In which I wax philosophical

ITV3 is rerunning Brideshead Revisited at the moment and I've been watching it with a great deal of pleasure. I stayed away from watching or reading it while I was writing my novel. Working on a novel about Oxford, I thought it was important to steer clear. But I know that some elements of the book are a response to Brideshead. Or perhaps not a response to the book as much as a response to the way that Oxford presents itself post-Brideshead, the way that Oxford students think of themselves post-Brideshead, the experience students hope to have at Oxford having read or seen or heard of Brideshead Revisited.

[I had a conversation about a year ago with someone who I
knew distantly while I was at Oxford. The kind of person who, when I said I was
writing a novel about Oxford immediately said “oh, it’s about me then,” even
though I think I literally never had a conversation longer than three sentences
with this person the whole time I was there. Anyway, when I made my suggestion
that Oxford itself is now a response to Brideshead Revisited and that the
experiences students have there now are partly based on expectations created by
the novel, this person immediately said “oh no, you’re totally wrong, because I
never read it.” Which is, charmingly, exactly what I had a character in the
book say in an early draft of my book – later deleted for being far too
postmodern. I think that people who say this are even more vulnerable, in a way, because they have the yearning without knowing that's what they're yearning for. I think that Brideshead taps
into an English nostalgia for a between-the-wars perfection that probably never
existed and hooks it onto our oldest university. I think that, whether you’ve
read the book or seen the series or not, your idea of what it means to ‘be an
Oxford student’ has been shaped by it because those ideas are ‘wild’ in our
culture now, no longer needing to be transmitted by print or film. Oxford is not
a place which exists comfortably in the present anymore; it is full of people
pretending consciously or unconsciously to have stepped back in time.]

 So. Watching Brideshead collided in my mind with having
spent a few hours at The School of Life recently, and I started thinking for
the first time in probably a decade about my experience in studying Philosophy
at Oxford, what I had expected and why I was disappointed.

 At all my ‘safety schools’ I didn’t apply to read straight
Philosophy, I applied to read Philosophy and English. Which actually still
pretty accurately sums up the locus of my interests: I’m interested in writing
and words and I’m interested in ideas and that philosophical cliché, the
Meaning of Life. The School of Life feels like a perfect place for me because
there are people there grappling with the same issues that I thought I’d study
at Oxford: how does one make meaningful relationships? what is the right way to
think about death? how far ought one to go for a friend? is suffering improving
or just pointless?

 Maybe studying philosophy at Oxford now, one gets to deal
with some of these questions. Or maybe I would have got to deal with them if I
hadn’t become disillusioned quite early on and started ‘phoning it in’. But in
my memory, there was never a point at which studying philosophy touched on the
questions I’d imagined would be at its heart: the questions about how to live.

 Instead, we read a lot of ancient philosophers and tried to
find flaws in their reasoning. I am still grateful to have a bank of useful
philosophical ideas in my mind, grateful to have read Descartes and Spinoza,
Leibniz and Aristotle and Hume. They’re good writers with interesting ideas.
But I remember wondering at Oxford, with increasing desperation, when we were going
to start discussing our * own * ideas,
our own lives. When we were going to start talking about something real. Which,
of course, never really happened.

 In my third year, I finally had a tutor who I felt I could
raise this issue with. She (the only woman who tutored me during my whole time
at Oxford) told me that the problem with philosophy was that it had had its
wings clipped. It used to be a huge discipline of reasoning, in which
philosophers would start by using their reason to work out truths about our
physical universe (are we all made up of small particles which cannot be
divided? How do mind and body interact? Does God exist?) and, using that as a
base, would reason all the way up to “What is the good life? How is it best to
live?”

 But slowly that territory had been diminished. Physics now
took all the questions about the physical universe. I remember being incredibly
frustrated during a tutorial on Leibniz, that neither I nor my tutor knew *
what modern Physics actually said * about whether his ‘monads’ – tiny
indivisible particles – really exist. All we were doing was examining his
reasoning, without knowing whether reason had in fact led him to the right
answer. And religion – or despair – had taken away the questions about how to
live a good life. It was no longer considered something about which one could
reason one’s way to a conclusion.

