Step 1: Google “Psychology Today therapists near me.”
Step 2: Narrow your search: Zip code, Female, In-Person.
You will only seek in-person sessions because there’s no way that virtual therapy can adequately substitute seeing and hearing the therapist face to face, body to body, occupying the same physical space, breathing the same air. Human beings evolved to engage in 3-D, embodied communication. The totality of a person’s body language, facial expression, tone of voice, choice of words, all within a particular environment is greater than the sum of the parts. You can’t get the total, let alone all the parts, through video or phone. And they can’t get the total of you through video or phone. The way you see it, there’s no point in putting in the time and money to go to therapy if you’re not going to go in person. You’re committed to finding someone with whom you can enter what you hope will be one of the most intimate and productive relationships of your life. There’s no way you’re going to achieve that through a screen and/or speaker. This means you have to stay local in the search field. And you also don’t want to deal with a male therapist for the same reason you want an female Asian American therapist–reduce as much potential friction as possible up front.
Step 3: Narrow your search further by picking through the therapist’s “Specialties.” This filter heading could also be called, “What’s your problem?” Now remember, the more problems you have, the smaller the search results will be. It’s harder to find a therapist who can help you with all of your dump truck load of issues. So choose wisely. What’s your BIGGEST problem? Pick one. Seriously, pick one.
Step 4: If you have health insurance, well, that’s useless. Sadly, a lot of therapists, especially the good ones, don’t take insurance. They can’t afford the headache and the meager reimbursements provided by insurance companies. So they go private and ask for full payment by the patient. You can try to get something back from the insurance company on your own, they say, but good luck, they think but don’t say. Therapists have demand and lack of incentive to bother with insurance on their side. But try it. Click that insurance button and see the search result shrink to zero especially after you click on the Asian button in the ethnicity section.
Step 5: “Types of Therapy” is where you get stuck. What is all this shit? What is “Person-Centered therapy”? As opposed to person-decentered therapy? What would be the point of that? “DBT”? “Culturally sensitive” sounds nice, but that’s the whole purpose of clicking “Asian” under “Ethnicity” and “female.” “Sandplay”? Is that for kids? If the talking doesn’t work, there’s always “Ketamine-Assisted” therapy. Ketamine isn’t a psychedelic but you know psychedelics are all the rage in the psychotherapeutic world these days. There’s even a documentary on Netflix about the use of psychedelics for therapeutic use called, How to Change Your Mind. It’s compelling, not that I needed to be persuaded.
You realize that like all professions that seek to be knighted with legitimacy and authority by the sword of science, the field of psychology is gate kept with a large lexicon of knowledge specific terminology. You’ve seen medical doctors, especially surgeons, wave around lingo in “casual” conversation like soon to be brides waving their hands at everyone to show off the diamond on their finger. It’s status signaling at it’s most pathetic. It’s meant primarily to keep the general public out and those in-the-know in. All the “Types of Therapy” appear to you like little linguistic bouncers at the exclusive club of mental health. But, still, you wish you knew what all these therapy types were so you can maybe think about whether you want it or not.
Step 6: Scroll, scroll, scroll, and by the time you get down to the bottom of the list of available filters, you have 2 therapists that fit your search criteria. 2.
Step 7: One is Filipino and the other is Korean. Both look like they are in their 20’s. Fine.
Step 8: You unclick the “Asian” filter. Psychology Today clearly is telling you if you want help within a reasonable round trip, then you’re going to have to give white women a shot. That’s what actionable search result will give you in your part of the world. A whole lot of white and two Asian women.
Step 9: Contact 10 potential therapists, including the Filipino and Korean therapists. Receive return calls from 6. Have 6 free 15-30 min phone consultations to see if you want to book an hour in-person session.
Step 10: Book 4 of the 6 for an hour each. You cross your fingers that one of these will rise to the top as the obvious choice of someone you can work with long term to fix you. If fixing is even a thing. Perhaps just getting to a point where you don’t feel like shit all the time is the best you can expect. You have no idea. You have no idea about anything. Life has thrown you a big fat pile of steaming shit. Hit you right in the noggin and knocked you overboard from your own life. Yes, you are mixing metaphors. This is what happens when you get blind sided by a freight train of earthquakes. Your husband has . . . an addiction problem, and your marriage has blown up. Suddenly, you go from being a married single mom to a separated and soon-to-be divorced single mom. Your kids’ world, along with yours, has been shaken to their foundations and they probably need therapists, too. You have no job, you have no career, you have no friends or family near by. After 12 years of giving up everything in service of being a wife and mother to a surgeon and two young sons, you have no identity. You don’t know who you are.
