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Getting Started With Therapy

Nov 03, 202410 min read

TL;DR: It’s only a few steps, it’s super doable!!

Disclaimer - I’m not an expert on mental health stuff I’m just documenting some things I’m learning here. For actual advice definitely talk to a professional. Also this doc is only based on my own experiences/thoughts so your mileage may vary, but therapy has been the highest ROI thing I’ve ever done so I highly recommend trying it out! Most people conceptualize the benefits of therapy as big breakthrough sessions where you cry and work your past out and that’s true, but there’s also other really important benefits:

  • Having time allocated once a week to reflect and take stock of your mental/emotional/general wellbeing is a complete game changer. Everyone knows consistent reflection is good (for mental/emotional stuff but also literally any goal you have in your life), but it’s really hard to do without a forcing function and therapy serves as an excellent one.
  • I have a big document called Questions For Therapy where I put stuff throughout the week that I think of but can’t deconstruct at that moment. I think most people have a feeling that they have thoughts/problems that can slip through the cracks (especially when life gets busy), and knowing you have therapy X days later lets you note down those thoughts without having to figure them out fully because you know you’ll get to them later.
    • The document also ends up serving as a really cool tracker of how your thoughts/problems/feelings have evolved over time!

Pre-Thought

  • I’ve found therapy to be most successful when you go into it with at least one goal/thing you want to work on. It doesn’t have to be super well thought out, but even something as general as “I feel like I’m constantly messing up at X and I haven’t been able to fix it, so I want to understand why I’m doing this and then make progress toward being/feeling better” works
  • This is mainly for two reasons:
    • To give you something that will motivate you to keep trying to find a good therapist even if it gets a little tough
    • To give you something to track your progress on once you get into therapy. Your mileage may vary, but I found that you can make some relatively quick progress on goals that you’ve been stuck on for a while once you get into therapy and that can be very encouraging!
  • Also therapy is expensive, so check out your insurance and hopefully that’ll cover some of the cost (we’ll talk about making sure a therapist is under your insurance in the next section)! I will say, my insurance doesn’t cover anything (till I hit a massive deductible) and therapy is still the highest ROI thing I’ve ever done, so if you think you can afford it I really do think it’s worth it even at a high price tag.
    • Tangent: Tech nerds (guilty as charged)/grindset type people always talk about the compounding returns of working hard early in your career which I think is true, but imo people really discount the compounding effects of understanding yourself earlier in life because that leads to you choosing career paths/jobs, friends, and romantic partners that all align better with who you are/want to be (and I’d argue the aggregate impact of making those choices better is more important than almost anything else). I will admit on average it probably leads to you being less “productive” because part of what you figure out will almost certainly be that you don’t want to work 16 hours a day, but (my hope at least) is that that “productivity” is exchanged for happiness/self-actualization which I think is a lovely trade. For me therapy seems to be the right path to get that self-understanding for now, but I believe this idea of compounding returns is true regardless of your mechanism for understanding yourself!

Sending Out Consultation Request Emails

  • Go to: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/, you can filter by your insurance (HUGE) and also by the issues you’re dealing with+their types of therapy
  • Then just find like 20 people that seem interesting and spam out the email below (that is literally the email I sent out for myself, but make sure to edit it to fit your situation/goals/etc as needed) and wait on responses!
    • Keep in mind that in these consultations you are (even if only superficially) opening up about your problems and that can be draining, so try not to overwhelm yourself with like 8 consultations in a week lol. You can always spread your consultations out by scheduling for a couple weeks in the future!
Hello!

My name is Suchir, and I'm a recently graduated student looking for therapy. In case it helps you tell if I have coverage/if you take my insurance, I have [YOUR INSURANCE PLAN HERE]. With regard to why I'm seeking therapy, I don't have any immediate mental illness or emergency situations [IF YOU HAVE AN EMERGENCY LOOK UP IMMEDIATE HELPLINES], but [YOUR SITUATION HERE]. If you're free and it's offered, I'd love to schedule a quick free consultation to get an understanding of your methods as well as to assess our compatibility. I'm free any weekday (or even weekend) after 1pm ET if that happens to work for you anytime soon!

Looking forward to hearing back from you!

