A quiz to determine what therapist is right for you

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How to Find the Right Therapist By Angela Haupt Editor, Health & Wellness Therapy is always going to be hard work—and that starts well ahead of your first session. First, you have to figure out if your potential therapist is available and affordable (tricky enough: it once took me over a year to get off a waiting list). Then you have to determine if he or she passes your vibe check. That's important because research consistently indicates that a good relationship is key to successful outcomes. To help make it easier to find the right therapist, we developed an interactive quiz that highlights a dozen factors to reflect on as you wade through your options. You can rank each one based on how important it is to you, and your responses will yield guidance on what questions to ask to make sure a potential therapist meets your criteria. You might be surprised about some of the experts' pointers. I found these three takeaways to be particularly useful: You can ask your therapist if he or she is currently in therapy. This is one way to gauge intellectual kinship, and it also signals investment in the system and a commitment to self-improvement. “Therapists who do really high-quality work tend to have done a lot of work on themselves," one psychologist told me. It’s helpful to inquire upfront about how you can expect to communicate. Via text? Email? And what kind of response time is typical? Otherwise, you're setting yourself up for frustration when you realize you have different expectations about availability. You get to shape your own therapy experience. Having compatible communication styles is essential. But if your therapist spends a lot of time nodding along, and you'd prefer more active feedback, it's completely reasonable to have a conversation about it. TAKE THE QUIZ TO FIND OUT WHAT TYPE OF THERAPIST IS RIGHT FOR YOU

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