 So Philosophy was left with the stuff in the middle.
Theoretical questions that almost never touch the ‘real world’. Not ‘how should
we use language?’ but ‘what is language?’ Not ‘what is the right way to live?’
but ‘what is the meaning of the concept ‘right way to live’?’ Not ‘is there a
God?’ but ‘is there a coherent way to understand the idea of God?’ And while
it’s certainly useful to be able to parse concepts like this with clarity… I
eventually found this approach frustrating and dull.

 It’s not the way those philosophers intended to be read, and
it’s not the way to grow to love them. It’d be like reading Jane Austen purely
in order to learn about punctuation and being set essay after essay critiquing
her use of semicolons. Or like reading music scores and debating their merits
without ever actually listening to or playing the music. Like reading recipes
without tasting the food. Like reading sex manuals without… well, you get the
drift.

 So, The School of Life – it feels like home to me, because
people are finally using the philosophers I read as a teenager in the way they
themselves intended to be used. Not as objects for reason or examination of arguments
but as guides to living. Not perfect guides; there’s no such thing as a perfect
guide anyway. But writers who practise an art as much as a science and who must
be responded to with the emotions as much as with reason.

 I remember feeling almost overwhelmingly excited when I
first read Alain De Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy because I suddenly saw
what I had missed at Oxford; someone who treated these philosophers seriously
and wanted to think through their ideas and then * use them *.

 Perhaps I started the wrong way round. Perhaps when I was a
teenager I was too fundamentalist about my Orthodox Judaism to have been
willing to entertain ideas about the right way to live from Greek philosophers
anyway. Perhaps I needed years of therapy – or just years of living – to begin
to understand what any of them really meant. But I find myself now, finally,
free to read philosophy again and simply to love it, to appreciate it on the
level of the writing and ideas.

 This is how Marcus Aurelius’ second book of meditations
starts: “Begin each day by telling yourself: today I shall be meeting with
interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will and selfishness.”
Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t it inspiring, and funny and somehow magnificently
calming? I honestly do not care what reasoning led him to say it and whether or
not it was flawed. It is not about pure reason, it is about living.

Wool, do you hear me? Wool.

Now, see, I *have* been to some new places lately. But I haven't written about them, so maybe they don't count. And I've given a couple of talks, one at the Interesting conference and one at a colloquium on 'The Glory of Failure' which I really have to write up and honestly intend to do here but... haven't done it yet. And it's Rosh Hashanah tomorrow, so can't promise to write anything then either, oh the disgrace of it.

But today I did go somewhere new. It was a wool shop. Knitting and crochet - skills my grandmother taught me - have become rather super-trendy of late. And thus they have super-trendy shops to go with them, shops like iKnit and Loop (neither of which I've been to, but I'm sure I'll love them when I do go). They seem unlike the wool shops of my youth. They are in trendy parts of London. They appear to have sofas and chairs. Apparently you can drink wine or coffee there and 'hang out' as these young folks say. It's all very chic and I'm looking forward to exploring them sometime.

But these are not wool shops as I remember them. My mother used to take me to the Colindale Wool Shop, on the Edgware Road, next to the bag shop that smelled richly, almost overpoweringly of leather. I loved that wool shop. I think it might have been the first shop I remember, certainly the first one I asked to go back to. It was small, dark, staffed by an extremely kind and knowledgeable lady who occasionally, if I was very good, gave me one of the cartoon-character buttons from her button tubes. (Possibly my mother paid for the buttons, it just occurs to me. But at the time I thought they were a gift, and maybe they really were.)

Those wool shops of old were not trendy. There was no coffee. And today I was delighted to discover that although the Colindale Wool Shop is now sadly gone, replaced by the Colindale Cash Converters, such shops are not entirely replaced by the chi-chi. For here is the Borehamwood Wool Shop:

I love this shop. I love the window display that clearly *hasn't* been designed to appeal to 30-something yummy mummies but instead to grandmas. I love the eclecticism of the contents inside, discount wools and feathers and sequins, stands of zips, a corner of rubber stamps and, best of all, hundreds of button tubes. I would have adored this shop when I was a little girl, and I wouldn't have had to worry about knocking over someone's coffee. The shopkeeper was incredibly knowledgeable, giving me loads of help converting an American pattern to UK wool and needles.

