How not to choose a clinical counsellor

My first EMDR appointment was supposed to be tonight, Thursday.  I booked it that day on purpose because I am taking the course again tomorrow and I had this nerdy idea in my brain that I would be a better student and absorb more from the course if I had experienced a session just prior.  Things started to fuck up on Wednesday when the counsellor emailed me to say she had thought I was coming on Wednesday instead, apologizing for her confusion and wondering if I could come later on Thursday because she didn’t have time when I had originally booked.  I accommodated this (because I still wanted the session and because part of me was assuming the mix up was somehow my fault- which it wasn’t).

So I drove over there tonight arriving five minutes early like a respectful little client.  And waited in the waiting area and waited and waited.  Finally, nearly half an hour late she emerged from her office and walked past me in the waiting room, heading out to go home.  I stopped her and asked about our appointment.  She was flummoxed and confused and didn’t realize that we still had an appointment.  She made a halfhearted attempt to say something about having an appointment then, but I said no.  Not unkindly.  Just that she had that look of someone who is done for the day and there was no way I wanted an hour of time that looked like me keeping this woman from her bed.

I chose her very impulsively, because I liked her face in the profile picture she posted on her website. She looked older and wiser, and with a smiling sense of humour.  Maybe someone who would get me.  I picked her after scrolling past a couple of men with big white teeth and muscle-y looking necks.  I also scrolled past anyone with bleached blonde hair (personal bias) and anyone who appeared to be under the age of thirty.  Apparently this is not a good way to select a counsellor.  Shawn laughed at me when I told him what happened and told me the twenty-somethings would have better apps to manage their calendars.

The counsellor has sent me two emails since I got home, the first one apologizing and the second one inviting me to have a Skype session with her tonight.  Eww.  I have ignored both emails so I can think about whether I really want to do this after all.  With her. Or with anyone.  I was quite nervous about the whole thing and it took a lot of inner push to get there at all.  Now that I’ve been botched twice I seem to have lost some of my initial resolve.  Shields up.

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