On Consultations

I have my spiel that I always repeat when I sit down with someone for a free consultation. It goes something like this:

“This is a consultation. A consultation gives us a chance to talk a little about what has been going on, what you are looking for in therapy, any questions you might have for me, and what therapy with me might look like. Ideally, this gives us a chance to feel out if this might be a good fit.”

There have been quite a few times when I’ve been emailing back and forth with a potential client and we have covered much of what I cover in a consultation, but I still feel that there is something important to feel out that happens during a consultation and not through the written word. Well, it just so happens that Rollo May, in his book The Discovery of Being, touches precisely on that thing that can happen in a consultation and not through email. He writes:

“It is the experience of the instantaneous encounter with another person who comes alive to us on a very different level from what we know about him. “Instantaneous” refers not to the actual time involved but to the quality of the experience. We may know a great deal about a patient from his case record, let us say, and may have a fairly good idea of how other interviewers have described him. But when the patient himself steps in, we often have a sudden, sometimes powerful, experience of here is a a new person, an experience that normally carries with it an element of surprise, not in the sense of perplexity or bewilderment, but in its etymological sense of being “taken from above.” … The data we learned about the patient may have been accurate and well worth learning. But the point, rather, is that the grasping of the being of the other person occurs on a different level from our knowledge of specific things about him.”

Rollo May writes from the existential psychology perspective. While there are many perspectives therapists may have that focus on behavior, or thoughts, or feelings, or motivators, there is something key to understanding the power of psychotherapy that existential psychology brings into focus: the encounter with another person. That experience is what gives life to the work we do as therapists and is what brings me back, day and day.

When should I go see a therapist?

If your teeth are hurting, go see a dentist. If you can’t see very well, go see an eye doctor. Hopefully we know some of the reasons why we might visit medical professionals, but how much thought do we put into recognizing the signs that we need to visit a mental health professional? But before I lay out a simple answer to when you should go see a therapist, we need to think about some different perspectives on mental health care.

How did you feel about my very first sentence? I don’t know about you, but I don’t go to the dentist when my teeth are hurting. I try to go before my teeth start hurting to get a cleaning. In the medical community preventative care has shaped the idea of when you might think of visiting a doctor. In a similar way, how we think about mental health, the role of therapy, and what our lives ought to look like are going to shape when we visit a therapist. I hope you find this podcast informative and thought provoking as I take several important detours in order to answer the question: When should I go see a therapist?

What is an MFT?

My title is marriage and family therapist, but what does that mean? Rather than giving a simple dictionary answer, perhaps it would be more fitting to explain how I see myself and how I define what an MFT is. Listen along as I work through what differentiates MFT’s from other mental health professionals.