How To Find a Therapist

Editor’s preface: I’m Carmel—I’ve been editing Every behind-the-scenes in recent months, while Kate Lee is on maternity leave. You may have met me in my past lives at Figma (the early years) or as a startups reporter (at Recode, Gigaom, and Pando). Despite my tech and media background, my friends always joke I should've become a therapist. Human psychology is a favorite subject of mine, and I’ve been inspired by Every's recent mental health essays to publish a few of my own posts on the topic.

Below is a guide for vetting therapists that I initially wrote during the pandemic (for my old colleagues at Figma). I always meant to expand it and publish it publicly, and Every feels like the right audience for it! Would love to hear about your own experiences therapist hunting in comments.

Therapy has been having its mainstream moment in the wake of the pandemic. The shark has been jumped. I realized it when high school friends from home started dropping words like “codependency” and “EMDR.” 

But despite its rise in popularity, anyone new to therapy still faces a daunting job getting started. It’s hard to know how to go about finding therapists, let alone evaluating whether they’re the right fit for you. Good therapists practice some witch’s brew of experience and intuition. People’s needs evolve over time, so the therapist that works for them at first may not be a fit a decade later. 

In the wake of the pandemic I’ve had a lot of friends and colleagues ask for advice on navigating through this maze. I’ve seen a lot of therapists through the years, so I learned how to find new ones through trial-and-error. It was a process of blood, sweat and tears (mostly tears).

I wrote this guide based on my own experiences and suggestions—it covers everything from consult call questions to red flags to etiquette for therapist break ups. I’m not a doctor or a therapist myself so take it all with a grain of salt.

Step 1: Reflect on what you want in a therapist

It helps to have a sense of what you're looking for, everything from what you want to work on in your life to how active you'd like your therapist to be in the room. If you've never done therapy before, it may take some testing to figure it out, so don't be afraid to just get started and try sessions with different people (more on that later). Here are some of the things to consider upfront.

Style 

• Challenger: Do you want someone to challenge and push you in therapy?
• Listener: Or would you prefer someone who holds space and asks questions?

💥 Note: If you're new to therapy, sometimes the latter can feel safer, whereas if you're more experienced you often need the former. 

Modalities

There are different styles of therapy that inform the types of questions the therapist will ask or the way they'll focus their conversations with you. Some focus far more on reprogramming present thought patterns than past or childhood experiences, for example. Others focus on processing emotions and experiences somatically—through your body—to avoid getting stuck in your head or intellectualizing your feelings. 

Many therapists blend multiple modalities, so don't get too hung up on picking the right one. The following list will just give you a sense of the language used by therapists on their websites or Psychology Today profiles. (This is by no means an exhaustive list.) 

• Cognitive-behavioral: Not past focused, more reprogramming thought patterns. Great for some things (anxiety) less great for others (trauma).
• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR): This therapy  involves audio tones or light to help people access, process, and release feelings they may have suppressed. It helps people suffering with PTSD, like veterans, but it’s becoming more and more common for people from all walks of life to use this method with difficult memories.
• Relational therapy: Focuses on relationships in one’s life and sometimes will involve analyzing what comes up between therapist and patient in their own provider-client relationship. (For example, the therapist might ask the client, “How did it feel when I asked you that question?” And then they’d discuss it.)
• Art therapy: Often relies on visual exercises like drawing, sculpting etc to access and process emotions, memories, etc. 
• And more

Specialty

In addition to modalities, therapists will also have specialties — the mental health areas they have the most experience or interest in. This can be everything from mental health conditions to questions of identity. If you know what you’re looking to address in advance, specialties can help narrow down the search. 

(That said, therapy can be beneficial for everyone, regardless of whether you have a mental health diagnosis or a particular challenge in life you’re tackling.)

Again, not an exhaustive list:

• Anxiety 
• Depression
• Social anxiety
• Neurodivergence (autism spectrum, ADHD, etc.)
• Marriage & family counseling // Couples counseling // Children & adolescents 
• LGBTQ experiences
• Racial identity
• Therapists with background in alternative lifestyles like polyamory 
• Group therapy: Processing groups (like grief or alcoholism)
• Many more

It's also worth considering demographics—would you feel more comfortable seeing a therapist who is the same gender as you? What about race or ethnicity? Age? Sexuality? Religion? Therapists work with people from many different types of background, but your personal comfort levels should factor into your decision.

💥 Pro tip: There’s a difference between psychiatrists and therapists. Psychiatrists are medical doctors, so they dispense mental health prescriptions like anti-depressants. They don’t tend to offer traditional therapy, although there are some exceptions. Therapists can refer you to psychiatrists and vice versa.

Step 2: Generate a list of options

Once you’ve done some thinking about what kind of therapist you’d like to start seeing, you’re ready to generate a list of options. (We’ll talk about insurance in the next section.) 

The number one recommendation I give to people is to ask their friends, family and colleagues if they’ve seen a therapist before who they’d recommend. Obviously use your own judgment about who to ask—stick to people you feel comfortable with or those who’ve been open about their own therapy experiences. It’s ok to see the same therapist as an acquaintance or a colleague you don't work too closely with. But it's not a good idea to see the same therapist as your partner, parent, boss, best friend, or other close connection. It’s a conflict of interest. 

Instead, ask the therapist your trusted person sees for THEIR recommendations. Therapists are connected to each other—they have peer group processing sessions and a cohort of friends from graduate school. So they can usually refer you to someone whose modality or approach is similar to their own. 

💥 Pro tip 1: A friendly intro goes a long way towards getting on a busy therapist’s calendar as a new client. As your friend if you can name drop them when you call their therapist to check availability. 

💥 Pro tip 2: Therapist openings come up unexpectedly and often. If someone you trust recommended someone, but they didn’t have any availability, try them again in a few months! 

Not comfortable asking friends/fam?

• Do you have a doctor or wellness practitioner you like and trust? Consider asking them for a referral, they may have a good network.
• Start combing the website PsychologyToday.com. Where you can, cross-reference it with Yelp reviews. I found an amazing psychiatrist by doing exactly this. (After years of seeing bad psychiatrists.)
• Search your health insurance website for in-network mental health providers and go through the list. (If you do this, you need to be fastidious about vetting them upfront, which I cover in Section 4.)