46 - HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR THERAPIST - QUESTIONS YOU CAN ASK

I'm going to give you a great secret today. How to choose a therapist. Hi, I'm Dr. Carol Darza, author, trauma psychologist and founder of Reconnect Trauma Treatment center in Los Angeles. So let's say you are now ready to go into therapy and how do you choose a therapist? Well, a lot of people, of course, it depends on the financial situation. Just look in the list of their in network providers and just choose a therapist. Or sometimes they go by maybe references of other people. But I have a huge criteria in my mind about how to recommend you to choose the best therapist for your needs. And especially I'm talking about, of course, if you are going to work on your trauma. So first things first, you do have to really understand that the chemistry between you and the therapist is crucial. So the personality has to match because you are building a relationship within a therapy setting. So it is a therapeutic relationship. But if that is not right, no matter what methods a therapist is trained in, it'll not work. So in some ways I do actually recommend, after you do the initial elimination, which I'm going to help you with, how to do, you meet the person in person for a brief or maybe one session and see if you really feel comfortable with that person. So that will be an important indicator. So of course, for the chemistry, I can't really explain much. It's going to be how you feel. But I'm going to be able to give you some tips about how to choose a therapist who really helps you with trauma and not with other topics necessarily, since this is, this is an area where I find myself where there may be the most mistakes happen among therapy. I have met many, many people along my career of 23 years as a trauma therapist. Clients that came in and said, you know, I wasn't doing well, but after therapy, after treatment, I'm actually doing worse. So that should not be happening. All right, so let's talk about that. Number one, you want your therapist to really be trauma trained. Not just, yes, I understand what trauma is, but that he or she has to be trained in specific trauma treatment modalities. And I'm going to tell you what modalities that we use the most at reconnect and that I'm a big fan of and that I've been trained in anything to do with the body. So somatic experiencing, sensory motor trm, trauma resolution model, resiliency model. And so those three are sort of major somatic work. You could also get a therapist who's trained in either emdr, eye movement, desensitization, and reprocessing or brain spotting, which is another trauma resolution technique. There's also CRM, which is comprehensive resource model. And then so these are very specific techniques that I'm telling you about. There's also you want also your therapist to be trained in something along the lines of mindfulness, because with trauma, you are really hijacked with the past and you want the therapist to be able to help you to come in, into here and now. Hopefully I'm not overwhelming you, but don't worry because what I'm going to do is today I'm going to give you an overview, but then we're going to have in the next few videos, interviews and meetings with other therapists who actually do these modalities. So you're really going to have a sense of what modality is right for you and how it works. But I'm a big fan of the combination of all of that to make it more eclectic and much more helpful and containing. So you can actually find a lot of this information in my book, the Trauma Map, there's a list of questions of what to ask to your therapist, along with some explanation of explanations of these modalities as well. So let me tell you, sort of backtracking again, right? You are looking at a list of therapists that maybe your insurance gave you, or you found it on psychology today.com and you're reading trauma treatment, trauma trained, and you're looking at these modalities. So this should be matching, right, with what I'm saying. Then when you interview them, which is an important thing, you want to ask a few things. One is how. How do they treat trauma? Do they ask you to. Do they believe that you have to tell everything about trauma, like what happened to you in detail? Do they believe that you have to be exposed to maybe some of the fears that you have? Maybe you have social isolation because you were severely abused as a child and now you're afraid to be around other people. Do they feel like you have to be actually facing your fears sort of heads on, or do they have more of a gentle, slow approach? And of course, I am going to go with much more slow approach. So you don't want to be in a therapy where you feel like your capacity is overly stretched and then you're doing things that actually overwhelms you emotionally. So you want somebody who understands that working with trauma means they have to go slow, gentle, and really respecting your capacity and respecting your boundaries. So if you feel like a therapist is being too pushy and too Much about the interest is too much about what you have to do rather than how you feel. That is not probably the right therapist for your needs. Regarding trauma treatment. Again, for other things it might have a different purpose, but we are talking about trauma treatment. So another important thing, which is what I mentioned in the beginning about somatic oriented therapies. Somatic means body. So anything to do with the understanding of how the body reacts to trauma and therefore how it needs to be included