Best of all, the shop is called a *wool shop*. Americans, you see, call the chunky thread-like stuff you use to knit into fabric 'yarn'. Stitch and Bitch, in fact, is quite insistent that it is *entirely wrong* to call it 'wool', because wool is the stuff that comes from sheep whereas yarn is the generic term for all such thread. To which I say: phooey. In the UK, we call it all wool. It is both the description of a particular kind and the generic term. As in "I'll do the hoovering with my hoover that is made by Hoover." If you want to specify that the particular wool you're using comes from sheep, you say "pure wool".

Anyway, having got that off my chest, here is a picture of the cushion cover I finished off today. With toggles (they were Esther's idea) from the button tubes. I love those button tubes so much.

Tough Jews

So I'm just sitting around on a Sunday watching 'Lucky Number Slevin', a movie so complex that, by the time I was 40 minutes in it was very clear to me that I'd have to read the wikipedia entry if I hoped to understand it without multiple viewings. It's a cute film though, and wins many bonus points with me for having Josh Hartnett spend 20 minutes wearing only a towel (see above). But I'd really forgotten why I'd mentally bookmarked it to watch until we arrived at 'The Rabbi', a gangster played by Ben Kingsley who has a team of hardcore Chassidic Jew assassins working for him. I love this stuff; not so much purely tough Jews as tough, comic, highly-identifying Jews. One day I want to write something like this, but in the meantime it reminded me of a piece I wrote for Jeneration for last year's Jewish Book Week when they asked me for something on 'my favourite fictional Jew'. I think they printed it on handouts but never put it online, perhaps because of the high levels of swearing, so here it is for your enjoyment.

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To describe my favourite fictional Jew, there's going to have to be
some swearing. I make no apology for that. It's the whole point,
really. When do you ever hear people swearing about their Judaism? When
do you ever hear them ranting, and raving and shouting and screaming
about how much they love being Jewish? Nowhere. Except for one
character. I'm talking about Walter Sobchak, the ex-military bowling
fanatic  played by John Goodman in The Big Lebowski.

Walter converted to marry his ex-wife but he's still passionate
about his Judaism. This is what he says when his bowling team has been
slated to play on Saturday:

Walter: I told those fucks down at the league office a thousand times that I don't roll on Shabbos!

Donny (a schmuck): What's Shabbos?
Walter:
Saturday, Donny, is Shabbos, the Jewish day of rest. That means I don't
work, I don't get in a car, I don't fucking ride in a car, I don't pick
up the phone, I don't turn on the oven and I sure as shit [he roars] DON'T FUCKING ROLL! SHOMER SHABBOS!

The first time I saw this scene I almost leapt out of my seat in
excitement. I grew up Shomer Shabbos but no one I'd ever met had talked
about it so openly. We debated when to tell a prospective employer
about Shabbos; not too early in case they turn you down, not too late,
lest you should look secretive. We learned to slip out of work quietly
on a Friday afternoon. We learned to apologise, and speak softly, and
if someone asked us to a party on a Saturday to murmur "sorry, Shomer
Shabbos." It had never occurred to me that one could angrily demand
respect for one's Judaism. But now I know. We need more people like
Walter Sobchak, ranting and raving and not being afraid to cause a
scene. More people, please, who are Shomer fucking Shabbos.

Far from Willoughby

Went out for drinks last night with some ex-colleagues from my time in the City. It gave me a curious, shuddery feeling to be back among the dark suits and stripey shirts, to be on the train again with the sad-faced people still grimly working on their Blackberries at 10 o'clock at night.

Conversation with the ex-colleagues was interesting. Some are still in similar jobs, and a little rueful about it. One said "it's taking the King's shilling, of course, but you have to pay the bills somehow." Another quizzed me intensely about whether it was really possible to make a living doing something creative (to which the answer is, of course, "yes, provided you accept that if you live in London it'll be in a flat not a house, and in a non-descript area rather than a trendy or pretty one"). Some have now left the City - one described how much happier she is now she lives in Brighton, with a 10-minute walk to work and lunches on the beach. Another said that she'd had several unsuccessful rounds of IVF while working at a stressful City job, before changing to a more relaxed one and happily falling pregnant.

