Keep Looking
Good therapy is about more than approach
They tell you to shop for your therapist. Find the right fit. As if you were trying on clothes in a department store. What no one mentions is that shopping requires a calibrated instrument — some internal sense of what good feels like. And if every prior relationship, therapeutic and otherwise, has been telling you that your readings are off, the instrument itself has been tampered with. You’re supposed to find good therapy without reliable access to what good feels like, because good was never modeled.
I’ve seen several therapists over the years. Most did nothing helpful, some created harm. And then there was Kate. Kate helped me find my way through the most challenging season of my life thus far. And, as an outcome of her extraordinary support, I need to find a new therapist.
When I retired, I lost my corporate health insurance, and had to move to an ACA HMO. My therapist’s office doesn’t accept my new insurance, and they charge New York rates nationally. At $390 a session, that math doesn’t work. So I started looking, which meant I had to figure out what I’d actually had.
Kate practices ACT and Rogerian approaches. She told me to keep those words in mind as I searched. I used them when I described what I needed. What I didn’t have words for yet was the thing underneath the method — the orientation. That would take a failed attempt to name.
I found Ruth on a list of neurodivergent therapists in my state. She worked in multiple modalities, including ACT. She implied she understood that CBT was often a mismatch for ND people. On paper, she was exactly what I was looking for.
The first session included a discussion of ABA. I have a position on ABA — informed, embodied, built from years of watching what it does to people in the communities I’m part of. Ruth responded by suggesting I might be engaging in black-and-white thinking.
I moved away from the topic.
It wasn’t avoidance. My nervous system had just received information: this is not a safe place to bring embodied knowledge. Pushing back would have meant defending my self-knowledge to someone who had just demonstrated the power to reframe that self-knowledge as a symptom.
What I noticed later was the irony. She flagged my position as black-and-white thinking. But her framework had no room for the possibility that my position came from somewhere real. The category “black-and-white thinking” closed the inquiry before it opened. She didn’t ask where my position came from. She corrected it.
I processed the first session for a week.
Fragments surfaced during conversations, during walks, in the middle of unrelated moments. The ABA discussion. Something in how she’d responded to something else I’d said. A low-grade growing sense that this wasn’t right.
I couldn’t have told you immediately after that first session what was wrong. The gestalt arrived before the specifics did. I know something before I can articulate it — that’s how my processing works. The knowing assembles itself slowly, across days, in pieces.
By the second session, I could feel a lack of coherence. That Friday, Ruth was looking for something she could work with, the opportunity for intervention. Her orientation was corrective. I don’t need fixed.
The confrontation happened in my body before it happened in words. Tightness. Pressure. A rising need to get out of something that was becoming more dysregulating the longer I stayed in it. My body knew before I’d assembled the language.
I said what needed to be said. I think I said it well. I ended the session.
And then I was anxious for days.
Doing the right thing isn’t cheap. My nervous system had mobilized. The anxiety didn’t care that I’d handled it correctly. And there was a familiar quality to that anxiety. The low-grade dread before a meeting. The adrenaline spike from having to say words I don’t want to say. It had been my baseline for years, so constant I didn’t have a name for it because it was just the water I swam in.
It had been absent for months.
One session with Ruth’s fix-seeking stance and it came back, fast. My nervous system was telling me exactly how load-bearing the right therapeutic relationship actually is.
Ruth is genuinely neurodivergent. I have no doubt of that. She also, somewhere in her training, absorbed a clinical orientation built around deficit and repair — and that orientation survived her self-identification. Neurodivergent identity doesn’t automatically displace the framework installed in training.
This is worth knowing before you go looking. Shared neurology doesn’t guarantee shared epistemology about what therapy is for. A neurodivergent therapist can still hold a fundamentally corrective orientation toward the person across from them.
Credentials and identity tell you something, but they don’t tell you everything. What you’re actually looking for is harder to screen for in advance.
I interviewed Meg on the Monday after the session with Ruth. I was still carrying the anxiety — vivid, present, recent. I told her I was anxious walking in.
The way she received that is the whole story.
She didn’t do anything with it. Didn’t explain it, didn’t offer a technique for managing it, didn’t reframe it. She received it as information about me in that moment. Meg let it be there.
I walked out knowing she and Kate would be friends.
That’s not a rigorous diagnostic criterion. But it’s real. There’s something in orientation, in values, in how a person understands what therapy is for — and when it’s present you can feel it. When it’s absent you can feel that too, though it may take a week in Oregon to fully name it.
Kate held space.
She didn’t create a container — that would imply she was keeping me in something. What she did was different. She kept the walls from closing in. She kept the space from collapsing around me.
For someone who processes in feeling-shaped wholes and needs to talk their way toward language, space isn’t just emotional safety — it’s functional infrastructure. The space is where the translation happens. It’s where the gestalt finds its first words. Without it, there’s nowhere for the knowing to go.
A clinician who is scanning for the fixable thing is generating their own signal, and that signal competes with the very thing you need quiet to locate. The space collapses under the weight of their agenda, even a well-intentioned one.
Kate wasn’t waiting for the fixable thing to emerge. She was present with whatever was actually there.
That’s not a method. It’s an orientation. And it’s what I needed: not to be fixed, but to have space to process, with a guide who could help me see around some of the corners.
If you have a therapist and something feels off — a low-grade sense that you’re managing the relationship while trying to do the work, that you’re calculating what’s safe to bring, that the space feels like it’s slowly shrinking — that’s information. You might be in a room where the walls are closing in and you’ve normalized it because you don’t have a comparison point.
If you’re mid-search and you’ve had a session that didn’t fit and you couldn’t fully explain why until a week later — you’re not being slow or avoidant. The delay is how the knowing finds its shape.
If you haven’t started looking yet because you don’t know what you’re looking for — you’re looking for the space where the walls don’t close in. Where your self-knowledge isn’t a symptom. Where the sharing isn’t an invitation to intervene. Where someone can sit with what’s actually there.
You’ll know it when you’re in it. And if you haven’t felt it yet, keep looking. It exists.
Note: Names have been changed to protect privacy.
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