for trauma healing is a must. As far as I am concerned. For trauma healing now, especially in the last 15 years, the trauma work and the somatic work became much more known and accepted and validated. Where in the past it was more about really the belief of you just have to tell me what happened and if you're able to talk about it, then you are healed. Now we know. Unfortunately, talking about it does not always heal, in fact sometimes makes it worse and does not necessarily create long term changes. So you might cry when you tell about it, about what happened and kind of feel a little bit of a relief. But the next day or the following day you might find yourself really being actually in the same situation where you have the same reactions. So just talking about it does not actually help for the nervous system to calm down. So body oriented therapists help you with that, really help the nervous system to calm down so that you can tolerate the stressors of today. So ask your therapist, do they know what resourcing means and what kind of resourcing techniques they teach you? So resourcing techniques are referring to things that they teach you like a self, like a relaxation technique. But I'm not talking about meditation because sometimes some meditations are actually not helpful for trauma treatment, believe it or not, which a lot of people do not know. So I'm not looking for relaxation techniques, but I'm suggesting that your therapist should know techniques that actually really help calming the nervous system down. So certain breathing techniques, certain mindfulness techniques, techniques like eft tapping which I've mentioned, or grounding are the kind of techniques that I'm talking about. Ask them what kind of traumas they worked with. So if you have a attachment trauma which is relational oriented, like abandonment, neglect with your parents kind of thing, you want your therapist to be experienced in that specific trauma as well. If you have sexual abuse, you want to make sure that they understand the nature of that. So you could really ask these steps specific questions, how long they've been working with trauma, do they know what dissociation is? Okay, because dissociation is a Huge factor that happens as a response to trauma, which is a way to leave your body to deal with the pain. So does your therapist know what to do so that you are. If you're getting overwhelmed when you talk about something and you get dissociated, your therapist knows how to handle it, how to manage it, how to help you to really emotionally learn to calm down, to regulate yourself. So I know a lot of people might disagree with me, but I am actually, there are certain modalities that I really do not recommend for trauma treatment. Hypnosis can be used maybe like some addiction issues sometimes, especially for people who are trying to quit smoking and, you know, that kind of a thing. But I wouldn't use that to access memories. And that's why it's important for people to know. Because in the past, we believed that in order to heal the trauma, you have to be able to remember everything the way it's happened, with details. And that's why people use hypnosis to be able to get an access to the memory, right to the unconscious, that is not necessary anymore. You'll see that just the feeling of something happened, even if you don't remember what happened, along with current symptoms, are often enough indicators for somebody to really work on. On. On the. On the past memory, on. On the trauma, really, because we are working with the symptoms rather than the memory. So hypnosis can cause sometimes too much of an opening. It's like this gate opens and a person can be really overwhelmed. So those are some other questions you can ask for your therapist. And I wanted to just emphasize, do not feel bad about interviewing your therapist. This is an important decision for you. In fact, this is really the most important decision. Because with the wrong therapy, you might be getting worse. You might decide therapy is not for me. Little you know that maybe the person was not right. You might think there's something wrong with me. I have had clients coming in saying, I'm too resistant, I couldn't improve. I'm really effed up. There must be something really wrong with my brain. And then when I get into the treatment, I realize, no, there's nothing wrong with you. It's just you didn't get the right treatment. So the right treatment is crucial, which means the right practitioner working with you. So, yeah, don't be embarrassed about asking and just make sure that they are open. In fact, any therapist who says they're, you know, they're just. They already know everything and they don't need to be questioned probably isn't the right therapist for you because you want a teamwork therapy is such a situation or such an event that therapist alone can't do the improvement and you alone cannot really improve. It has to work together in a collaborative way. So I hope you found all my tips very helpful. And of course I would like to also extend to you that if you're LA based at Reconnect, we have staff amazing therapists that are trained on all these modalities that I mentioned and in the next videos you'll get to meet them. And you are always welcome to come and meet with the therapist here at Reconnect in Pacific Palisades. Thank you for watching. I hope you found my tips helpful. If you have any questions or comments, please write them below and I will respond to them individually. And remember, trauma equals disconnect and healing equals reconnect. Stay connected.