I wrote an article this time last year about the fall of Lehman's in which I encouraged people who'd lost their jobs to see this as an opportunity to pursue their dreams. And, Guardian comments being what they are, got a lot of hostility from people who thought that, having worked in the City I was clearly an overprivileged hooray henry, and that the mere fact of writing a novel meant that I was well up my own arse and not in touch with reality. (And, apparently, it's a terrible thing to be in your 20s or 30s and I should really have written my article for *real people* who are all in their 40s and 50s with several children.)

Now of course no one (for eg, not even Ben Bernanke) at that time knew how serious the fall of Lehman's was going to prove, and I suppose I regret having mildly made light of the economic situation. But I don't regret saying that many people in the City are unhappy. I think it's true. And I don't think that happiness is some kind of luxury that 'real people' don't have time to worry about.

It's true that there are many people on the breadline who'd be grateful for a job paying a tiny fraction of what City workers earn. But the human psyche is complex, and the mere fact that there are people worse off than us doesn't automatically make us happy (cf everyone you've ever met). And the fact that there are worse off people in the world doesn't mean that we *ought* not to try to be happy. In a sense, it's more reprehensible to *have* all the skills and education and advantages of birth that mean that you could create a life that pleased you and instead to keep on miserably grinding away at the City's money mine.

There *are* people who enjoy it, I know. There are also people who don't love it, but don't hate it either; I know quite a few men who work at City jobs with long hours to provide a beautiful home for their wife and children in the suburbs and they seem to feel the trade-off is worth it. But, my God, I met so many people who hated it but couldn't think of another way to live. People who didn't have a family, or whose family might perhaps have been just as happy in a smaller home or a different city. There were a lot of tears in that workplace, a lot of stress and stress-related illnesses. A while after I left there was even a suicide. And even if your distress didn't reach that pitch, it was impossible to escape the atmosphere of meanness, posturing, back-stabbing and hostility.

[I happened on a Twilight Zone episode on YouTube yesterday which seemed to me to sum up a lot of the aggression, the resentment, the terror and eventual despair that go with doing a job day-in, day-out that goes against your deepest wishes. A Stop At Willoughby is worth a watch; plus it is very clearly a point of inspiration for Life on Mars.]

In about an hour, it'll be eight years to the day since I stood in my office in Manhattan watching someone else's office buildings burn and then crash to the ground. I thought that day about the people who like me had arrived in the office early, at least some of them to jobs they didn't even like. It seemed to me then, perhaps ridiculously, more pointlessly horrific to die doing something you didn't care about than something you at least felt had value and meaning.

In real life, things that happen don't have neat endings or a moral to them. But, because of the way our minds work, we need to create a story out of the chaos. So that was the moral I drew from 9/11. Life is very short. It will bring with it enough unhappiness of its own without adding to it by forcing yourself to do work that you dislike. No one will come and present you with your happiness, but it is not being over-privileged or weak-willed or wussy to go and seek it for yourself. In fact, it is necessary.

How to find a therapist

This evening I’ll
be doing an event at The School of Life with Brett Kahr on the subject “How to
make sense of psychotherapy”. Which is a great topic, and apparently the talk
is already sold out with a very long waiting list – I don’t attribute this to
my brilliance but to people’s hunger to find out about therapy (and of course
to Brett’s brilliance). So this seemed like a good time to put up this post
which I’ve been working on for a while. It’s long, and I thought of posting it
in multiple parts over several days, but really that’s just annoying for anyone
who wants the information. So here it all is.

This post was
inspired partly by chats with some friends, and partly by the fact that I think
the advice on the BACP website and on the site of the UK Council for
Psychotherapy is just… not very helpful to anyone who isn’t already an expert
on therapy. (I have a theory that the reason these organisations put up lists
like this and think they’re sufficient is that they’re very useful to the
people who work in these organisations - because they know half the therapists
on the lists personally, and understand the subtle differences in each description.)
I remember when I arrived back in London after living in New York and wanted to
look for a therapist, I found these directories totally useless. This post,
basically, is all the advice I wish someone had given me then.

--------------------

I make no secret of
the fact that I’ve had, and been significantly helped by, psychotherapy. At
least, I think I make no secret of it. If there are any members of my family
reading this who don’t know: hi, I’ve had therapy.

