How do I find a therapist who understands me?
The question of feeling understood by your therapist is often central when evaluating whether therapy with a particular therapist is right for you.
If you are looking for a counsellor or other mental health professional in Bendigo, this question may feel particularly important if you are someone who spends much of your life caring for, leading, teaching or offering therapy to others. Many helping professionals find it difficult to grasp that a therapist truly understands their experience of the world. There might be an intellectual understanding that the therapist understands or tries to understand, but there may be no embodied-in-the-bones experience of being understood—which if this is the case an important issue to acknowledge and talk about.
As a therapist who has been in therapy and done extensive training and study, I believe that the first consultation with a counsellor or psychologist should evoke, even if only tentatively, an experience of: ‘Yes, I can connect with this person, and perhaps I can talk to them about really painful things, such as the ones that make me feel deeply ashamed, despairing or frightened.’
Understanding, however, rests on much more than liking, connecting or experiencing that your therapist has empathy for you. For me, as a narrative therapist working with a psycho-dynamic lens, curiosity belongs alongside liking, connection and empathy as one of the qualities that help bring about understanding.
Curious questions from your therapist help with greater awareness of yourself and others, which eventually fosters the ability to make different choices in life instead of doing things whilst on ‘auto-pilot’.
How trust helps feeling understood
Sometimes people come to therapy with deep relational wounds and may have good reasons to guard what they really feel. Feeling safe enough within the therapeutic relationship to place trust in the relationship should develop gradually over time. Sometimes it can be a core part of the work to be able to feel safe enough with a therapist and then eventually take that learning into other relationships in your life outside of your therapist's room.
Showing vulnerability can be a raw experience, and for those who see me, who are also mental health professionals or in related fields like health care, case management, or leadership, it is also natural to feel apprehensive, worrying about being judged for falling short or being inadequate if talking about how you feel impacted or vulnerable in your own work with your clients or staff. You are, after all, used to caring for or holding space for others, and it can feel vulnerable to let go and step out of the professional role.
You might ask yourself, " Who am I as a professional, if I am not able to ‘feel together’ on the inside?”—To that I say, we are all human, and we are all living life and exposed to life’s difficulties as well.
The therapeutic relationship is not static
Trust, like many aspects of human relationships, is dynamic and may depend on what we are talking about in a session and what the strongest undercurrent in your emotional life is on the day we have our session.
Importantly, there needs to be enough basic trust in the relationship between a therapist and a client to weather some emotional storms—and you need to experience a few times, perhaps, that your therapist can weather those storms and be curious about the concerns you bring up so that trust can build.
Can I disagree with my therapist and tell them they got something wrong?
I encourage you to say if something does not land. If you feel uncomfortable saying it, perhaps name what is uncomfortable, if you can. Hopefully, this lands with your therapist and is met with curiosity. The therapeutic relationship with your therapist should be safe enough that you can speak your mind. After all, therapy is often about finding the courage to speak your mind and thinking with less harshness about yourself.
In practice, if there is a rupture or conflict, understanding can develop through a process like this:
Your therapist may say something.
It misses the mark.
You call it out and tell her what you think.
The therapist remains curious and asks for clarification.
Together, you arrive at a deeper understanding of the feeling or the problem.
Does understanding come from likeness?
You might ask yourself: Will I feel better understood if the therapist I choose says they have also recovered from childhood trauma, miscarriage, family violence or experienced depression or suffered and recovered from vicarious trauma or burnout at work?
I believe therapists who have gone through hardship and found hope and experienced therapy working and helping can authentically convey hope. But having suffered from the same problem is no guarantee for understanding. Rather, the therapist's curiosity and effort to understand you is what matters.
Perhaps the question is not whether a therapist understands you immediately, but whether they are genuinely trying. When choosing a therapist, look for curiosity, openness, a willingness to explore difficult emotions, and the capacity to tolerate when misunderstandings or disagreements arise.
Therapy is a deeply human and sometimes slightly messy endeavour. Still, we begin therapy hoping we come out of therapy feeling we understand ourselves better, as well as other humans, with greater nuance and have found some resilience along the way.
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