapist do that logically? Unfortunately, in our society, there are some good reasons, and usually they’re not reasons that are very helpful to the client.
One of the main reasons is therapists panic. They get scared. “Oh my god, what’s going to happen to me if this person does something to himself or herself?” It can come back to by therapist pretty badly. Therapists have to deal with the issue of malpractice, and “Oh my god, if someone kills himself or has a suicide attempt, I can get blamed,” says the therapist. Also, therapists do get attached to clients, and sometimes they panic. “How will the therapist—how will I feel if someone has a suicide attempt?” They’ll feel horrible a lot of the time. Therapists do feel terrible if clients do have suicide attempts or actually follow through and kill themselves.
But the question is, how does a therapist who is good deal with someone who is suicidal? How do they work with someone better? One of the main things that I have seen—this is my personal experience and also just by talking to a lot of people and having been a client—is that the best way for therapists to help people who are suicidal, who want to kill themself, is to develop a stronger relationship with them. Develop a more intimate, more caring, more loving relationship with them. And that, in my experience, is the main thing that helps people feel less suicidal. They feel they really have somebody to bond with, someone who really is there for them. But the therapist really has to be there for the person.
So one thing that a therapist can do when someone is suicidal is offer to work with them more. Maybe don’t see them once a week; maybe see them twice a week. Offer to see them three times a week, four times a week, five times a week. These things can all be done. Also, the therapist can, for a while, perhaps charge less money, do things that make it easier for the client to come in, make it so the therapist is more emotionally available, more physically available, more physically present to the client to help them. Also, the therapists can talk about alternate strategies, other ways that people can become more connected with people, ways that people can find more value in their life.
I think part of being a therapist is being a very, very creative person. Also, from what I’ve seen, when therapists are—pardon using the word—but when therapists are trigger-happy about sending people to the hospital, getting them locked up, having their rights taken away, or pushing them to go on medication, and people are feeling suicidal, those are therapists that I generally do not trust much at all. Because when people really are feeling powerless, when people are feeling desperate, and people are feeling in terrible, terrible pain about their lives, it generally doesn’t help very much to take away their freedom, to force them to take chemicals into their body, to pressure them to be something other than who they are.
Again, I think really what it comes back to is a willingness to have a more intimate, more caring, more devoted relationship on the part of the therapist. Now, is that easy for a therapist? No, it’s extremely difficult. It can be extremely stressful and painful for the therapist. That’s why I think most people—I can understand why they really don’t want to be therapists. There’s reasons, lots of different reasons that I left being a therapist, but one of them is it’s extremely, extremely difficult as a job. And so that’s why it’s like a really good therapist is not easy to find, especially for people who do it for years and years and years. It’s a tough job. I really think it takes a toll on a person, especially if they’re working with people who are in very difficult states.
My next question is, does your therapist recognize the traumatic roots of your life problems? And to me, this is a key. This is my personal beliefs, this is my experience, this is what I’ve learned about from looking inside myself and working with a lot of people, is that people’s problems don’t come out of nowhere. They come out of their past. They come out of bad things that happen to them. Well, so you know, at the root, they come out of people’s childhoods. They can also come from childhood things that were passed down the generations from their parents. But it comes from difficult things that happen in people’s lives—the traumatic things.
So a good therapist, in my opinion, really looks into the traumatic roots of somebody’s history. They look underneath what the problem is, saying, “Where did it come from?” Now, I recognize there are a lot of people—because I’ve seen them, I’ve talked to them—who say, “I don’t want to deal with all that childhood stuff. I want to deal with all that trauma stuff. That stuff never helped me.” And I do understand for some people it can not be very helpful, and it can be extremely painful to talk about it because a lot of times it’s so huge, it’s so immense that it’s like, where to begin? And sometimes just opening it up doesn’t present any sort of quick solution, quick fix. So a lot of people are turned off by it. But does that mean to me that it’s not true? Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen, it is true. The painful traumatic roots are where the answers are.