But really, I’m
pretty open about it in conversation with friends. Which is probably why, at a
rough estimate, about a dozen of my friends have asked me for my advice about
finding a therapist in the past three or four years. I can understand why: the
world of therapy is dauntingly incomprehensible if you’ve never done it before.
Plus, in the UK at least, there’s a huge stigma in admitting you’ve had/you want
help of this kind. It’s a shame, because psychotherapy can actually help,
whereas some of the alternatives that somehow have less stigma in Britain –
like binge-drinking to ‘forget your woes’ – do much more damage.

A few years ago I
saw a woman on a TV money makeover show who was spending literally thousands of
pounds a month on ‘psychic hotlines’ because they gave her space to discuss her
feelings about the breakup of her 10-year relationship. The host, I think it
was Alvin Hall, said “instead of spending all this money on psychic hotlines,
go and get yourself a good therapist. It’ll be so much cheaper.”

When he came
back for his three-month follow-up visit, she’d done really well with all his
other pieces of advice but was still spending £300 a month on ‘psychics’.
He
said “what did I tell you to do about this?”
She looked at him and said “yeah,
I just need to grit my teeth and give them up.”
“And get therapy,” he said.
“Just
grit my teeth and go cold turkey on the hotlines,” she said.
She literally
could not hear him telling her to get therapy because, I think, in the UK
people hear “you need therapy” as “you are a damaged, broken, hopeless
individual who can never achieve normality and happiness”. The stigma is so
strong that it’s really hard for many people to seek the help they need.

Anyway, having had
a few of these conversations, it occurred to me that perhaps I could write a
post here with all the advice I’d give to a friend who asked me how to go about
finding a therapist. Just in case there’s anyone out there who wants to find a
therapist but is too embarrassed to take the first step of asking how to do it.

A couple of
disclaimers: 

1. I am not a doctor, a therapist, or trained at anything much
except writing down my opinions and making up fictional stories in my head about
imaginary people. All this advice is based purely on my experience and that of
people I know. It’s partial and possibly biased. Although it’s the best advice
I’m able to give, you’re going to have to make your own minds up about what’s
right for you; that’s your decision not mine. 

2. This advice is very London-centric.
Although the basic principles probably apply pretty much everywhere I’m only
going to recommend named organisations that either I have used or which people
directly known to me have used. I’ve only ever sought therapy in London and in Manhattan,
and in Manhattan everyone I knew was in therapy and so all had useful
recommendations to make. This is advice for people who live somewhere – like
London – where there’s still a therapy stigma, and people do not routinely swap
stories about their therapists over brunch at Sarabeths.

 Having said all that… here are Some Good
Ways to Find a Therapist

1) If you have friends
who are in therapy, or who are therapists, ask their opinions and advice. Your
friends may recommend their own therapist, another therapist they saw who they
didn’t click with but think might work for you, or they might ask their
therapist for a recommendation. Friends who are therapists will have an even
wider network to recommend from. This is a lovely simple way, and probably won’t
work if you live in the UK. However, I include it first because I think it’d be
better if we were able to do it like they do it in Manhattan.

A brief detour into my own story: when I
lived in Manhattan I came to a crisis point in my life. I didn’t like my job, I
didn’t like the life I was living in my free time, I was dissatisfied with my religion,
I was in love with a man who wasn’t able to love me back and terrorists had
recently flown a couple of planes into two big nearby buildings. As was my
wont, I went and complained and cried at my New York friends who all listened
very sympathetically and, at the end of each conversation said “have you
thought of seeing someone?” By which they meant, a therapist. And because all
of them had seen not one but several therapists they were able to flick through
their mental Rolodexes until they came up with someone they thought might work
for me, and one of these recommendations was, in fact, perfect. This is lovely
but unless you have a lot of therapy-literate friends, it won’t work for you.
So we go on to…

2)  This is my big piece of advice, the
thought that if you came to me and asked me about this in private I would
present to you like precious treasure:

go to a referral service.

Such places
exist. They are run by professional organisations. You get to sit down for a couple
of hours with a very experienced therapist, tell them all the things that are
troubling you, and then they have a think and send you to someone who, in their
opinion, will suit you. This is how I found my therapist in the UK. This is how
many people I know have found therapists who work for them.

