The single most important factor contributing to improvement through mental health treatment has been demonstrated, over and over again, to be the quality of your relationship with your therapist. This is true regardless of the type of therapist you are working with, their level of education, their level of experience, or their treatment orientation. Good therapeutic relationships develop over time, but follow your early intuition. If after one or two sessions you feel you aren’t clicking with your therapist or you haven’t been heard or understood, go to another therapist! The value of finding a therapist that you connect with can far outweigh the inconvenience of having to sort through a few to get there.
That said, it is also important to understand what exactly your therapist is going to be doing with you to reach your treatment goals. Ask questions and make sure you’re getting what you need. Without clear goals and a clear idea of what is going to be done to get there, you may find yourself months (or years) down the road, many costly therapy sessions later, with no real improvement in your life to point to.
Therapy should always be a collaborative process. Your therapist should know more than you do about how people get into distress and what works getting them out of distress, but you are the expert about you, your child, and your family. Don’t be afraid to challenge your therapist if something’s not working or if therapy seems to be drifting off course. A good therapist will welcome your input and teamwork.
A word about Evidence Based Practice
Unproven, harmful therapies have plagued the mental health field since its inception. Lobotomies were performed routinely through the 1950s and rebirthing therapy led to a notorious death in the early 2000s. Reparative therapy to alter LGBT sexuality has been roundly denounced as unethical and likely dangerous.
Evidence Based Practices (EBPs) are treatments that have stood up to scientific scrutiny through, typically, several large-scale clinical trials, involving thousands of patients and careful comparison of the effects of these treatments vs. other types of psychological treatments. While therapeutic approaches that have not yet been studied or are difficult to study may also be effective, at a minimum you can count on EBPs to be safe and effective. The most commonly used evidence based practice approaches for the treatment of psychological symptoms involve cognitive and behavior therapies (CBT). The efficacy of CBT has been demonstrated for a wide-range of symptoms in adults, children, and adolescents and is my main mode of treatment.
For more information on Evidenced Based Practices see:
http://www.guideline.gov/index.aspx
