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Notes -
Does anyone have any advice around relationships counselors in Western countries? Particularly regarding 'counselors' (eg did a counseling course with accreditation) vs actual trained psychologists. I'm looking at seeing one individually, but unsurprisingly there aren't any male counselors available so I'm trying my luck with a female one. I'm concerned that a woman won't be able to properly empathise with a male point of view, and might balk at certain 'how the sausage gets made' conversations.
This isn't for anything critical, just relationship advice regarding my specific situation (with details I wouldn't share here, even incognito).
Here in the States, having a MSW is actually a prerequisite for the additional coursework that goes with each particular specialty in question, as is practicing in residence under another licensed mental health professional (LMHP) within the same discipline, such as a licensed professional counselor (LPC) or a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT). If your concern is that they're not equivalent to a trained psychologist, then you can rest easy--LMHPs in general meet that bar and then some. That said, just because and individual has managed a graduate degree and a license, that doesn't necessarily make them a good counselor or therapist. Like all LMHPs, a good counselor or therapist is worth their weight in gold, as there are plenty of, well, not-so-good ones out there. Just like finding a good PCP that will actually listen to your concerns and tailor their advice/treatment to you accordingly, finding a good counselor that will do the same is possible (they exist!), but you might not necessarily find one your first time out of the gate, so I'd advise patience and willingness to go elsewhere to find a good fit. One other thing to address is that since you're doing individual counseling, as a rule good individual therapy will focus your needs, and any relationship counseling will come from the perspective of what is best for you, regardless of whether or not that's at odds with what is best for the relationship. Relationship counseling, OTOH, focuses on treating the relationship and not the individuals. FWIW, judging by your other reply, it sounds like individual therapy is the way to go.
And because we're on the subject, I've also had experience with doing relationship counseling in my marriage, and my situation was similar to /u/RenOS below. Despite being an LPC herself, my wife genuinely acted as if the purpose of marriage counseling was, for lack of a better descriptor, to make me "do right". Our marriage counselor (who was an LPC as well) quickly twigged to my wife's particular issues, which to be fair to my wife are rooted in massive childhood trauma, and although she didn't focus specifically on that, all it took was several sessions' worth of trying to work with that before my wife abruptly ragequit. It took another year and another separation, during which time we each had to come to grips with our own shit, before we were actually able to start doing things differently.
edit: tidied up some grammar
Yes, I've done therapy before so I'm pretty much expecting that the first counselor I try might not be a good fit. Especially considering its a woman.
I have had a good female counselor before, but considering the things I'm going to say, I just don't know if your average female counselor will be able to focus her empathy and bend her point of view enough to accommodate male needs in a relationship (emotional as well as physical). I'll see how I go, but at least I'm managing my expectations going in. If she doesn't work, I'll shop around to find a guy rather than wasting time and money trying multiple women.
Understandable. I know counselors that can empathize with you are out there, both male and female, and I hope your new counselor is one of said females. Best of luck!
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I tell patients sometimes that finding a therapist is not like a PCP - you might like your PCP more or less but they all fundamentally do more or less the same thing. It's like buying a car. Some are better some are worse and they might be missing bells and whistles...but it is all the same shit.
A therapist is more like offering a specific movie.
If you are looking for a Rom Com then The Godfather isn't going to be what you need.
Find the therapist that offers the right movie for you.
Does that feel right to you?
I should have replied earlier.
The movie I want has unexpected twists and perhaps an unhappy ending. I'm expecting to be challenged and for them to hold a true mirror up.
Reality always wins, but its sometimes a bitter pill to swallow.
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I don't think I need a therapist but I am curious - how would one find the right movie? I mean, actual movies have re views, trailers, etc. What do the therapists have? I never even seen an ad for a therapist ever - are they even allowed?
I mean, I can't even tell you how to get the right doctor. Shit is hard as fuck.
Lots of people use word of mouth within an IRL social network or via something like Facebook. You can find lists in your area or otherwise online (and with Telehealth...world is your oyster). Many people are already seeing an MD for med management and they have referral networks. More so than general medicine getting something that matches your insurance is harder since so many do cash, which in that case you gotta match the financial resources.
