Mental Health Blog | Fight4mylife | United States

To start off with some background information…

I have been seeing some type of health worker my whole life, as most, if not all of us, hopefully, have. I have been seeing some type of mental health care worker on and off since I was 13 and entering the U.S. foster care system. throughout the 29 years I’ve been receiving different healthcare services, I have gone through a number of different providers of all kinds, from social workers to medical primary caregivers and specialists to social workers.

For some reason, no matter how many changes I’ve gone through, the same process goes on when transitioning providers. I get a new provider, I put my walls up until I know I can trust the new one, I start to feel comfortable and share the important information about my past and current level of physical or mental health functioning, or how I am doing with life skills when relevant, I build up a relationship with the new provider until for whatever reason (job turnover, the provider gets a promotion, the provider doesn’t fit my needs anymore, or I need different care from a different provider, etc.) the termination phase of my time with the current provider starts as I get ready for a new provider to take their place, then the cycle starts again.

About 2 months ago this process started all over again when my previous psychologist stated that she would be not working at the same mental health office because she was starting her own practice in a different city. I do not have any way to get to this different city, and I’m the kind of person who can’t have all of my appointments be virtual ones like she was offering some of her other clients, so we both made the decision that I would start seeing a different psychologist at the same office she was leaving from, the one I have been going to since before I even started seeing my now past provider.

Just before my final appointment with my most recent previous psychologist, I started feeling those same feelings of worry about how well I would like my new provider and fear about having to open up again with the personal matters of my life and past once again with a new provider who may not understand me as well as she had.

Despite the nerves and fear I was feeling I got through the experience alive just like I had all of the times I went through this similar experience before. It wasn’t smooth sailing the whole way through, but it also wasn’t as bad as I thought It would be. For some reason after I get comfortable with a new provider, I usually forget all of the fear I initially felt about leaving my old one, especially when I find that my new provider is just as professional and attentive as my previous one.

There were some things this time around, however, that helped me feel more calm than I had in previous instances where I was changing providers. some of these factors were not exactly in my control or had nothing to do with how I was acting or thinking during the change.

The factors not in my control that helped…

An example of one of the things that helped me feel at ease was that my previous provider gave me the news that I would need to switch providers an entire month before we ended our sessions In that month we had a session a week so that I had enough time to deal with the change. Despite the fact that I still had worries about who my new therapist was going to be, having enough time to say goodbye to my previous provider was a big help in making me feel at ease with the separation.

That is why, if you are a provider of any kind of services that deal with regular interactions with the same clients I would highly recommend you try to give your clients as much notice as you can when you will no longer be seeing that client for whatever reason. It really makes a big difference, or at least it did for me. While terminations are still going to be difficult and sad in some ways, at least with enough warning ahead of time, the client will have a better chance of handling the news better.

Another thing that really helped me was that my former therapist told me a bit about my new therapist and I knew someone else who recommended my new therapist as well. This word of mouth may not be possible for everyone switching providers, but if your current provider has been seeing you for quite a while if you feel they understand your needs, and if they are setting you up with a new provider, I would trust that they have your best interest in mind.

This may not ease all of your worries, especially not magically overnight, and you are still going to want to do your own vetting process to determine if you and the new therapist work well together, but if you trust your current provider, try to see that they wouldn’t intentionally set you up for failure after your sessions with them stop.

If you are not switching providers in the same agency for whatever reason, it is unlikely that you will be introduced to your new provider by your previous provider. In this situation, there can be more apprehension than if you had your current provider’s stamp of approval. I have been in that situation myself for different reasons.

At one time in my life, I was transferring offices because I wanted to try the office my mother used for therapy because I had heard good things and needed a certain type of therapist. That ended up being a great move for me and is the place I still go for therapy.

The last thing that was not in my control that helped me when dealing with this most recent change was that my new therapist asked me 3 questions…

1. What has worked for you in therapy in the past?
2. What hasn’t worked so well for you in therapy in the past?
3. What are your goals for therapy?

I won’t go into these answers here, but maybe in a different post, but just by her asking these questions, I felt more at ease.

