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• It’s time to get some professional help. I’ve selfhelped and self-soothed. I’ve read the books, exercised to increase my serotonin levels, kept busy, kept still, found meaning, embraced beauty and nature, been kind to myself and sought the solace of all my kind (and longsuffering) friends. I’ve self medicated – oh, alright, perhaps alcohol doesn’t count, but it certainly dulls the pain. I’ve told myself to get a grip and compare my lot to those with real problems.
  
  And yet still, I feel anxious and down, angry and bereft. Sometimes it’s difficult to function at all. The short course in CBT a few years ago helped. I reframed how I saw things and it helped me change my relationship with my mother.
  I grew up a lot. However, it doesn’t seem enough now. The relationship with my eldest teenage son has gone horribly wrong and it feels as though the past is coming around to bite me once again. My mantra since I split from the children’s father has always been ‘damage limitation on the children’. I don’t want my youngest son to be damaged by all the angst and I want to sort the mess out with my eldest son. Friends say it’s just typical teenage behaviour – he’ll be back. But maybe I am bad for him, as he says. I have to get an objective view on this. I want to look at myself and see if unresolved issues from the past are being passed down to the next generation. I don’t have a personal recommendation for a therapist, so I’m going into this with only my intuition to guide me, and I’ve done the inevitable reading. It’s all about the therapeutic relationship apparently. I have to find a ‘good’ therapist.

  Well, how are you supposed to know that until you’ve met a few and done a bit of work with them? A couple of friends I’ve talked to said they hated their therapists to begin with, but stuck with it and it’s all come good in the end. It seems as though it’s down to luck... and your bank balance.
  
  Therapy is not cheap. How are ordinary mortals supposed to afford the fees? (I make a mental note to charge more for what I do. I don’t seem to value myself enough.) A confusing number of professional bodies come up when you Google ‘therapist’. You are then met with a bewildering amount of jargon when you access the websites. TA? Systemic?
  Psychodynamic? I know there has to be a certain amount of jargon and some attempt is made to explain what it all means, but you have to be pretty motivated and intelligent to work your way through. (My PC antennas are twitching about accessibility.) Either that or you close your eyes and stab a pencil at your computer monitor. There’s not enough cross-referencing.
  
  Once I’ve understood and decided I want EMDR, wouldn’t it help if I could type this in to access all the practitioners who offer it, rather than having to sift through everyone? One website just gives its practitioners ‘labels’ and leaves it at that. (Another twitch.) Back to the therapeutic relationship and how this is all-important. What I want is some kind of personal statement explaining in words that I can understand, where the therapist is coming from and what they are offering. There has to be professionalism – the therapist won’t reveal personal details – but I have to know what I’m signing up for. Otherwise it feels like I’m paying (a huge sum) for a lucky dip in Santa’s grotto. And we all know Father Christmas turned out to be a con. I am only going to write and ask the therapists for more details anyway, so wouldn’t it be better to have them on the website? It would save therapists having to reply to unsuitable enquiries and give them a great marketing opportunity.
  
  Now I have to look at my own prejudices. I’m a woman. Do I want a female therapist? She might be able to empathise with me more, whereas a man might give me a matter of fact male perspective on things, useful if I am to understand my sons. I acknowledge that these are both preconceptions. What if I fall in love with my therapist? I must find someone where there is no chance of this happening. So much about successful social interactions is about indefinable things, mannerisms, tone of voice, body language, whether or not a person wears nice shoes.
  
  The time for procrastination is over. I pick some random names within easy travelling distance and decide to email them – it seems less scary than a phone call in the first instance. It does feel just a bit like I’ve hung a stocking at the end of the bed, and I’m hoping that I’ll get what I’ve asked for when I wake up in the morning.

   

• All names and details have been changed to protect identities.