On top of those considerations you have an element of "if this one doesn't work for you, try someone else."
Frustratingly many people stop after the first one or continue with the first one even if it's not a good match.
Sigh, tell me about it. Next to impossible, unfortunately I have some experience. Same goes for most of professionals, unfortunately, but at least some have reviews and portfolios (not a guarantee but at least something...) Good thing at least I don't need that one, it would frustrate me to no end.
I can tell you that on the healthcare end of things the issue is that the people who want to be serious about "shopping" over focus on customer service and end up with awful care as a result.
In many other types of engagements customer service is a large part of the service so I imagine it is a bit easier.
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Really good comment! If I'm understanding you correctly, which is to say that most therapists will in their profiles/web pages/whatever advertise their preferred specialties and modalities and the like, then I think it does, yeah. To develop this thought a little further, while some modalities have become mainstream and common, there's still plenty of specific modalities for specific problems, like DBT specialists for BPD, CSTs for sexual specific issues, et cetera, and in that sense I'd absolutely agree that it's good idea to do one's homework and pick the right "genre" of movie accordingly. I was glossing most of that over in thinking, okay, so there are relationship issues but OP is doing individual therapy, and asking about counselors specifically... yeah, if they're seeing a LMHC, LPC, or whatever their State wants to call it, then OP should at least be in the right neighborhood. Not 100% guarantee, of course, but generally speaking looking at a good flavor of individual therapist. In making my comments about a PCP, I was drawing on my own experiences with a PCP in the past. I had a bad one that simply brushed off a serious and chronic medical problem that I had and when I got fed up and went directly to a surgeon, said surgeon took one look and was like, "yeah, you need surgery," and promptly scheduled me. My current PCP (when I actually see her) tends to actually listen to my presenting problem and offer me solutions if she has them or referrals if she doesn't, and I'm grateful for that. My wife has had similar experiences, so for both of us even getting more than blown off has been a non-trivial problem that we've had to overcome, hence my thinking that finding a good fit requires work even at the PCP level, and isn't something that can be expected right out of the gate. I think that part remains true, and the whole genre twist is an important one, though now my brain is going, "well, ackshully, all these licensed folks have to do so many hours of continuing education each year, some of which is different modalities, so maybe it's more like go to the right multiplex," aaaaand I'm gonna kill the analogy there before it goes further into the weeds.
Hmmmm what I'm really trying to find a way to emphasize is that the personality and the style they have to offer is part of the modality in therapy in a way that doesn't apply for other interventions. Yes the type of therapy matters but some people are never going to respond well to a more "ooey gooey feelings" type, or (frustratingly!) think they'd never respond well to that but would do great.
I think it's more common in the MD psychiatrist realm but you do see plenty of men who speak the male language and are heavy on tough love while still doing traditional therapy, which naively I imagine would work great for most of the Motte complainer types who mostly imagine a SJ adjacent "feelings" therapist.
Okay, gotcha. I still think your analogy holds merit, and that as much as good therapists can project an affect that I see as inherently Therapeutic (think Dr. Wong if you're a Rick and Morty) fan, it's also true that there's still some bleed-through that happens, personality-wise. So general agree, just was thinking along different lines.
Also, I gotta say that given my wife's firsthand experience in grad school the SJ stuff can be... whoo, boy! I mean, most of her texts were what you'd expect, but she also had texts like Decolonizing Methodologies and Privilege, Power, and Difference so, yeah. But getting into that would be thread derailing, so I'll just say that I think that there was enough dissonance there that my impression is that she mostly was able to doublethink here way through it.
In my interaction with therapists I think many of them aren't as broken by social justice as you might expect from the training and reading material. Fundamentally the goal is to help people, and the reality of the darkness you see helping with mental illness sands off some of the naive edges I think.
So great at playing the language games though yikes.
