How to Find the Right Counselor
Balancing your needs, values, and personality when seeking mental health help.
As a mental health professional, I know that it can be very difficult to reach out for help and sometimes even harder finding the right type of help from the right person. Some of the difficulties in finding help have to do with complications in understanding who does what in the broader world of mental health but other difficulties exist that deal more with finding the “right fit” in a counselor or therapist. In my time working as a counselor, I have found that balancing someone's needs, values, and personality in the counseling relationship leads to a much better therapeutic process.
I hope that this brief guide can help you think through what you are looking for or needing when seeking out a mental health professional.
Taking the first steps to seek out help can be challenging for many, difficult reasons but finding the right counselor shouldn’t be one of those reasons. Talking with a professional can help you overcome fears, process grief, overcome trauma, deal with depression, and see improvements in many other areas of life. Finding the right professional can be made increasingly more difficult due to confusion about what various letters mean behind someone’s name, how they market themselves, and in what theoretical models they utilize and/or have been trained.
Because you cannot select a counselor by swiping left or right on an app, I hope that some of the information below can help you navigate the waters of mental health and find the right person to offer the right kind of help.
Your Needs
If you are seeking out a counselor/therapist, I would encourage that you seek out a professional. The main reason for this is to help you know that you are meeting with someone who knows what they are talking about and is able to help you through a situation without causing more harm.
Professionals in mental health have to maintain licenses with a State board that serves as “gatekeepers” preventing unprofessional and unethical individuals to practice in their State. These State boards also ensure that the people marketing themselves as mental health professionals have completed the required education and practical experience to earn their professional status and maintain their professional status.
I have written on different types of mental health service providers elsewhere, but I will summarize things here for ease.
When seeking out counseling, you should be looking for someone with a degree and license in mental health. These most common of these would be LPC, LMFT, and LCSW (although these differ slightly by state). For each of these, there is also a Provisional period wherein someone is still under supervision because they have just begun their professional practice. These are PLPC, PLMFT, and LMSW. Lastly, someone who is a clinical psychologist — who has a PhD or PsyD in Clinical Psychology — is trained and equipped to do counseling/therapy.
Your Values
Your values are some of the most important things about you because they are the most important things to you. A professional counselor is trained and is required to work with anyone regardless of class, creed, or conviction but being able to connect with someone who may approach life from a shared worldview, social background, religious conviction may be beneficial.
When researchers look at what leads to successful counseling, they have identified the 4 common factors that lead to change. According to most estimates, 40% of progress occurs due to what you bring to the table in counseling. This means that you and what you value are the some of most significant predictors of positive change.
So, finding a counselor who shares those with you and is able to speak a common language with you about these values will help you bring out your inner strengths.
Good counseling brings out your own inner strengths, values, and skills while helping you build new ones.
While there are many values to keep in mind, two of the most prominent and significant are spirituality and sexuality.
If you are a practicing member of a particular religious group, finding a counselor who has experience and/or training working with or is a part of your faith group can be extremely helpful in counseling. From personal experience, my background and training as a “Christian counselor” has helped me reach deeper understandings of situations with clients who have shared the same religious background as myself. So, if you are a practicing member of any faith community — Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc., — consider finding a counselor who has stated experience in working with or within your community.
If you are a member of the LGBTQ+ community, you may consider seeking out someone who has specific experience and training in working with members of this community and some of the unique experiences faced by the LGBTQ+ community. Whether these experiences come from political, religious, or familial pressure or discrimination, finding someone who knows what these experiences are like can help establish a deeper understanding and connection.
Your Personality
Ask your counselor what their Hogwarts House is, reference The Office, speak your truth about The Bachelor. Be you and be comfortable. Long gone are the days of the stoic therapist sitting in a leatherback chair smoking a pipe and being cold and impersonal.
You should feel comfortable being yourself, even when discussing difficulties, processing your past, or doing any kind of work in counseling.
Another one of the 4 factors (mentioned above) that impacts success in counseling is the therapeutic relationship that forms between a counselor and you. This being the case, it is important for you to be known for who you are, rather than who you could be pretending to be. Finding common ground with your counselor can help counseling feel more like a natural interaction and not a clinical one.
As professionals, counselors are limited in what they are allowed to disclose to the people they work within counseling — but they are not robots. They are also humans with stories, interests, and hobbies. Many binge-watch “The Office”, go to heavy metal concerts and throw down in a mosh pit, read fiction widely, and have strong opinions about “The Bachelor.” It is up to you, dear reader, to guess which of those describe me…
Conclusion
Seeking out help is a sign of strength, not weakness. Speaking with a counselor can help you heal and can foster hope about the future.
Finding a counselor who you connect with can be difficult, but it is not impossible. While there is not a step-by-step guide for finding the right counselor, identifying your own needs, values, and personality can help make the process easier so that there is one less thing between you and who you want to be as a happy, hopeful, and healed individual.
