#therapy101

Finding the right therapist isn’t just about availability — it’s about fit.

Think of it like choosing a guide for your journey: someone who makes you feel safe, understood, and supported. 💙

Swipe through for a quick roadmap to help you make the right choice!

Thinking about starting therapy?

We know it can feel a little unfamiliar, maybe even intimidating. That’s why we created this gentle guide, to help you know what to expect, and remind you:

You're not alone. You set the pace. And you deserve support.

At Utsaah, our therapists are here to walk with you, not to fix, but to understand.

If you’re curious about therapy or considering your first session, we’re just a message away.

Save this if you're planning to start therapy soon.

But that’s not true. (As much as we all might like it to be!) As Meredith Grey once said

Mental health isn’t just happiness and easy achievements. Negative emotions, stress, loss, weaknesses, struggles, having to work harder than peers at something, trying your best and still not reaching a goal- these are all a part of a mental healthy existence. As we’ve talked about before- negative emotions serve a purpose. They are supposed to happen in certain situations. A mentally healthy person will feel sad during times of loss, or angry when they are being threatened. Stress and loss are a part of life, and negative emotions a natural consequence of experiencing them.  No person is good at everything; we all have strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes, despite trying our best, we still struggle to do something as well or as easily as we’d like. This does not make us ill; it makes us human.

So:

Give yourself a break. Allow yourself to be human. Allow yourself to be sad, and stressed, and angry. Allow yourself to not be good at everything, to have weaknesses, to fail. See that part of yourself as a natural and important part of yourself, not something to be removed or avoided at all costs.

Start to think about mental health beyond just happiness. Happiness is important, and striving for it is totally reasonable, but it is not the only component of mental health. Start to think about meaning and purpose- the things that help you feel like life is worth living in the long run. Happiness tends to be short-lived- how do I feel right now? Creating a life with purpose fills us up even on those sad and stressed days.

Which is weird and exciting and surreal and hard. 

So to all you undergrads and recent grads looking for research assistant positions, and grad students applying to internships and postdocs- I see you. You’re passionate and dedicate and hopeful, and working really hard to reach your goals. I wish I could hire all most of you. I respect you and believe in you and think you would be good in the positions I’m hiring for. 

But I can’t and I feel really bad about it. Not that that’s supposed to make you feel better, if you don’t get the job. Just know it’s not an easy decision. 

A couple of thoughts on how to stand out:

1. basic professional skills are more important than specific position-related skills. A person who knows how to work on a team, is a strong communicator, is reliable and responsible, and that I can trust to work with our clients, is way more important than having specific experience with a given stats software or clinical intervention. The latter is way easier to train than the former. 

2. before you interview, think about anecdotes you can tell about your work/academic/research/clinical experiences. all of these anecdotes should make you look good without seeming humble-brag-y or overexaggerated. Some of them should include times you faced difficulties or got negative feedback- but also what you did & how you succeeded in that tough situation. None of them should include shit-talking somebody else. These are not “I’m amazing and my coworkers don’t appreciate me” stories (even if that’s true!). These are “I have the skills & drive to do my best even in tough situations, and I work with my team so we can succeed together” stories. 

It’s about one of my past mentors. I’ve been thinking about him- I rarely gender identify actual people but in this case it’s important that he is a he – I’ve been thinking about him a lot, lately.

Because I’ve had some pretty huge successes this last year. Because he didn’t think I would. And maybe I thought that if I just got to this point- this assistant professor point, this not needing his approval or his letter of recommendation ever again point, this actually-I-can-care-about-real-people-and-do-good-science point –if I just made it here, he would fade away and I would never think about him again or seethe about the way he treated me while secretly hoping he would fall all over himself congratulating me again. I would just be and he would disappear. But he didn’t, and just this morning I was reading his twitter feed, seething and hoping.