Now, other types of therapy that can be helpful? Sure. Is there a place for cognitive behavioral therapy and different therapies like that that look more at thoughts and behaviors and how you live in the world and focusing on the here and now? For sure. And I think a good therapist also does focus on all that stuff too. But really, deep down, I believe a therapist has to ultimately have their perspective be looking at what’s underneath it. Yes, they can focus on the here and now, focus on lifestyle, diet, exercise, friendships, working—what are you doing? How are you spending your day? Your creativity, your joy, your having fun, your relaxation techniques—all these things are really important, and I think a good therapist should know a lot about them. But ultimately, the most important thing is where did we come from? What did we go through? What is our history? What is our story? And really looking at trauma and really…
Really being an expert at having someone unpack their trauma, look at it, study it, create a safe environment to bring it out, to explore it, and ultimately to grieve it.
The next question that I would ask someone who’s questioning, “Is my therapist good or not?” is, “Do you feel your therapist understands you?” Seems like it could be kind of a simple question, even a silly question. And maybe even in a way people could say, “Well, I don’t know if they really understand me,” or “Do they understand me quickly?” But to me, the answer is kind of simple. Does your therapist understand you? I feel a therapist should have a really quick grasp at understanding people. That’s part of the gift of being a good therapist. If they have a really intuitive grasp on getting someone, so I feel that a person in therapy should pretty quickly feel that their therapist gets them, understands them, understands who they are, and is quickly able to put a lot of different things from a person’s personality, in their history, their background, into a cohesive whole and make sense of it. And also demonstrate to the person who’s coming to them for help that they do get them and really are able to mirror them pretty quickly and pretty succinctly. That’s part of the communication gift of a good therapist, to really help someone know that you get them, you see them, you empathize with them.
I think a lot of people feel that their therapists really don’t get them all that well, or their therapists are surprised when there’s something that the client shares that light comes out of left field because the therapist really didn’t get such a coherent picture of the client’s whole personality. Now yes, you could say a therapist could take some time to learn different things, different parts of the client’s personality, but ultimately I still think a therapist should pretty quickly be able to grasp a lot about the client.
Now this leads right into the next question: “Do you feel your therapist really loves you?” Now this might seem like a loaded question. Therapists aren’t supposed to love their clients, you might say. That’s too personal, that’s too intimate, that’s not good boundaries. Well, I actually really don’t agree with that. I think it’s very important that a therapist actually love their client to really be able to help them, to really be good for a person.
Now how do I define love? Does that mean the therapist should be in love with the client? No, not at all. Quite the opposite. I think being in love and loving someone are very different things. I think being in love, there’s a lot of neediness involved. There’s a lot of hope that that person will save me and rescue me, and that’s not good. I don’t think a therapist should be in love with the client and think that’s helpful or good. But loving someone, loving someone is really caring for them. Loving someone is really supporting them, being there for that person in the relationship, putting that person’s needs at a top, top priority, and really striving to be giving, helpful, caring—all the things that really are strongly part of a healing relationship.
So I think it really is important for a therapist to love a client. I think back on it, yes, I really did love my clients. There is a caveat though, is that it wasn’t like I necessarily felt that deep, strong sense of love immediately for my clients. Something I came to myself is that for seeing someone once a week, twice a week, it took months—usually about six months—before I really felt that deep sense of love, almost like they became like family. But at the same time, I could still be very loving toward people before it really sunk in. But I really think it does take a lot of intimacy, it takes a lot of time, a lot of really concentrated special one-on-one time to build a sense of deep love with a client. But I think it ultimately has to come for the therapist to really be good with a client.
Now I’ve heard a lot of stories about therapists who didn’t love their clients. I’ve also sat and talked with tons and tons of therapists over the years who, from the way they talk about their clients, it’s very obvious they didn’t love their clients. A lot of times they didn’t even like them. And also, no, not even close. I don’t feel any of my therapists loved me. In fact, the one that I worked with the most intimately and the longest, I think actually kind of hated me. And as more and more time went on, and the more she got to know me, I think she was threatened by me. And I think part of it is that I started getting more and more able to understand her and see her limits better than she could understand mine. And I think it really threatened her. And also the things that I was talking about, the healing and growing that I was doing, I think it really put her on edge because I think it was getting into a lot of territory that she hadn’t personally dealt with herself. And I think that’s pretty common with therapists. I mean, we all have limits as people, but if you get a client who actually is healthier than you are, more mature, has more insight, has done more growth in certain areas, can be very threatening to a therapist, especially if the client starts really challenging the therapist.
