 Hello, this is Bob Cook here from the YouTube channel TA Therapy, and this short video is about how to choose your own psychotherapist. Who is the right therapist for you? How would you know? Okie dokie, let's get on then. So what is psychotherapy first? Well, psychotherapy, whichever psychotherapy you choose really, has two major dimensions. First of all, they will be practiced at listening in the here and now, so they'll be interested in your story, helping you talk, helping you access feelings, and help you understand your emotions and your thoughts with the context of day. Secondly, they're going to help you make connections with your past to your present. As you grow up, you make decisions about yourself according to what's going on around you and the environment, and then you repeat this in the present. Your personality gets repeated in the present, so any therapist will look for connections with past and present, the patterns, the themes, so you can understand and take ownership of those patterns and themes so you can change your life today. So firstly, you need to like them. So what does that mean? Well, they need to fit into your frame of reference, how you see the world, the type of person that you want to talk to, to be able to share your anxieties and deepest feelings with, someone who really be there for you. Secondly, you need to feel safe with them. What does that mean? You need to feel secure with them. You need to feel that they'll be able to contain your feelings and your deepest anxieties and be there with you when you talk them, out with them, and also to have a sense of real trust in them, that they're not going to let you down and that you'll be able to really be yourself with them. All therapists, whoever you see, should keep the confidentiality, otherwise make sure you don't see them. Confidentiality means that anything they share with you stays in the room. Okay, they should really be genuine people, have a good sense of integrity and somebody you feel is honest and not someone who you feel will sort of like cheap gate you or let you down. Okay, all third, you should have access to their own supervision and their own supervision. That's really important because that means they're accountable to another body. It helps you know that they get stuck with you, they can take you to supervision and it's good to know that they're accountable and not just doing this completely on their own. Price? That's an interesting one. I would check out the average price of therapists in your own local area and go with that. Therapist in Manchester, probably between 40, 50, no more than 60 pounds. It does really also go on qualification how long they've been therapists, whether they're trainee therapists or their therapists have been around just a few years after a qualification or maybe therapists have been there a long time and really experienced. So that will probably respect the differentiality. But I think it's important to look around the average price of therapists and not pay too much really. Are they qualified? Very important. You need to find out they're qualified because they could be trainee therapists for example. You need to find out which area of psychotherapy they're trained in. There's different areas like transaction analysis, gestalt, existential psychotherapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy, client-centered psychotherapy. This will give you a clue or insight to how long their training was, whether they're qualified, the ideas and the methods that they actually think is important when they're therapy using you. Really you need to find out if they're registered with one of the two major regulating bodies in this country. So the foremost regulating body for psychotherapists is the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. For counsellors, which is association of counselling and psychotherapy. So if they're not registered with one of those professional regulating bodies, I think I'd ask them why. How come they're not? Because they're important bodies to be part of and it gives you a sense of knowing their professionality. Okay? Notekeeping. That's an important one. UK ACP says that therapy should keep notes and be able to show their notes to clients up to seven years. BACP. I'm not quite sure how many years but it probably follows the UK ACP. It might only be five years they have to keep their notes but they are obliged to show clients notes if that's important to you. Now, good question to ask yourself when you're going to therapy and that will indicate what type of therapies you have then, whether you are a long-term or short-term therapy because some therapies specialize in long-term psychotherapy and some therapists will be trained in short-term psychotherapy. So short-term psychotherapy I think is anything up to sort of nine months of a year. Some people say short-term therapy is only about six sessions to 20 sessions. Long term therapy is anything from one year onwards. I think long term is more like three, four, five, six, seven years and psychotherapists need to be trained and already work with long-term clients because some therapies are short-term like CBT for example is only 60 and 17 sessions whereas some therapy is much longer in nature like psychodynamic psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. So what do you want from your therapist? I suggest you think of things like dependability. That the therapist you can depend on will turn up, be there for you if they have to actually stop for some reason they'll let you know and give you notice. So you feel that you've got someone you can depend on but will always be there for you. That has a sense of predictability in the sense that they're going to turn up, that they're predictable in their move, they're not suddenly going to switch from one move to the other. There's a sense of stability with them. And finally continuity what I mean by that is they're not going to take lots of holidays or they're not going to be out of country. Of course they take holidays but some therapists are away for quite a long time and I think for therapists you know for therapy to really work you need to be able to see them once a week and there are not many breaks really. Okie dokie.