Yeah, that's certainly been true for my wife. After a few years of wanting the hard luck cases and the downtrodden, she's learning that working harder than her clients is a bad idea and that too much of that sort of thing is burning her out. That said, it was certainly an experience when she wanted to talk about Systemic Racism with me, blissfully unaware that I'd been around the internet more than long enough to have experienced many HBD debates and that the argument she was making was essentially straight from the Dread Jim with the serial numbers filed off. GUH.
Language games, of course, lead inevitably to The Rectification Of The Names. Alas.
I would say you could fix her, but sounds like she doesn't need fixing.
I wonder how much seethe it would cause on /r/CoupleMemes if one posted a video of a young attractive white couple cuddling while a male AI voice reads (naturally, with subtitles that proceed one word at a time):
After a few years of wanting the hard luck cases and the downtrodden, she's learning that working harder than her clients is a bad idea and that too much of that sort of thing is burning her out. That said, it was certainly an experience when she wanted to talk about Systemic Racism with me, blissfully unaware that I'd been around the internet more than long enough to have experienced many HBD debates and that the argument she was making was essentially straight from the Dread Jim with the serial numbers filed off 💕More options
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N=1, but I had the amusing situation that while my wife talked me into going to a counsellor with her and I thought it's going to be a huge waste of money just to get someone to side with her, the (female, older) counsellor actually ended up being more sympathetic to me, if anything. It took only two appointments until my wife agreed that it was too expensive, and inconvenient for other reasons anyway. She also seemed somewhat mollified afterwards, so I guess it was worth the money after all.
This is just me speculating based on general life, but I wouldn't expect men to necessarily be more empathetic to you, unfortunately. Men can put women on a pedestal just fine. Especially if you're reasonably attractive & socially competent, you almost always can leverage some attraction/sympathy to your benefit, and that goes for both sexes. I'd say your best bet is a no-nonsense older married woman with kids (ideally teenage/adult sons with shitty girlfriends, but that's probably hard to find out). Those are both most likely to be sympathetic in my experience, and will usually have no problem being pragmatic. It's also important to start out nice and friendly at the first appointment, talk about her private life and be empathetic to her, which will allow you to both gauge whether she's the kind of person you want to get counselled by, and also to simply make her empathize back. Our counsellor was pretty open and happy to share, obviously nothing super-private, but she also though that a good match is important for counselling to work.
I'll keep it in mind to build some rapport before dumping on them. Luckily I'm doing individual counseling only, so I won't need to worry about them taking sides. I'll be the only one they meet.
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In the US, you'd be looking for an LMFT. I've noticed male ones on psychology today in most major cities. If you're looking for individual care, then telehealth is the way to go. Expands your options by quite a bit. If you are in California or Massachusetts then I know a couple I would recommend.
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I am dating a zoomer who thinks “Everyone should go to therapy regularly even if there are no specific problems, it’s just a health checkup for the brain!”. This means, apparently, both singles therapy and couples therapy. We have just the one female counsellor who serves all three roles (her individual sessions, my individual sessions, and the couples sessions). Which I’m sure must be a conflict of interest, but whatever, I go to indulge my adorable basket case of a zoomette, not to be the professional ethics police.
Sample size N=1, but I have absolutely found, as you suspected, that she is completely unable to empathise with the male perspective on anything.
Turns out Scientology was prescient! You have to periodically exorcise the Thetans to maintain the Clear status.
(The prescience being about having someone in a position of authority poke around your psyche occasionally being both happily accepted and conducive to keeping the population compliant. Of course, you could argue that the Catholics got there first with confession, but it was the Scientologists who gave it a "scientific" coat of paint and the idea that it is for your health rather than otherworldly obligations.)
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I saw a clip of a standup comedian saying that seeing a relationship counselor when you aren't married and don't have children just means you should break up, and I'm inclined to agree. If you have children and a mortgage, you should be doing everything in your power to try and make the relationship work: if not, you're probably better off just cutting your losses.
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Wild dynamic - your gf is essentially demanding another person be in your relationship! I wonder what she gets out of it.
I will admit to sometimes wanting a referee.
Sure, but the cumulative capital flowing from the couple to this therapist (3 different types of therapy...) is a huge outlay. I'd pick being Poly over being forced into therapy like this any day.