Thank you for your time,
Suchir

Doing the Consultations

For me the main things I want to figure out in a consultation are: do they do in person, what are their specialties (both for issues they deal with and therapy methods), and how well we vibe

  • In person - Certainly not necessary and different people have different preferences, but I personally have found it useful to have a separate physical space to be doing therapy from (rather than zooming in from my bedroom lol) so if you’re open to it it’s definitely worth keeping an eye out for!
  • Specialties - They’ll always say client-focused/I work with the client to figure out what’s best, so you basically just have to push them a bit harder and be like: yes totally makes sense we’ll work together to figure out what works for me, but what in particular are your specialties?
  • How Well You Vibe - This is by far the most important part and generally means how comfortable you are with them. Therapy is all about being able to open up to this person and accept thoughts from them on the deepest/most vulnerable/most insecure parts of yourself, so don’t settle for mediocre on your vibe/comfort with them.
    • To test this, I usually just spend the last 5-10 minutes of the consultation being like yeah so this is my current issue/goal, how would you approach talking me through that/understanding what’s going on?
      • They might give vague details about things they’d do, if they do that that’s understandable and let them know you don’t need them to give you therapy on the spot, but you just want to get a feel for some concrete examples of questions they’d ask to get a feel for how they’d speak to you and then - if it’s interesting to you - their high-level approach of how they’d try to drill down on your issue.
    • This test pretty quickly revealed things to me like some therapists’ approaches feeling condescending or accusatory to me/not making sense to me/etc. You can tell pretty quickly if you don’t vibe, just trust your gut!

Choose Your Favorite Therapist

  • This is all up to you! The main thing I’d say again is 100% trust your gut. If it sounds like a person is smart and deals with the issues you care about (aka they’re “good on paper”) but for whatever reason you feel a little off about them, then trust your gut and look for someone who’s a better fit!
    • I eventually did like 12 consultations (got a ton of info about different things I liked and didn’t like) which tired me out, so I was like alright I’m taking the next person I like a lot even if they’re not absolutely perfect. Then I took the next person I clicked with and that’s how I met my therapist who I really love!
    • So it’s not about finding the perfect person, it’s just about getting enough consultations in that you see the range of different types of therapists (which helps set a standard in your mind+see what you like and don’t like) and how you vibe with them so that you can make the most informed decision about who you want to go with.
    • Also don’t feel bad about being open that you’re consulting with other therapists, they’ll understand (and if they don’t you probably don’t want them as your therapist lol), and it’s always completely feasible to be like “hey I’m gonna explore other options just to make sure, but I do like you and I may decide to go with you I just need a few weeks/etc.”

Doing Therapy

  • Your therapist will have much better thoughts on how to do things than I do. The only thing I personally would recommend is, similar to how you came up with a goal in the Pre-Thought, try and have a goal for what you want to talk about/accomplish in any given session (the first session will just be you talking through your life story most likely, so don’t worry about it for the first session)
    • I personally also try to spend like 30 minutes before each session thinking through my goals/thoughts/situations and journaling about all of my superficial/first-order thoughts, that way my sessions are only the deeper hard hitting stuff vs me fumbling around collecting my thoughts for half the session. But that can be pretty hard work so it’s okay if you don’t want to do that
  • I also personally really like hand-writing notes on sessions (and then I save pictures of the pages too) because otherwise I’d forget everything over time, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to and it’s not very common from what I understand!
  • Be honest and open, especially for the hard stuff! I had some things I had never talked with anybody about before therapy, but I talked about all of it in my first session and it was wild how big of a difference it made to even just say the stuff once. The more honest you are the better they’ll be able to help you and the more you’ll feel like the thoughts they’re giving you are fully informed and thus useful.
  • I had a bit of trouble with this, but keep in mind that this is a business transaction so you can walk away if it’s not working. Your therapist will be someone you confide in about very vulnerable things, but if you don’t feel like therapy is working you can be open about that and if things don’t change in a session or two you can always look for another therapist! They won’t take it personally because this is just their job, they’re not relying on you for friendship and they’ll be happy you’re finding someone else who will be able to help you.

Congrats on reading through this, and good luck!! <3

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