Now that gets into the next question: “How does your therapist deal with being personally challenged?” Getting confronted. When therapists get confronted in therapy, it’s a kind of a crisis sometimes. It directly is a crisis, or it can be leading toward a crisis. We can be very, very stressful as a therapist for a client to challenge you, to confront you, to say, “I don’t agree,” or “I think you did something wrong,” or “I think you were stupid when you said that,” or “I think you made a terrible mistake,” or “I think what you said really hurt me or harmed me.” So how does the therapist deal with that? There’s lots of different ways a therapist can deal with it. One of the basic ways that a therapist can do, whether it is to become very defensive and even to become nasty, to become rude, to put the client down, to say, “You’re wrong,” or to start criticizing or breaking down everything that the client says and say, and to turn it back on to them. Therapists, after all, have a lot of power in the relationship. It’s inherent in the relationship with the client that the therapist has more power. So how they respond to being challenged tells a lot about how they use their power.
Now, are there helpful ways for therapists to act if they get challenged? Yes, and this to me is what’s very telling about a good therapist. When a good therapist gets challenged, they handle it in a very respectful way. The first thing that they do—this is my experience having been a therapist—is when you get challenged, you stop, you go inside yourself, and you self-reflect. You look at yourself and you say, “Is there real validity in what this person is saying?” And in my experience, there always is validity when people challenge you. It’s always coming from someplace that has some validity. Now there’s a range. Sometimes it cannot seem like there’s a lot of validity, and sometimes it can seem like, “Yeah, they’re actually totally right.” That’s the range. The question is, how does the therapist deal with it? For me, the first thing is it’s very important to acknowledge any areas of validity in what the client says, to be respectful of those and to admit it. If the therapist made an error, admit it immediately. Fess up. Don’t hide it. Don’t—why? Because therapists can do that, unfortunately. Then also, what if the therapist really doesn’t overall agree with the criticism? I think the therapist has an obligation to say that in some way. First, of course, to acknowledge the ways, even if it’s small, in which they feel that the client is right. But then to open it up for discussion and just to concede the possibility, “Well, you know, maybe as a therapist I’m actually wrong.” Because it is always possible, even if I don’t feel like I’m being confronted fairly overall, maybe it is fair and I just haven’t acknowledged it. After all, this isn’t like a hard science where you get a mathematical answer that’s right or wrong.
Think of many experiences where I’ve been criticized by clients, and it didn’t feel totally fair to me. But later, I actually, with more maturity on my part, more distance from the relationship, more growth, more personal experience, I realized actually there were a lot more right than I realized.
So I think it’s really, really important that if a therapist gets challenged, they respond. And if in a humble way, a loving way, but also they have to be sincere about it. And I think in a way, it’s like the therapist has to be open to looking at the place the client is coming from and see the validity. Because also sometimes people do challenge therapists with things that they’re projecting onto the therapist. They can challenge therapists and criticize them for things that come in the client’s past. They can put things from other people, bad things that other people did, onto a therapist.
But I think if a therapist is good, they’re gonna have some sense of that, and they’re gonna still have empathy for the client. Because they’re gonna realize part of what makes a therapy relationship special is that privacy, that anonymity, the confidentiality, the intimacy in it. And those kind of relationships can kick up a lot of stuff in people. All that vulnerability that a client is expected to express, it’s like it can kick up a lot of stuff, and there can be reactions.
So I think a therapist has to be open to that and be humble about how difficult it is. And that sometimes, yeah, people can confront a therapist about things that aren’t fair. And the therapist sometimes has to just weather it, to be able to take it for a while. Sometimes it changes over time, but at least to be able to hang tough, be strong, still be loving, and show the person, you know, I actually still care about you even though you’re criticizing me. I may not totally understand it, I may not totally agree with it, but I still definitely defend your right to confront me.
Because also many people who come to therapy have never really had a safe relationship in their life where they’re allowed to criticize someone, where they’re allowed to confront someone, and they’re not going to get punished for it. There’s not going to be horrible negative consequences. They’re not going to be abandoned for it, because so many people in their life have been abandoned so terribly, which is part of why they go to therapy in the first place, to work that out.
