#she's the first mental health professional who saw that we were plural

[chemicalcarousel]

Us, a system: "I'd wish I could be open about the people in my head to people outside the internet, such as family and friends that I'm close to"

Therapist: "but why do you want that?"

Us:

[chocobarsys]

cw for ranting, venting, talk of therapy

I’m so frustrated on behalf of my whole system.

We’re having such a difficult time finding a therapist who meets our needs, and our needs aren’t even that specific. We just want to find a therapist who already knows what a system is/what plurality is. We don’t want to go into therapy and have to educate a mental health professional on what it means to be plural and we also don’t want to have to mask because that would be counterproductive in regards to working on our issues. 

We don’t consider ourselves disordered due to that our plurality doesn’t hinder us in any way, but we still would prefer a therapist who will see us for who we are.

At first, we checked Psychology Today, but that site doesn’t even have dissociative disorders listed as a search criteria, so we aren’t extremely comfortable using it. We did reach out to a couple of therapists on there, but they responded saying they weren’t accepting new patients. We don’t understand why their profile said they were, but okay. 

Our partner& asked their therapist if they had any recommendations and they gave them the name of a counseling office. We emailed them and they responded saying they were booked up, but that they would contact us in a month or so if they got any openings. 

We waited a month and a half and emailed them again to check in, but they said they were still booked. They did give us personal recommendations, with therapy styles listed, but none of the styles were ones we felt would be helpful for us, so we didn’t reach out to those folks. 

However, they also suggested we check Therapy Den, so we did. That site does have dissociative disorders as a search criteria, but only two people showed up. We contacted one of them through the form on that site, but ended up with no reply a week later. 

We went back to that person’s profile and saw she had a website, so we clicked through and saw there was a way to set up a consultation appointment, so we did.

The day of the consultation, though, she texted us saying she isn’t accepting new clients (again, why does the profile say you are) and gave us a recommendation to one of her colleagues who works with DID.

At that point, we were really fed up with the runaround we’d been getting and took a couple of days to gather ourselves before reaching out, yet again, to another person.

It’s been at least five days by now and that person hasn’t replied, which we take to mean they also don’t have any openings. We really don’t understand why people, especially mental health professionals, don’t just send an email back saying they’re unavailable? We wouldn’t care if it was just short, sweet, and to the point, as long as you responded.

I spoke about this on another site and someone commented a link to the ISSTD website to search for therapists, so I checked there with the bare minimum of criteria; just that they accept our medicaid and are within 100 miles of where we are (because we plan to do telehealth) and only one person came up. Sadly, she is part of an office that is only for women and our body is not a woman. 

At this point, I’m really not sure what we’re going to do. I’m beginning to think we just aren’t going to find a therapist, which is bad because we need one and it’s vital in our need to get approved for disability. It just seems like we’ve exhausted all our options and we’ve come up empty-handed...

-- Gregory