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The more the merrier.
If one wants to add to the throuple and expand into a polycule, one could consider one or all of the following to accompany the therapist (LMFT) for additional Expert advice:
I am not familiar with the investment industry in the US, but I don't think a financial advisor doing private client work with people with net worth in the single digits (the equivalent of a UK IFA) would have a CFA charter. (CFA stands for Chartered Financial Analyst, not Advisor).
The CFA is an extremely demanding exam-based qualification and is about as prestigious as it is possible for a qualification to be if anyone can get it by passing an exam. Most people who take it are already working as financial professionals and do it over 4-5 years of part-time study. The typical CFA holder is working in a mid to senior role in a bank or buy-side investment firm.
You can register as an investment advisor with a CFA, but most registered investment advisors got there by passing the much easier FINRA exams.
I agree with @JarJarJedi that none of these people are going to get involved in intra-family affairs, except that a good financial advisor will discuss options for transferring wealth to kids and grandkids, including questions like "when should they get access to the money", and an estate lawyer will go into such issues as far as is necessary to write a will.
Interestingly, at the high end part of what a true private banker (I'm talking about the kind of service you aren't in the market for unless the family net worth is well into double figures) is paid for is to understand the whole family and to offer financial advice that takes that into account. A private banker absolutely would, if asked, mediate in a money argument between family members in a way none of the other professionals on that list would.
I'm well aware the "A" in CFA doesn't stand for Advisor. Just as a CPA isn't required to be a tax accountant nor is a CFP required to be a financial planner, but I threw them in there for the microhumor on credential inflation. As I mentioned elsewhere, they're just the designations most stereotypically associated with each. If CFAs, CFPs, CPAs are the most common designations for financial advisors and planners, and we give CPAs to tax accountants and CFPs to financial planners, that only leaves CFAs for financial advisors.
Where, as I previously mentioned, self-identified financial advisors also often offer planning and self-identified financial planners also often financial advisory. In fact, the types of advice all five of those roles offer can often overlap.
As I already explained:
"While one can always find low-performing financial advisors, financial planners, tax accountants, tax attorneys, and estate lawyers out there, a lot of being a professional in higher-paying client-oriented work (such as the roles mentioned above) involves proactively thinking on behalf of your client(s), describing and outlining options and tradeoffs for your clients."
"Or at least, being able to convincingly portray you’re doing so even if you’re not, and telling them in the early stages 'talk between yourselves and decide what you want, then tell me and I'll tell you how to do it' does not quite lend such a portrayal. Especially when what they think they want may be against their best interests or straight-up unlawful to implement."
Especially for financial advisors and planners, the roles are much closer to being sales/relationship management (that is, managing a relationship with an account) than being say, a HFT quantitative researcher; @JarJarJedi's characterization that "all of those are pure technical roles" is completely baseless and inaccurate.
In countries including but not limited to the States, the Scotsman you're describing is a private wealth manager (or sometimes called a wealth manager), typically used for a financial advisor targeting high net worth clients. A private banker typically refers to someone who sells financial products to high net worth clients.
And indeed, whenever there's more than one client involved in a client account relationship, whether the relationship between the clients be spousal, parent-children, or both, there can be tradeoffs, differences of opinion, balancing of interests. As I explained for the case of a couple: "there can involve balancing the individual concerns of the two members of the couple and navigating the tradeoffs between the utility functions of one and the other. Aka, dealing with the relationship." Of course, one could take a No True Mediation line of argument, since the topics at hand may be different and level of intrusiveness might differ (or might not) than conversations with a therapist.
Under the traditional 1% of AUM model, it can be easily worth it for a financial advisors and planners to help "navigate the tradeoffs between the utility functions of one and the other," for clients well below "double figures" of what I presume to be millions USD. Even a couple with just $5 million USD is worth $50,000 of fees annually. These fees are the lifeblood of financial advisors and AUM-fee-based planners. They'll do what it takes within reason to keep a client account going and telling them "talk between yourselves and decide what you want, then tell me and I'll tell you how to do it" is risking the account going elsewhere. Hourly fee-based financial advisors and planners will be even happier to sit around and deal with any relationship-navigating.
