In Search of a Therapist - Part One of More than One

His name was D. He was her first therapist. She was 5 and new to our home. They did mostly play therapy. They played a game called "Stop, Relax and Think." In this game, you practice visualizing safe and happy places and memories, and you occasionally land on a scenario that gives you practice evoking that safety in the context of a more stressful hypothetical.

I love D. Still to this day, the things he said about her and what our life would be like were among the most accurate I have ever heard. He said lying would be a struggle throughout life. He said stealing would persist at least through the teen years. He said we might not... but then again we might. These seemed like bleak prognoses at the time. They were accurate. He was brave to tell us, and he did it gently, with love.

But D's focus was father-son work so eventually he kicked us out of the nest. We then moved on to K.



K was the Arrogant Therapist. Goatee, flannel shirts, biked everywhere, practiced Buddhism, well educated in attachment work. He knew his stuff, I still believe. But this was my first experience (as a parent) with the Arrogant Therapist, and I got taken. He acted as if he knew each of us better than we knew ourselves. He quoted Tibetan Buddhist maxims and seemed to have all kinds of reflective insight. At that time in my life, answers seemed really great, and far preferable to more questions. She hated him. Completely shut down. Never did a stitch of work in there. (Saw right through him? Maybe.) Eventually he said that if she wouldn't work, we couldn't come back. High expectations of a 7-year-old. But the Arrogant Therapist delivery, cloaked in spirituality, made us believe him. He tried to convert to doing couples therapy for us, which was unwanted - if not unneeded - at the time. It fizzled.

In retrospect Arrogant Therapist did harm to us. He made us angrier than we were, instead of helping us to recall our compassion. And the only arrow in his quiver was direct questioning. Again, not really age appropriate. It felt like our failure for a long time before I realized that it was, at least in part, his failure as well.

We went a little while without a therapist for our daughter. At this time our foster son was seeing S. S was The Dude. He was nice. He wasn't smart. He didn't know the literature. They would look at cool rocks together. At the same time this foster son was also seeing Doctor A, who fit another mold - The Expert. Doctor A had all the answers, but without the spiritual gloss of K - he didn't have insight, he was just right. He once told our foster son that Seroquel would help him "forget all the bad stuff that has happened to him." Not so much Doctor A. Foster son made short shrift of them both, and of us, and blew out.

Then some bad stuff went down with our daughter, and we saw a lady whose name I honestly don't remember. I'll call her B. She was supposed to be an expert in trauma. If I had to give her a type, it would be Complete Idiot. She suggested that what we really needed was to get some drums and start drumming together, as a family. She set us back months by buying into all of child's bullshit and splitting. She was completely clueless about our struggles as parents, she was judgmental, even vaguely threatening. I hated her so much that I never even went back for a favorite rain jacket that I left in her office.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, because finding a good attachment therapist is damn hard. And you have to be willing to listen to your gut and walk away from a bad one. And you have to find the courage to assert that you know yourself and your child and you deserve to have input. And you have to look skeptically at people who are too rigid or unwilling to listen, or who are just plain wrong. And it's okay to demand that the therapist have compassion for YOU, not just your kiddo.

The journey continued, and got better. But that's for another day. This day is for remembering all the at-bats that ended in an out, and for being thankful that we were able to let it go and move on.