So I think it is important a lot of times for people to test therapists, and maybe not fairly. I certainly have tested my therapists in ways. I’ve confronted them about things that I think were right, and also later in hindsight realizing some of the things I confronted, the more that probably wasn’t quite right. I was testing them to see if they still loved me. And a lot of times when they reacted really negatively, it’s like, oh, I get it. They need to be right more than they need to really actually care about me. And there was a sign that I didn’t really have that good of therapists.
Next Question
Next question might seem a little bit out of left field, but I think it’s an important one. Is your therapist a radical person? Okay, so where’s this coming from? To me, I think the whole process of therapy, a really good, helpful, useful, life-changing therapy, is a radical process. It’s about radical growth. It’s about exploring radical sides of ourselves. It’s about really being able to be intimate in some really unusual and radical ways.
And I think if you get a therapist who’s not a very radical person, hasn’t really taken radical steps in their own life, is basically kind of a comfortable, soft, emotionally small person who’s not taking big risks or hasn’t taken big risks in their life, I don’t think they’re gonna be very helpful. I don’t think they’re gonna be very good for being someone who’s intimately involved in a radical growth process.
So what I see is the answer is if your therapist is a radical person, it’s gonna be a lot, lot more likely that they’re gonna be a good therapist. And what is someone who’s radical? Someone who’s radical is someone who’s really faced demons inside of themselves, someone who has a lot of courage to really go for it and be strong, to have confronted their past, to really look at terrible things inside themselves, terrible things that happened to them, perhaps terrible things that they’ve done.
Someone who’s done a lot of grieving, gone through that radical, painful process of suffering, of really going through a lot of maybe depression and coming out the other side and grieving it and getting to know some whole new sides of themselves, perhaps has changed their life in some really radical ways over time, really has dramatically new perspectives on who they are and where they came from and what the world is and what’s happening on our planet, all sorts of things. People who are really willing to take great challenges, to try things, people who are artists, all these things I think make a therapist a much, much better therapist.
So I think there’s ways of finding out, and the best way is finding out about a therapist if they’re a radical person is asking them, seeing how they behave in that. You ask them questions, letting them talk about themselves, studying them. I think it’s very normal to look up a therapist on the internet and see who they are, what kind of things they’ve done, what kind of things they’ve talked about, what kind of things they’ve written about.
I see a lot of therapists’ websites. I remember when I first created my first website as a therapist, that was back in 2004, and I went through a process. I studied tons and tons of therapists’ websites, all the therapists I knew and could think of. I looked at their websites if they had one, and I also googled and I looked at therapists’ websites just in general. And what I saw from the far, far, far, far majority of therapists via their websites is that they were not radical people. They actually had very tame, boring websites. They didn’t put out any really unusual ideas. Very few of them did. Most of them put out an image of themselves as a very conservative, caring, solid, stable person, and they didn’t want to put out ideas that would get them rejected.
They didn’t want to put out radical ideas because that’s the problem. Also, if you put out really honest, radical ideas about who you are as a therapist, likely you’re gonna piss some people off. And there’s going to be some clients who are gonna say, “That rubs me the wrong way.” That’s inevitable. I think that’s part of getting rejected by life. Some people just don’t like certain parts of people. You can’t help it. I mean, there’s a lot of people who don’t like certain things that I say. I’ve certainly been rejected a lot for a lot of the things that I said, and I think that’s just part of being a radical person.
However, one gift that I think that I offer by being so honest and having been so honest for so long is that people really get to decide what they think about me because I’ve really shown myself. I’ve really shown the radical sides of myself. It’s not like a big mystery who I am because it’s out there on all sorts of subjects. So I think that’s a real benefit.
So you get a therapist who you can see who they are, see how radical they are, see how much risk they’ve taken in putting stuff out about themselves. You can make a real decision about who this person is as a person. It’s much less of a hidden mystery. And I think a lot of people, their therapist is a mystery, and I think a lot of therapists really put a lot of energy into maintaining that mystery, of putting out cloud and smoke around themselves so they can sit back with this role of being all-knowing and mysterious, and I don’t think it’s helpful.
