Hey everyone, I'm new here but I've been reading this forum for a couple of weeks now and have been finding it really useful. 
I was hoping to get other people's thoughts on my experience with my therapist/counselor.
I started seeing her in August. I like her a lot - I think it would be hard to replace her even if I wanted to - and her list of qualifications/experience seems quite extensive. She lists trauma counseling as one of her primary interests on her website, and specifically mentions working with people who self-identify with complex ptsd. But, I've never seen a counselor before, so I don't have anything to compare her to and sometimes I feel it's hard to judge exactly how we're doing.
She knows what my problems are pretty thoroughly by now, and when I first started seeing her I thought that once she understood them she would automatically know the best way to work on them or the most useful thing to talk about at any given time - or at least would be able to figure it out fairly quickly by asking me questions. But in reality it seems like a lot of what we do is guided by me, which I don't always like.
She also seems quite flexible in the way she works. One example: she explained EMDR to me as something that might be useful and said that there are 8 steps to the official process, but that we don't have to necessarily follow those steps exactly. Toward the beginning, she was also doing some CBT-type stuff with me without rigidly following a structure. I guess this is great in some ways, although it probably adds to my feeling of being very much in control of what we do, and being slightly overwhelmed by that.
Probably as a result of being guided by me and of this flexibility, the work we've done seems pretty scattered/disorganized to me. It seems like we've started to do a lot of really interesting things, but haven't followed through with many of them as fully as we could have.
I'm probably going to talk to her about all of this, but I thought it might be helpful to see what you guys thought as well.
Thanks for reading!
I was hoping to get other people's thoughts on my experience with my therapist/counselor.I started seeing her in August. I like her a lot - I think it would be hard to replace her even if I wanted to - and her list of qualifications/experience seems quite extensive. She lists trauma counseling as one of her primary interests on her website, and specifically mentions working with people who self-identify with complex ptsd. But, I've never seen a counselor before, so I don't have anything to compare her to and sometimes I feel it's hard to judge exactly how we're doing.
She knows what my problems are pretty thoroughly by now, and when I first started seeing her I thought that once she understood them she would automatically know the best way to work on them or the most useful thing to talk about at any given time - or at least would be able to figure it out fairly quickly by asking me questions. But in reality it seems like a lot of what we do is guided by me, which I don't always like.
She also seems quite flexible in the way she works. One example: she explained EMDR to me as something that might be useful and said that there are 8 steps to the official process, but that we don't have to necessarily follow those steps exactly. Toward the beginning, she was also doing some CBT-type stuff with me without rigidly following a structure. I guess this is great in some ways, although it probably adds to my feeling of being very much in control of what we do, and being slightly overwhelmed by that.
Probably as a result of being guided by me and of this flexibility, the work we've done seems pretty scattered/disorganized to me. It seems like we've started to do a lot of really interesting things, but haven't followed through with many of them as fully as we could have.
I'm probably going to talk to her about all of this, but I thought it might be helpful to see what you guys thought as well.
Thanks for reading!