I know of three
referral services which I can personally recommend on the basis that they made
referrals with which I or people I know have been happy. They are all based in
London but I believe they do referrals nationwide; at the very least, they
should be able to put you in touch with an organisation in your area that makes
referrals.

The Women's Therapy Centre

Founded by Susie Orbach, although I believe she's now no longer associated with it (not that I know why she left, but... therapeutic groups and people seem to be constantly having spats with one another which are not comprehensible to the outside world. Therapists do not, in case you’re wondering, seem to be
perfectly enlightened beings of peace and harmony themselves; like any other kind
of doctor, their ability to help you heal isn’t necessarily related to their
own health). The WTC do really good work, but only see women. If you’re a woman
I recommend them very highly – go there without delay.

The Association for
Group and Individual Psychotherapy (AGIP)

Honestly, sometimes I feel quite
cross with therapists. AGIP is a good organization, which has found excellent
therapists for people I care about. But when you go to their website and click
on the ‘find a therapist’ link it takes you to one of those useless lists of therapists
rather than to their extremely useful *referral service*.
But apart from their illogically arranged website, they are good. They also
have a low-fee service for students and people on benefits.

Centre for
Counselling and Psychotherapy Education

Why do therapists need so many
different professional bodies? What is the difference between them? I don’t
know, but if any therapist reading this could enlighten me that’d be great. The
CCPE has a rather more sensibly organised website than AGIP, and their
referrals service has worked for several people I know. I’ve had less personal
contact with them than with the WTC and AGIP, which is why I put them third, but
a doctor friend mentioned them to me and I know people who’ve found very good
therapists through their referrals.

3)  This is less of a method than a piece of
advice. When you meet a therapist, do not worry about their “analytical
framework” or their model or their school of thought. They may say things to
you like “I’m a neo-Freudian” or “I’m a Lacanian”, or “I work in a
psychodynamic structure”. Ask them to explain what this means in practice to
the work you’ll be doing together. The differences between these various schools
are often, to the untrained patient, pretty much invisible. The key question to
ask yourself when you meet a therapist is: do you feel comfortable with them?
Do they seem like they understand what you’re talking about? When they speak,
does what they say make sense? [If it makes sense and stings a bit but only in
the good way that makes you feel like you’re understanding something new about
yourself, you are probably in good hands.] Do you feel like you can open up to this
person? Do they seem intelligent? Do they seem to ‘get’ you? Trust yourself (I
shall be returning to this refrain). Trust your own ability to pick someone who
you can work with. Do not worry about whether or not they have ‘neo-Kleinian
leanings’.

Ways of finding a therapist which might
seem sensible but about which I have my doubts:

1) Getting a
referral from your GP. I realise this is controversial and I’d be the first to
admit that it’s just my highly inexpert opinion. However, my friends who have had
NHS therapy have had decidedly mixed results. Some people have found it just
fine, some really helpful, but some have found it useless. The thing is… the
NHS don’t give you a choice in therapist (as far as I can tell) and don’t do a
detailed referral session like a private referral service does. I think there’s
a bit of a lottery about whether you’ll end up seeing someone highly
experienced or someone who’s been on a three-week counselling course. And I
think there’s something quite powerful about the experience of private therapy
in which you choose the person yourself, you know that you’re paying them, you
say how long you want to go on for.

Having said that,
therapy is extremely expensive. If you’re unemployed or young or on a low wage,
a private referral service will probably be able to find you a therapist who
works on a sliding fee scale (down to £5 a session in the case of the Women’s
Therapy Centre, I believe) but it still won’t be free. If you are really in
dire financial straits, going to the GP for NHS therapy isn’t a bad idea, but
do try to find out what the qualifications are of the person you’re seeing, and
if you think the person doesn’t work for you, do go back to your GP to discuss
it rather than feeling that you have to soldier on with someone who's not appropriate for you.

If you’re able to,
though, I think you’re likely to get better continuity of care, greater choice
in therapist, and probably someone more experienced and better qualified if you
don’t go through the NHS and instead bite the bullet and pay for private
treatment. I love the NHS, they are wonderful for acute conditions, but I think
they can fall down on treating long-term or chronic problems, and
psychotherapy can be a long-term business.