Next Question
How much does your therapist charge? How much money do they charge for being a therapist? My general rule that I’ve come to, having been a therapist, having been in therapy, and having been out of therapy and thought about it a lot, is it’s pretty simple: better therapists charge less money. It’s pretty counterintuitive because usually in most fields and most lines of work, the more quality…
Someone has the more they’re they charge for it. But I think with therapy it’s different. And I think again it comes back to does your therapist love you? And I think when people love people, they want to give them the most fair deal possible. Now, it’s not so simple because a good therapist also loves himself or herself. So he wants to respect him or herself. And part of respecting oneself is charging more money and making more money. However, it’s not that simple.
So I think there’s two curves. One curve is the better you are, the less money you charge. And the other curve is the more you love yourself, perhaps the more you want to charge. It’s nice to have more money. Money is very useful in the world. So the question is where do those lines meet? Where they meet is I think how much a therapist charges.
Now, I think part of what a therapist can do is charge a sliding scale and give the client a lot of say in how much they charge. Now, I have heard people say, “Oh yeah, my therapist charges on a sliding scale,” and it’s a ridiculous sliding scale. The low end of a sliding scale is higher than anything I ever charged anyone in the high end of my sliding scale. So I think yeah, charging a low amount is better because if you really care about someone, you don’t want to stress them out by charging them lots of lots of money.
I’ve heard this from people a lot. They came to therapy with me and they said, “Yeah, it was really, really stressful in my relationship with my last therapist.” And I was like, “Stressful in your relationship with your therapist? Why?” And they’re like, “Yeah, my therapist was charging me $200 a session and I couldn’t really afford it. I had to save up for two weeks to be able to pay for it.” And I’m like, “They charge? And how much were you earning?” The person was earning $12 an hour. It’s like, “You were paying a therapist $200 an hour and you earning $12 an hour? That therapist is a crook. They’re a shyster.” And I think a lot of therapists are. They really don’t care about their clients that much. They just want to make money.
Another thing is a lot of therapists get pretty grandiose in their own head. They really start thinking they are a guru. They think they’re a god. And they think this client who comes to me, they’re so lucky to be sitting with me. They’re really, they’re so lucky that they should pay me this. And it really is very, very self-centered of the therapists.
I’m gonna go against what I normally say and I’m going to use a diagnostic word. It’s very narcissistic of a therapist. And a lot of therapists really can be that way. And part of that narcissism, if you want to call it that, that self-centeredness, that feeling that they’re the center of the earth and the most important person, a super inflated vision of themselves is that they’re worth it. And I need to charge this amount of money. And they feel that if they charge less money, it’s a negative reflection on them. And really, that’s very self-centered.
So I really think if you really care about people as a therapist, you really love them, you really want to do best, the best by them, you want to make it fair. You don’t want to charge them a huge amount more than they earn an hour. Now, of course, there are some clients who make a lot of money. Why not let them pay a lot of money? I think it’s fair. And I’ve had that experience also where I had clients who made quite a bit more money than I ever did, and they were paying me low fees because I gave them a sliding scale and they chose a lower amount. That made me feel bad. And sometimes I had to say, “You know, I really think it’s better that you pay more.”
So another question is what is the therapist’s opinion on forgiving parents? This is where it’s getting into ideas of mine that probably conventionally would be considered more radical. But for me, I think a good, good therapist, a gifted therapist is not at all about forgiving parents. That’s not even on their mind. They’re not trying to help their clients forgive their parents. Instead, they’re trying to help their clients heal from what their clients went through, heal their traumas. And often it comes back to healing their childhood trauma that happened inside of their families of origin, often at the hands of their parents. Often it goes back to abuse and neglect and other really painful things that people went through in relation to their parents.
And for a lot of clients, a big part of their healing process is dealing with the really painful things that happened with their parents. And although there are a lot of people in the world, healing figures and gurus who are really big on forgiveness and coming to, you know, coming to a loving place with one’s parents, I don’t think that’s part of the healing process.
Now, does that mean that a therapist should be attacking your parents and criticizing them all the time? No, I don’t think so. I think it’s a therapist’s place to let the client lead the healing process, feel their feelings, really go through their process at their own pace for determining what they went through. Yes, the therapist can do a lot of mirroring and give feedback and be honest about it, but definitely not pushing forgiveness. I don’t see forgiveness as a goal of therapy or a goal of the healing process. I think reconciliation can be, but I think the most important thing for people to do in their healing process is to work through their traumas, resolve their traumas. And a lot of times it goes quite especially during the process, and it can be a very, very long, long process of going through the healing process with one’s parents.
