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The therapist I wanted to start seeing said she is not equipped to help me. What do?
Oh god. Not you too! This bullshit happens to me constantly. I'm on first-name terms with every therapist within a fifteen-hour drive. I adore therapy. Can't get enough! With half of them, they've been generous enough to grant me my own shelf in their staff room's fridge. I think. I just lay claim to a shelf and swipe its existing contents and no-one's yet punched me, which seems sufficiently close to happy healthy informed consent that to quibble otherwise would just be splitting hairs. Yum yum yum.
But okay. My particular theraporgies, hah, inevitably faceplant me against the same several reasons why your own therapist might assert this:
(1) Simple incompetence. She's a shit therapist.
Or even an intruder fraudster masquerading as one. Happens more often than you might think. I once gatecrashed a psychiatry clinic, disguised as a psychiatrist's chair, to scope out other patients. And good god. The "psychiatrists" who actually sat on me? You would not BELIEVE the bullshit they infect their therapies with. Chatting, and Listening, and Empathy, and encouraging their patient to actually explore their emotions.
Eeeurghh! Not a single "pistols at dawn"! Not a single "rum, sodomy and the lash"! Not a single "Assert Rome's primacy with hounds and grapeshot"! What kind of blasphemous softcocks are we raising these days? Stepping in and counterbalancing all that pinko-Stalinist codswallop took me hours.
(2) Your therapist means "equip" literally. Your particular therapeutic needs require specialised equipment, and she lacks it.
I'm an expert at Reading Between The Lines, I am. My last seventeen therapists have dropped a million billion smouldering hints that the one and only conceivable treatment for my Exercisephobia is to get driven around everywhere in a Bagger 288. That's the only way for a Lady of Sophistication and Refinement to travel, you know. Anything less is just vulgar.
But should I exhibit the temerity to actually voice their hints? Congeal their unspoken anticipation into the indignity of verbiage? They get all flustered! Nothing but bitching! They're all "I can't help you" and "too expensive waaah" and "get out of my office or I call the cops". Calling them out on their kit cockteasing seldom mollifies matters. Can't think why.
(3) Your ailments are of such stupendous grandeur that no typical therapist could ever be reasonably expected to treat them. She's out of her depth!
This also happens to me constantly. The underlying issue? It's that ladies and/or gentlemen of Dynamism and Voluptuous Vigour such as you and I, we make therapists feel so very intimidated. We seize life by the friggin' horns, don't we. We do Interesting Things. We lead Interesting Lives. At least by their mouldy and dreary standards. And all they can do is gripe. Like, I'd been operating just one teeny-tiny cadmium mine in rural Mozambique, for only three decades, and they're all "you're NOT supposed to conscript two million local infants to process all that cadmium ore by gumming it" and "I'm telling the UN" and "how the hell do you keep breaching these tungsten supermax prison cages, that's nine in just the last month". There's just no pleasing some people!
You too, eh? You're also an undercover cosmic goddamn ubermensch? Then it's little wonder your therapist shirks her duties and abandons her post so. Oh sure, she's being heinously unprofessional, but we all have our limits. She's only human.
(4) You're actually being a total dickhead, but your therapist knows that if she tells you that to your face, you'll flip out.
So she's mollifying your ego. Girls do this all the time with douchebag guys hitting on them: ego-stroking them with "oh I simply can't handle your masculinity, byeeee" grants them a skedaddle-window of rather greater duration than "omg you're the biggest asshole I've ever met".
If that's the case ... then honestly, I'm kinda on her side on this one. It's a bit asinine to assert your otherwise entirely self-evident psychocosmological goddamn supremacy if you're also being a total friggin' bitchy-bitchy-bitch-bitch. Lead by example, goddamnit! Exhibit sterling resolution! Command respect supremacy! Hold the freakin' line! Remain an implacable and adamantine Rock against which the world's whininess inevitably shatters! You're mightier than her, mightier than mere Puny Humans, right?
Right?
So come on. Lift your game bro.
But anyhoo. You didn't come to me for a chewing-out. You came for Answers and Advice.
Man. This one's easy. I'm honestly a bit surprised and disappointed you didn't arrive at this conclusion yourself. But okay. Clearly you're having an off-day. So act thusly:
Simply make your presence worth your therapist's while. Harness your entirely superior command of the gamut of all possible therapy treatments, past, present, and future. Offer to be her lab rat for the Nobel Prize for Psychology, or Psychiatry, or Spacedicks, or whatever field of choice you deem of greatest hilarious-ness. Propose to your therapist that if she agrees to go halvesies with you on the Prize's prize-money (and the groupies, duh), then in return, you shall happily research up on and then convincingly fake every single psychiatric disorder that psychiatry has ever discovered. The whole lot. All at once.
And your therapist shall publicly cure them. The whole lot. All at once. In public. Under test conditions. And she shall become the famous-est therapist of them all.
As any acolyte of O.J. Simpson will tell you, fame is EXACTLY the same thing as competence. Who better to then cure whatever bullshit it is you've actually got?