If you are a helping professional—how do you choose a therapist for your own therapy?

‍The question you might have is: Should I choose a psychologist, a counsellor or a social worker?

I have a different and long-winded answer compared to the usual opinion pieces you might find on therapy service sites, AI overviews in Google, ChatGPT or social media. This post is also a personal reflection on some of the ‘profession bashing’ that I have encountered in different mental health professionals in Australia, including counsellors. Instead of talking about differences in professionals, I want to ask about what is part of the makeup of a good therapist despite training.

But let me be clear—I am a Bendigo-based master’s-qualified registered counsellor. I trained in Narrative Therapy, and I lean towards meaning-making first rather than quick fixes, so this flavors some of the questions I suggest asking when you are looking at different therapists regardless of their profession.

We are colleagues despite our different trainings and orientations

I have worked alongside many different mental health professionals in the human services sector for years (I still do), and I consider you all my colleagues.

I also trained in my master's degree with social workers, psychologists, youth workers and occupational therapists and did many therapy role-plays with people from a completely different professional background to my own. I came to my master's degree with a Grad. Dip. in Psychology (which does not make me a psychologist, albeit I have some of the same initial training and completed units in statistics and research)—and I can tell you that a good therapist is a good therapist regardless of their original training.

During my two-year master's degree, I had the pleasure of many peer conversations with a psychologist I studied with, and I have had supervision from social workers over the last many years with different orientations and training in mental health, counselling, existential therapy, and, more recently, psycho-dynamic therapy and depth work.

Whilst there are differences in how counsellors, psychologists and mental health social workers are trained in their base training or in their first completed degrees, my point here is that some counsellors use CBT or other talk therapies just like many psychologists, and some psychologists use Narrative Therapy, somatic therapy and EMDR, as do some counsellors, psychotherapists and social workers.

Questions About Training, Experience and Therapeutic Orientation

• Ask the therapist you might be interested in how long their training was and whether they have undertaken additional training after their first degree beyond short courses. Was it a formative training where they learned about the therapeutic relationship?

• Are they willing to explain how they work and why it matters in terms you can understand?

• What is their orientation beyond the techniques they use, such as EMDR or CBT? Do they have a broader therapeutic orientation? Different therapeutic orientations may also hold different views about frequency, duration, and what creates change in psychotherapy. For example, some relational and depth-oriented approaches place considerable importance on regular weekly sessions and continuity of care and how the past shows up in your present relationships.

• Ask if they have had their own therapy and ask them why it mattered to them beyond the sentence, ‘I have healed from trauma, so I can help you heal your trauma.’ You would want to see someone aware of what is their own emotional material and what is yours. Not all therapy provides that experience unless the therapist providing it has specifically trained in noticing what happens between client and therapist relationally and what it means.

Evidence about what makes therapists efficacious and what provides better outcomes in therapy

If these questions have made you more curious and you are interested in the research behind outcomes in therapy, you might also want to peruse the work of Jonathan Shedler and Daryl Chow. Both have many references to meta-analyses, peer-reviewed journal articles and opinion pieces about what makes psychotherapy efficacious for clients.

Shedler also talks about psychotherapy in no-nonsense language on Substack.

Finally, one central question for most people looking to invest their time and money in therapy is also: Will I feel safe with this person, and will I be understood? Whilst training, experience and therapeutic orientation matter, the experience of feeling understood by your therapist is often central to whether therapy feels helpful. I have written more about this question in my article, ‘How do I find a therapist who understands me?’