A lot of times it involves feeling a lot of rage, a lot of anger, feeling that painful, horrible feeling of having been abandoned, often repeatedly, sometimes in big ways, sometimes in not so big ways. But I think it’s really important that the therapist hangs with the client on that process, respects the client’s process, and doesn’t try to short-circuit it by saying, “Forgive and you need to go back to your parents and you need to love them.” And, “Well, let’s look at your parents’ perspective on this.” And I think a lot more therapists than we realize actually do things like that. They try to get into understanding the parents’ perspective. Well, I know you’re feeling really angry and really upset with your parent, but remember, look what your parent went through. They went through a lot of hard stuff too. I don’t think that’s helpful. I don’t think that’s good.
And a lot of times it tells a lot about the therapists that secretly, unconsciously, the therapist is actually more on your parents’ side than they’re on your side. And that is not good. And I’ve had that happen. I’ve had therapists because they actually emotionally had not broken away from their parents that much. They hadn’t confronted their parents that much. They hadn’t really done a lot of process on their own healing journey to heal from their own childhood traumas. Unconsciously, they were still on the side of their parents and the side of parents in general.
And I think it’s vitally important that good therapists be intuitively, deeply, emotionally on the side of the child, of the child that’s within the client that they’re working with and the child that the client once was.
So this leads into the final question, and it might seem like a bit of a weird one, but does your therapist have children? And I think part of being a really good therapist in general is it helps to not have children. Why is that? Okay, and one way I’d say look at the world. The world is such a mess. People who are bringing children into it, a lot of times from what I see, are less conscious, less healthy. And so I would want a therapist who is more conscious and more healthy. But also from what I’ve seen, when people have children, a lot of times it stymies their own growth process. It blocks their own growth process. They end up getting into a relationship with their child, an emotional relationship that really diverts people from their healing path. And I’ve seen that so much.
When people have children, it’s so much harder to devote oneself to the really, really painful process of growing and healing. That lifetime process of growing and healing. And when people have kids, their energies go so much more into raising their kids and to nurturing their children, which in a way they should. They should be putting a ton of energy into nurturing their children. But something gets sacrificed, and a lot of what gets sacrificed is one’s own growth process.
So when you get a therapist who’s not fully devoted to their growth process, generally, not as good of a therapist. But it also, on the flip side, is when you get a therapist who has children, especially young children, you get a therapist whose attention is divided. Being a therapist, especially if you have more than just a few clients, there is an extremely emotionally taxing job. It’s extremely stressful.
And when people have young children, especially, how are they supposed to be a good parent for their young child when they’re having an extremely emotionally taxing, challenging, stressful job? Their child is gonna suffer for that. On the flip side, if they’re really being an excellent, devoted, focused, caring parent to their child, how are they supposed to devote all their emotional energies to being a good therapist?
I think we only, as people, have so much emotional energy to devote to ourselves and to the world. I think we really all have a limited capacity to give, give, give. And part of being a therapist is doing a lot of giving. I think it’s basically pretty hard for anyone to see a lot of clients as a therapist and also to give a lot to oneself. Add a child to the picture, I think it really is just too much to ask.
So I think really, yeah, if a therapist has a child, especially a young child or multiple young children, it’s generally just they’re just not going to be able to be as good of a therapist.
So overall, that is my list of 12 things that I would ask someone who’s questioning, “Is my therapist good or not?” But to go back to what I said at the beginning, the most important thing really is to trust your gut, to look inside yourself, and to trust how you feel about your therapist, about how this person really feels to you. And to listen to yourself.
I think that’s a good place for me to close. That ultimately, even if we are in therapy, ultimately it’s our own journey. And ultimately, our life and our healing process is ultimately a self-therapeutic process. And ultimately, we have to be the ones who are in charge of our healing process. Ultimately, the therapist is just someone who we hire to help us, to nurture us, to do some guidance. But ultimately, we have to listen to ourselves. We have to listen to that voice that’s within us because ultimately, that’s what we all have. We all have a voice of truth within us, and that’s ultimately the person who tells us where we need to go and what is the right direction for us. Not any outside person, not a therapist.
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