Step 11: Somehow you end up getting connected with the Filipino therapist on your short list. She is the third therapist you meet with. She is in the early stages of her career, but by no means a spring chicken in life. She has been working in the helping profession for a while, including guiding pregnant woman into motherhood as a birth doula. You thought maybe she was mixed race from her picture in Psychology Today, because she has the same last name as a famous actor. Nope. She married a white dude like you. Bonus!
Step 12: “Annette” is a committed, emotionally intelligent therapist with cultural understanding of Asian Americans. She’s exactly what you hoped to find: someone who can help you place your problems in the context of your family, community, and countries on top of helping you deal with all that shit you mentioned in Step 10. During the 6 months you work with her, she manages to do 2 things: 1) separate the inner critic from you; and 2) help you reconnect with the love you have for your kids.
She explains that your love for your children was never inadequate or faded or lost. Rather, your inner critic attacks you, leading you to believe you are a shitty mom, that you don’t deserve your kids, that maybe they’re shitty kids, too, because their mother is shitty.
Annette calls her the “Dismayed Woman” because she’s always looking to be disappointed in you and, well, everyone, really. You meet this Dismayed Woman, thank her for protecting you when you were a kid, assure her that nothing bad will happen to you any more if you mess up, and promise not to get rid of her. And could she please be quiet sometimes when you need her to be silent.
And suddenly you find you love your kids without fear for the first time in their lives. You can love them without being scared of screwing up at loving them. It’s like falling in love again. Like when they were first placed in your arms and nothing bad had happened to them yet.
When you decide to move on to a different therapist you thank Annett for giving you back your motherhood.
Step 13: But you get ahead of yourself.
As you approach month 6 with Annette, you notice a static feeling in the session. The past two sessions have been mostly venting fits about your ex’s recent heinous behaviors. While venting might feel good it does nothing to heal your complex PTSD. This is one of the new terms you have learned, one of hundreds of new terms and ideas you have researched and consumed and digested over the past six months in service of healing yourself and preparing for grad school: you’ve decided you want to be a therapist.
The talking isn’t getting you any further. CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy, which Annette has used to great effect at the beginning and middle of your therapy, is not healing. It’s managed to help you become cognizant of your issues but you’re still just managing the symptoms. You have reached the limits of this modality.
You’ve been studying up on somatic therapy, EMDR (Eye Movement and Desensitization and Reprocessing), and parts work, specifically its latest incarnation called Internal Family Systems (IFS). Annette’s tool box is limited. She’s still in the process of getting to know other modalities.
A therapist can take you only as far as they know the way. Once you reach the boundaries of their knowledge and experience, you must thank them for their guidance, say goodbye, and find another guide to take you on the next leg of your journey.
Step 14: Go back to step 1. Yes, seriously. And this time in the “Therapy Types” click on somatic therapy, EMDR, IFS. You’re no longer too concerned about ethnicity or race. That was a crutch, really, a strawman to keep you distracted from the true fear of not being understood or, more to the point, deserving of understanding from anyone. Asian or otherwise. You still click on “Female”, because some of the traumas you need to heal have to do with male sexual assault. A male therapist could be triggering. You would rather not have to worry about that possibility.
This time you narrow down the search results to 3 only. During one of the free consultations you find your new therapist: “Jackie” specializes in working with trauma and she isn’t just about talking about it or managing it. She works to heal it. She specializes in several modalities. Her rate is reasonable and she practices much closer to home. Bonus.
Step 15: You continue to have weekly sessions. You make significant gains. Gains that look and feel like peace: peace inside you, peace with your mother, peace with your kids. Peace with money, peace with the American culture, peace with divorce, and even peace with the custody battle your ex keeps pursuing. It’s not that life is less stressful. It’s that the therapy is working. That is, you are no longer mindlessly defining yourself and gauging your internal state by how others attempt to define you or behave toward you. You are the only one who gets to do that now.
You don’t know how, but this truth finally got inside your body in session one day:
You became aware of all the thousands of parts of you that you gave away like so much nothing to thousands of people to shape into whatever they wanted it to be. They, these parts, were still connected to you, some of them thousands of miles and decades away, connected by nothing but hair thin yet tenacious threads that miraculously hadn’t snapped or deteriorated over the years of abuse. You began to reel in the threads all at once–you could practically hear the whirring of the machine inside you that you didn’t know you had–and pulled back toward your Self every last one of those thousands of misshapen, misused, abused, mishandled, forgotten parts tethered this whole time, past all this space, to you. The parts arrived, locked back into your body, one by one, returning to their proper place inside you for the first time in your whole life of giving yourself away piece by piece. And for the first time in your life you felt solid.
It took many months, many internet searches, many consultations, many hours in session, but you found the right therapist.