I consider myself to have hit the therapeutic lottery winnings 20 years ago when I met my therapist based on a referral from a friend. I had never considered or desired therapy prior to calling to make an appointment, however desperate times called for desperate consideration to anything that could help me through the pain I was in.
Before my first scheduled therapy appointment with Julie Ann in 1999, way back before the internet could provide me with the guidance, reviews, and the wisdom that it does today, I knew there were certain qualities that were going to be important to me in deciding to talk with this or any therapist.
The list of important therapist qualities was short:
Be an excellent listener
Be in the moment and use the moment well.
Beyond those 2 things I had no other qualities in mind.
After 10 years of being on the client side of therapy and an additional 10 years of being on the provider side of therapy, those original two qualities remain. However, many more have emerged and I have set out to list them here.
2019 list of important therapist qualities:
Be an excellent listener.
Be in the moment and use the moment well.
Be genuinely empathetic.
Be nonjudgmental.
Be compassionate.
Be consistent.
Be educated.
Be self aware.
Be open.
Be humanistic.
Be generous.
Be intuitive.
Be available.
Be flexible.
Be organized.
Be able to hold an expansive and seemingly limitless therapeutic frame/space.
Be understanding.
Be endlessly curious.
Be communicative.
Be courageous.
Be together in the experience.
Be able to see beyond the surface.
Be able to turn over stones together.
Be able to make space for choice.
Be creative.
Be accepting.
Be thoughtful.
Be authentic
Be warm.
Be completely, undeniably, and unwaveringly present.
Be willing to admit not knowing the answer at times.
Be willing to grow.
Be willing to learn.
Be willing to repair mistakes and misunderstandings.
Be gentle and kind.
Be willing to trust.
Be appreciative of diversity.
Be a teammate.
Be ethical.
Be aware of the strengths and contributions made by the client.
Be genuinely appreciative of the therapeutic alliance and work being done together.
Be able to build and tailor the therapy interventions around and with the client.
That’s it, 42 important qualities. It was 41 a second ago. I’m under the impression that many more qualities will emerge after I’ve posted this.
This list is fairly comprehensive when I look back 20 years ago and recall my decade of experience with Julie Ann. She, as a therapist, truly captures all of the qualities that I have listed above.
In these last 10 years, I am endlessly grateful to Julie’s effectiveness as a therapist and our work together.
I am equally grateful to attempt to pay that experience forward in every therapeutic relationship I am privileged to engage in.
Okay, now, for real, I’m going to look up what the internet has to say about it.
Also, I’m so glad I only had 2 important qualities back when I first started therapy. A list of 42 would have been and is an unworkable number of items to confirm when meeting a new therapist. My suggestion, if you are looking into therapy, is to make sure they have the first and second important qualities:
Be an excellent listener.
Be in the moment and use the moment well.
If those two qualities are met at the onset it is off to a potentially good start. My hope is that the other 40 qualities emerge as needed over the course of a fruitful collaboration and that you too hit your own equivalent to a therapeutic lotto jackpot.