I Found a Therapist Who Was Not a Good Fit and Almost Gave Up on Therapy

I had finally, at 26, overcome the resistance I had carried toward therapy and made the appointment that the accumulation of a difficult year had made unavoidable. The therapist I saw for the first four sessions was qualified and experienced and also, for reasons that I could not locate in any specific failure, not the right person for me to work with.

The sessions were technically correct - she asked appropriate questions, provided appropriate frameworks, maintained appropriate professional distance. What they did not produce was the specific quality of being understood that I had hoped therapy might provide and that had not arrived in four sessions.

I concluded from this, with a speed that I now recognise was partially motivated by the desire to stop going, that therapy was not going to work for me. I did not return for four months. The return was prompted by a friend who asked whether I had tried a different therapist.

The question had not occurred to me, which tells me something about how thoroughly I had been treating the first therapist as representative of therapy itself. The second therapist was different from the first in approach and in quality of fit in ways that were apparent by the end of the first session.

The work I did with her over the following year was the most significant personal development I have done as an adult. It would not have been available to me if I had stayed with the conclusion that four sessions with the wrong person had almost produced. Therapeutic fit is a real and important variable.

Finding the wrong therapist is finding a person who is not right for you, not evidence that the process is wrong for you.