2)  Going to, eg, the BACP website and
finding someone in your area.

I know they offer
this service on their site, and it might seem like a good way to go about it
but just… don’t. I’ve tried finding a therapist this way. I ended up meeting
about half a dozen women in north west London who all seemed very similar, I
got exhausted and demoralised telling them all the same story of my life, and
really didn’t have any way to decide between them. While it’s a good idea to see
more than one person before you make your final selection, you should really be
‘interviewing’ people who’ve been recommended to you for some reason; either
someone you know has seen them and thinks they’re good, or your friend’s
therapist thinks they might work for you, or your friend who is a therapist
thinks their approach would be right for you, or a referral service has
recommended them. If you pick someone purely based on geography, the field is
likely to be too large to make a useful decision.

Having said this,
if you live in a remote area of Scotland, this may be the only way you have to
find a registered psychotherapist within 50 miles of you. If so, have at it.

 A few bad signs

Here are some signs
that this therapist is not right for you. Some of them have happened to me, and
some to friends. This list isn’t exhaustive (see above re: how I’m not an
expert) but in my opinion if you find yourself in one of these situations, you
should probably be looking for someone else.

1) I put this first
because it’s the most important, but I should say that it is *very rare*. The
following things have never happened to me or anyone I know; they’re in no way
common. You need not fear that you’ll have to search long and hard to find an
ethical therapist, and especially if you use the referral methods I suggested you
should have no problem whatsoever. However, unethical behaviour does occasionally
happen and I think it’s quite empowering to know where the line is, and to
understand that some things are *not OK* and that you should *walk away*.

So, the top reasons
to look for a new therapist include: if your therapist becomes in any way
violent, aggressive, demanding or hostile. If they try to invade your private
life. If they call you at home except to rearrange an appointment. If they make
sexual advances to you. If you feel they’re overly touchy-feely and you tell
them to back off and they don’t. If they don’t think it’s a problem that they’re
also treating your mother and your husband. If they have more than one
relationship to you – that is if, in addition to being your therapist they’re
also your boss, your next-door neighbour, your cousin or your friend. If they
tell you that getting naked with them will help you overcome your inhibitions
or that you should give them lots of money (more than you’re paying them for
sessions) to help with your healing. Really these are things that should have
you reporting them to their regulatory body.

 I think a lot of people worry that their
therapist is going to brainwash them – I know I worried about this – and that
they won’t know enough to say ‘stop’. Therapy can seem very mysterious, and it’s
hard to know what to expect and whether they’re “doing it right”.

A friend of mine
once said that it was hard for her to appreciate good modern art because she didn’t
know what bad modern art was. In this spirit, I highly recommend reading this
article about Masud Khan, a respected
London therapist who was eventually struck off. He was a Bad Therapist – at
least to many of his patients – and it is Not Rocket Science to spot why. My
impression is that Wynne Godley came from a world and a time where people had
never discussed what one could expect to happen within a therapy session, and
he second-guessed his own ability to work out what was right for him. And of
course Masud Khan was highly plausible. The world’s changed, but the important lesson
is: trust yourself. However well credentialed they are, if they suggest you
leave your wife to hook up with another one of their patients, it’s time to
report them.

This is the major
caveat. All the other problems on this list will just end up wasting your time,
but if you think the therapist is actually manipulative or damaging, run for
the door.

2) They just don’t seem
to understand what you're saying. I had a therapist like this once – she was the one I’d
picked after seeing half-a-dozen entirely randomly chosen women from the BCAP
directory and having no idea how to choose between them. I only saw her for a
few sessions, but each time I shared something that was troubling me she got an
“I’m concentrating really hard now” frown on her face, and then made a reply
which indicated to me that she didn’t have the least idea what I was trying to
communicate. She was a very nice woman, she just wasn’t as bright as I needed
her to be. It’s important to have a therapist who you think is smarter and
wiser than you. If you think there’s no one out there who is smarter and wiser
than you, go to a referral service, tell them that, and then enjoy how they
find you someone to work on your superiority complex.