I met him in undergrad. He invited me to be one of his RAs, and later, his TA. He gave me responsibilities that most undergrads don’t get. He wrote me a letter of recommendation for graduate school and then got another faculty member to write one too when I didn’t have enough. I babysat and dog-sat for him. We met on campus, and off campus- usually in groups, but not always. He bought me dinner and wine. After I received an offer to attend the program where he had received his PhD, he tearfully told me the program wasn’t good enough for me and he knew I would accept a better offer. Once, he surprised me- I have a strong startle reflex and didn’t see him coming –and he apologized profusely for days.

He built me up.

He openly discussed the strengths and weaknesses of his students, and which he liked best, which seemed to be based on who obeyed him and agreed with him the most. He told me- explicitly –that I should try harder to be one of his favorites. He criticized everything I did. He called me on a major holiday to complain about a draft I’d sent him and demand immediate revisions. He watched the tapes of me collecting data for our studies, and saved sections he didn’t like so he could show them to me. He didn’t like my facial expression (too mean) or my tone of voice (too flat, which contrasts weirdly with a later supervisor who thought I talked like a “valley girl”). He expected more from me. When it was time for my evaluation, instead of giving me feedback on my performance, he gave me feedback on my personality. He thought I was directionless, overly ambitious, “lost.” He thought I was wasting my talents on clinical psychology, because –according to him –it was total bullshit, a pseudointellectual exercise that makes therapists feel good but doesn’t actually help anyone, although he also didn’t really believe that mental health mattered enough to study either. A real scientist would pursue something else, like data science. I cried. I told him something nearly no one knows, a deep hurt from my past. He told me something similar. It might have been intended to make me feel better, this sharing of secrets, but I felt exposed and ripped open and burdened.

He tore me down.

A number of the people in my life at that time- my ex-boyfriend, my parents –thought we were having an affair. We weren’t, and I don’t remember any moment I thought he was testing the waters in that direction. But years later, I was looking at a list of signs of emotional abuse, and it all fit. We had that up-and-down, toxic-but-dedicated relationship you expect out of people who are in love even though they’re terrible for each other. I probably did love him, but I also hated him. My friends and family got used to me complaining about the latest frustrating or mean thing he’d done. Eventually they stopped asking why I continued to work with him. My mother told me that the number one reason she was excited for my upcoming graduation from college was that it meant I would never have to work with him again.

And I haven’t. I moved on. We talked occasionally at first and met up once, which was an awkward disaster that lead to a long text chat where he, possibly drunk and definitely emotional, apologized for not valuing me more. I didn’t know what to say. I felt invaded. We didn’t talk for years after that. Every once in awhile he made an overture- “when you visit next, let’s get a drink!” –and I was carefully polite but non-committal. Which isn’t to say I didn’t want to see him- I did –but something had changed for me in that strange meeting after I started graduate school. He was still talking about favorite students and what I should do to be one of them, and I felt disdainful. Why does he think I want to be one of them? I had a new mentor, who believed that mental health care, science, and social justice were intricately connected, has never commented on my appearance or my voice, and treats all of their students like they matter. Since then, I have had many mentors and supervisors- most good to excellent. I have had conflicts with mentors, but was mostly able to resolve them in ways where I felt respected and heard. I was not reliant on his approval anymore.

And yet, here I am, about a decade later, and I want his approval. Maybe more than that- I want him to acknowledge the scale of my success and that I achieved it despite him. I want to know that he knows that he treated me poorly, and not in some soppy, in-my-feelings way. Possibly perversely, it reminds me of that same ex-boyfriend, another toxic relationship that tore me down even in the good moments, that relied on me undervaluing myself and so not expecting any better from him. I don’t miss that ex-boyfriend, but I find myself in some moments wishing that he would recognize what he did wrong and sincerely apologize for it- not because he wants me back (he’s apologized in a “things will be different!” sort of way before, and it rings hollow), but because it’s the right thing to do. Neither of these things will happen.