Here's one amusing anecdote as to how determined financial advisors are for obtaining and maintaining client accounts:
Quite a few years ago I temporarily had a brokerage account at say Bank XYZ, with only a few hundred thousand USD worth of stuff I was transferring around to chase transfer bonuses. I've long since transferred this account out and closed it. The financial advisory side of Bank XYZ, starting from the time I opened that brokerage account, has been regularly calling me to try to sell me on their financial advisory services (and still try to this day). Each time they call (once every few weeks to a few months) they leave a voicemail and say something like "I just wanted to check-in since I see you haven't reached back out to [last person who called me] yet..." So there's a long unbroken chain of follow-up voicemails—and in Ship of Theseus style—where the more recent callers almost certainly haven't overlapped with the first few callers in their tenures at Bank XYZ's financial advisory.
Other banks have also attempted something similar but not as persistently/thirstily.
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Neither of those would go any further into the family relationships than "discuss important stuff with your SO". All of those are pure technical roles that help dealing with outside world, not your relationship.
All of those, when hired by a couple, involve balancing the individual concerns of the two members of the couple and navigating the tradeoffs between the utility functions of one and the other. Aka, dealing with the relationship.
I don't think CPA is going to do that. A CPA would say "talk between yourselves and decide what you want, then tell me and I'll tell you how to do it". So would any professional. If I hire a painter and I tell him I want the wall in teal and my wife wants it in beige then the painter won't mediate between us, he'll say "well, figure out between yourselves which color you want and call me when you have it".
Depends on the CPA’s specialty. If he does estate planning, trusts, etc then he might.
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Sounds like you’re already retreating from talking confidently about “all of those roles” to “I don't think CPA is going to do that” and returning back to extrapolate upon all of those roles from your head-canon of the tax accountant.
While one can always find low-performing financial advisors, financial planners, tax accountants, tax attorneys, and estate lawyers out there, a lot of being a professional in higher-paying client-oriented work (such as the roles mentioned above) involves proactively thinking on behalf of your client(s), describing and outlining options and tradeoffs for your clients.
Or at least, being able to convincingly portray you’re doing so even if you’re not, and telling them in the early stages “talk between yourselves and decide what you want, then tell me and I'll tell you how to do it" does not quite lend such a portrayal. Especially when what they think they want may be against their best interests or straight-up unlawful to implement.
After all, that’s what you’re supposedly there for, to share your knowledge as a knowledge-based professional—not a painter just looking to complete a wall.
The work of a tax accountant can involve a lot more than punching in numbers into TurboTax/H&RBlock for a couple if they’re not explicitly one-off flat fee clients. Even in just execution (much less planning) there can be a lot of decisions to be made with regard to a given year’s tax realization and how, and two members of a couple can have quite different opinions on how such things do, can, and/or should work.
Sure, if you pay enough, you can find a CPA which would work as your family relationship consultant. Heck, I can see a sum where I would agree to do the same (it'd be a lot of money, but still a finite sum). But that's not a typical financial advisor/CPA and not one that I have ever seen. Maybe I am just too poor to see any really good ones. But so are likely 90% of other people then.
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What is the difference between a financial advisor and a financial planner?
It's not uncommon for financial advisors to be financial planners and vice versa.
Stereotypically, financial advisors are somewhat more prestigious and are more focused on things like investments and asset allocation. Financial planners are more "holistic," who may consider things like life insurance but may be more basic with regard to things like investment theory knowhow. Fee/compensation structures may or may not reflect as such.
In countries like the States—financial advisors are stereotypically CFA instead of CFP holders, financial planners are CFP instead of CFA holders. Although one can certainly hold both designations.
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Absolutely. Assuming you're American, this is enough of a conflict of interest that your therapist could potentially lose her license were you or your girlfriend to file a complaint. It's also all-too-common behavior, unfortunately.
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Sounds like you might need a reliable therapist in the future, after all.
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