3) They talk about
themselves a lot. Now, different therapists have different views about this.
Personally, I like a therapist who I know nothing about; it prevents me from
trying to tailor my responses so they’ll like me more. Some therapists think it’s
important to share their reactions at times, or to tell stories from their
personal experience which shed light on what you’re discussing. However, I have
a friend whose counsellor spent most of their sessions telling my friend about
his holidays, his new conservatory, his grandchildren, his partner’s career… that
isn’t therapy, it’s a chat. If you find you’re doing more listening than
talking, something’s probably gone wrong.

4) You just don’t
vibe with them. Again this comes down to: trust yourself. Listen to them,
observe them, observe how you respond to them. If you feel instinctively you
want a female therapist, or a male therapist, or a black therapist, or a gay
therapist, it’s OK to follow that hunch. (They may want you to talk about why
you made that decision. Therapists are like this, always asking questions about
stuff.) If someone seems on paper really right, but when you meet them you just
don’t feel you can open up, they’re not for you. Carrie and Danielle have a
lovely little post about choosing a therapist based on their style.
If this is important to you, go with it. I knew I felt comfortable with my
therapist in Manhattan when she quoted from one of the more obscure Shakespeare
plays in our first conversation. It is OK to choose based on weird and personal
things. Our personalities are weird and personal. As President Bartlett once
said: run towards yourself.

A few things that
may feel uncomfortable but aren’t really bad signs

If you ever take a
course in massage, you’ll be taught about the difference between “painful pain”
and “grateful pain”. I love that phrase, “grateful pain”. When they rub you in
that place where it hurts and it makes it hurt more but at the same time you want
them to carry on doing it because you know it’s making something release and when
it’s done you’re going to feel better? So yeah, again, like much of this it all
comes down to instinct. Therapy’s not always pleasant; sometimes you end a
session feeling like shit. I think mostly one can tell if it’s grateful pain or
not. However, these are some things that might seem on the surface like the
therapist isn’t really doing their job but which probably mean it’s going OK:

1)  ‘They’re so quiet!’ This is something
that can throw people. A therapy conversation isn’t like a normal conversation.
After all, you don’t really want to end up finding out a lot about them, that’s
not what you’re paying £40-75 an hour for. So therapists often go quiet or just
answer your words with an “mmm-hmm.” They want to let you talk. If you’re
someone who doesn’t like to talk, who is often quiet in groups, this may feel a
bit strange to you.

2)   ‘I’m not better yet!’ Yeah, what with
the rise in popularity of CBT, anti-depressants and in general the
makeover-show culture people are surprised when they see a therapist for four
weeks and their life isn’t utterly solved. It’ll probably take a while. Talk to
your therapist about realistic time expectations (they may get cagey, it’s OK
to press them and it’s OK to say “I can only afford three months of this”,
although they might say you could do with more and they might be right. But
life’s not perfect and they should be willing to work with what you have.

3)  ‘Since I started therapy I seem to be
feeling kind of worse!’ Hmmm. Yeah, this is a tricky one. It can happen, and
sometimes it’s a good sign. In fact there’s probably no such thing as good
therapy which doesn’t sometimes make you feel more miserable than when you started.
If you’re talking about difficult stuff, the stuff you need to talk about, it’ll
likely have a few negative effects – the idea is that the long-term effect will
be positive. Talk it through with your therapist. Don’t be afraid to tell them
that you’re afraid you’re getting worse and that it’s freaking you out. Talk it
through with good friends (and supportive family, if your family’s supportive)
too. They might see improvement in you that you can’t see yourself. If you’ve
got a good GP, discuss it with them too. It could be that this therapist or
kind of therapy isn’t right for you, or it could be one of those things that
you have to ride out. If the latter, you have my sympathy; it does suck, but it
does get better.

 As a final thought: if you have read
this post and are still confused or have questions, feel free to leave a
comment below or to email me directly. You can use an anonymous gmail address
if you like. I am, as previously indicated, not trained, but I will do my best
to give some pointers in the right direction. If you email me with a useful question,
comment or insight, I might post it to this blog unless you explicitly say you
don’t want me to do that but I will try to make you as anonymous as possible.

And if you have come
to this post because you are feeling very depressed or despairing, please do
call The Samaritans. You don’t have to tell anyone
you’re doing it, and they really do help when you’re in a rough spot. Feelings
don’t last forever but while they’re happening they can feel overwhelming. It
is OK to ask for help.