good therapy requires a therapist to choose you as much as you choose them.
What If Your Therapist Chose You Too?
Most people think therapy looks like this: you show up, you talk, the clock runs out, you pay, you leave. You feel a little better, or you don't. You come back next week.
I get why people think that's what it is. That's what we've been shown.
But that's not the kind of therapy I practice.
———
Here's something most people don't know: I don't work with everyone who reaches out.
It's not about availability. It's about something harder to name…like a pull. A sense that something in me is being called forward by this particular person and their particular story. When someone reaches out, I'm not just asking whether I can help them. I'm asking whether I'm the right person to sit with what they're carrying.
When that recognition isn't there, the most ethical thing I can do is refer them out. Not because they're not worthy of help but because they deserve someone who is genuinely moved by their story. And I believe they'll find that person.
This means therapy with me is a mutual choosing. You opt in. And so do I.
That's not how we usually talk about a paid professional service. But I'm not sure therapy (real therapy) has ever been just that.
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I am a rational, science-informed clinician. I believe in research, in evidence-based approaches, in understanding the nervous system and the ways early experience shapes who we become.
And I also believe there is meaning in who finds who, and when.
I don't think it's random that you arrived at my particular door at this particular moment in your life. I think something in your psyche was ready for something…and something in mine was ready to meet it. That's not magic. But it's not nothing either.
My clients feel it. They describe it in different ways: I feel like you actually care, or I don't feel like a number here, or simply, something happens in this room that hasn't happened anywhere else. I don't say this to flatter myself. I say it because I think it points to something real about what makes therapy work.
———
Genuine empathy is not a technique.
It cannot be performed indefinitely without cost and it cannot be faked without the client eventually feeling it.
Real empathy means I am genuinely affected by what you bring into the room. Your grief lands somewhere in me. Your breakthroughs matter to me beyond the session. The work you're doing stays with me, because you are not a case. You're a person I've chosen to sit with.
This also means I have to continuously do my own work. My own history, my own unresolved material, my own blind spots…these cannot be allowed to crowd your space. If I notice that something of mine is getting in the way of being fully present with you, I'll name it. And if it becomes something I can't work around, I'll refer you to someone who can hold your work without that interference.
That, too, is what makes this not transactional. A transaction doesn't require that level of accountability. A relationship does.
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I won't pretend this is easy to convey to someone who hasn't experienced it yet.
The best I can offer is this: if something in you recognizes what I'm describing, if there's a part of you that has always suspected therapy could be more than what you've seen, that recognition is probably worth following.
Because the kind of therapy I'm talking about begins before the first session. It begins in the moment something in you reaches toward something more…and something in me reaches back.
That's where the real work starts.
