Somewhere between deciding you want to try therapy and finally walking into a room with a therapist, most people wonder: how do I know if this therapist is right for me?
It’s a good question. You are being asked to trust someone with the interior of your life — the parts you haven’t said out loud, the places you’ve been stuck, the versions of yourself you haven’t shown anyone. That requires a particular kind of relationship.
Here is what I’ve come to believe about finding a good fit.
The most important thing isn’t training or specialty. It’s trust.
Credentials matter. Specialization matters. You want a therapist who knows what they’re doing and who works with what you’re carrying. But when people tell me what made their therapy work, it has little if anything to do with the modality. It is about the relationship. They felt safe. They felt accepted. They could say the thing that otherwise felt unsayable, and the therapist didn’t flinch.
That kind of safety isn’t a bonus feature of therapy. It is the actual mechanism by which therapy does its work. When you feel genuinely accepted — not managed, not assessed, but accepted — something opens up. A space for honest self-examination becomes available that didn’t exist before. You can look at yourself more clearly, because you’re not also managing how you’re being perceived. You can identify what you want to change, because you’re no longer spending energy protecting yourself from judgment.
So the first thing to look for is this: can you imagine trusting this person? Not completely, not right away. But enough to begin?
On curiosity — yours, and theirs
One of the things I value most in the clients I work with is curiosity. Not as a personality trait, but as an orientation — a willingness to be open to learning something new about yourself, to sit with a question rather than close it down, to hold what you think you know about yourself loosely enough that something might shift.
When curiosity goes dormant, it tends to look like certainty. Already knowing what someone is going to say before they say it. Closing the loop before there’s been time to really look. Being right in a way that forecloses discovery. That’s not a character flaw. It’s usually protection — a way of keeping the field manageable when the world feels like too much. But it does make therapy harder, because therapy at its core is an invitation to be surprised by yourself.
During the process of therapy, I’ve watched the curiosity come back. Slowly at first, like a question you hadn’t thought to ask, or a moment of genuinely not knowing, and being okay with that. Maybe a small opening in a place that had felt sealed. When I see it happening, it’s one of the clearest signs that “the work” is working.
A good therapist is curious too. They should be interested in you specifically — not just your diagnosis, your history, your presenting issues, but the particular way your mind works, the way you talk about the people you love, what lights you up and what closes you down. Their curiosity should inspire your own curiosity.
What happens in the room
People sometimes imagine therapy as a kind of prolonged advice session, or an emotional excavation conducted by someone with a clipboard. It is neither of those things, at least not how I practice it.
You will do most of the talking. I will listen in a way that is active and present — asking questions, reflecting back what I hear, noticing patterns, occasionally offering something from the research or from my clinical experience that might be useful to you. I bring structure to our sessions so that after a few weeks, you’ll have a sense of what to expect. But that structure is always in service of what you bring in. If you walk in needing to talk about something that wasn’t on the agenda, we talk about that, and we’ll locate it within the broader therapeutic goals that you’re working toward.
I don’t tell clients what to do. What I try to do instead is be an accurate and authentic mirror — to help you see yourself more clearly than you can from inside your own perspective. Sometimes that means naming a pattern I’ve noticed. Sometimes it means sitting with you in something that doesn’t yet have words. Sometimes it means offering a framework that helps make sense of something that has felt confusing.
What happens when something goes wrong between us
This one might surprise people: ruptures happen in therapeutic relationships. A moment of misattunement where maybe something I say lands wrong, or you finish a session feeling worse rather than better. This is not evidence that therapy isn’t working, or that I’m not the right therapist for you. In my view, it’s an opportunity to strengthen our relationship through the process of open communication and repair.
If something goes wrong between us, I will name it: “here’s what I noticed — did you notice that, too?” I’ll check in about how you’re feeling. If I caused hurt, I will take responsibility for it — not in a managed, clinical way, but genuinely and from my heart. I will apologize. I will ask what else we need in order to repair.
I do this partly because the relationship between us is the primary healing mechanism in therapy, so I want to actively tend to it. I do it also because the relationship between us can become a model for relationships outside the room. Many people who come to therapy have never experienced what it looks like when someone takes responsibility for harm without defensiveness, or seen a rupture followed by repair. The experience of that happening between us — of the relationship being strong enough to hold a fracture and come back together — is itself part of the healing.
Who I work well with
I do my best work with people who are ready to show up and do the work — not people who have everything figured out, but people who are honest and willing to engage. I love working with people who want to understand the systems shaping them: the family they came from, the patterns they inherited, the ways their history shows up in the present. I find deep satisfaction in helping people get clear on what is theirs to carry and what isn’t, learning to recognize when anxiety is about something real versus something borrowed, and learning to set and hold boundaries not as walls but as honest expressions of what they need.
I am particularly drawn to clients who appreciate curiosity as a shared value. Not because you have to be curious right now — sometimes the curiosity has gone quiet and that’s exactly why you’re here. But because there’s something that feels alive in me when a client starts to wonder, and I’d love wondering alongside you.
How to decide
Most therapists offer a free consultation, and you should use it. Notice how you feel during and after the conversation. Do you feel heard? Do you feel comfortable enough to say something true? Can you imagine coming back?
You don’t need to be certain. You need enough of a sense of trust — even a small one — to believe it could deepen with time.