If you are any kind of health or human service provider or social worker, I highly recommend you start with these three questions when seeing new clients/patients, especially as a way of building rapport with new clients/ patients.

If you are a client seeing a new provider and your new provider doesn’t ask these questions, it could be helpful to bring up these topics to the provider yourself if you feel comfortable doing so.

Everyone has their own unique way of doing things, and not every way works for every client, but if anyone reading this deals with clients/ patients, the ideas I’ve shared when put together with the code of ethics, and the best practices for your profession may help your clients feel more comfortable with the process of getting a new provider.

There were other factors that occurred that I was more in control of which helped make this most recent provider transition go a bit easier. I’m going to talk about those factors for the rest of this post.

Factors that were more in my control…

The biggest factor that was in my control when transitioning providers this most recent time was, believe it or not, my attitude about the situation. I know that sounds like something impossible to control, I often felt that way as well, and even still have to catch myself at times when I start getting too cynical and feeling hopeless.

It isn’t always something you can start doing right away, especially if you have gotten into a regular pattern of behavior where your worries negatively affect your emotions about a situation leading to you putting up your walls of cynicism to protect yourself from getting disappointed if the situation you are put in (like getting a new provider) doesn’t go as well as you wanted it to go.

That being said, whether we realize it or not, we are the best and most qualified ones to be able to control our own attitudes and outlooks on life. I am not saying there aren’t other factors at play in determining our emotions such as past traumas, chemical imbalances, or triggering behaviors of those around us, because those are more factors not in our immediate control.

I have, however, learned from some wise people (past providers and other mentors) that just because other people act a certain way, it doesn’t mean we have to let it affect how we feel. We will always have our initial gut reactions, but if we are able to find coping skills and other tools we get from things like therapy, and if we start putting in the work and using the tools we are given, we stand a better chance of developing new habits and reactions to future triggering events.

Past traumas and chemical imbalances are not exactly the same type of triggers as the behaviors of others, such as a sibling annoying us, but the traumas we go through all the way from us forming in our birth giving parents through the rest of our childhoods do negatively impact our developing minds and bodies and lead to these negative patterns of thought and behavior forming in our adult lives.

I would never suggest that we can easily fix the damage caused by our life traumas, or that we can easily stop reacting to our triggers. I am 29 years old and still working to break all of the negative patterns of thought and behavior I picked up from my childhood and early 20’s. It takes a constant effort of putting in the work every day to ensure you do even a little better today than you did yesterday.

I really am sorry for that, it’s not a fun part of life, but it is necessary to continue this journey of healing so that when the fun parts of life present themselves to you, you are better able to enjoy them and build up supportive human relationships with those closest to you.

Again I’m not saying I am perfect or that I don’t have moments or even days where I slide back into some problematic ways of thinking or acting, but now I am better able to recognize when I need to take time to get myself together and remember the coping skills I have gained through all of the work I have been doing to improve my thought processes and behaviors.

I’ve talked a bit about how to deal with other people’s behaviors and how to heal from past traumas, although not in great detail here (I can do separate posts if there is interest), but there is one thing that can negatively affect our thoughts and behaviors that we can’t control at first, or even by ourselves, but that we can control fairly easily, that is chemical imbalances.

I will say, If your brain doesn’t make enough of a certain chemical, or if it makes too much of a certain chemical, there is no coping skill in the world that is going to fix it no matter how hard you work at it, but there is still hope.

I say this understanding the sad reality that not everyone can afford healthcare, but in an ideal situation you would go to your primary doctor and tell them some of how you are feeling, they would do tests to rule out any underlying physical illness or disorder, and if they didn’t find anything physically wrong, they would refer you for mental health services from a qualified professional.

There are different types of professionals to go to for different mental health issues, I for example, see both a psychologist and a psychiatrist because I have chemical imbalances and trauma that both contribute to my mental health issues, and I function best when getting medication and talk therapy together.

Once you get diagnosed properly you and your doctor may decide it is best for you to try medication to help correct the chemical imbalance and after a process of trial and error you would ideally finally find a therapy and medication treatment that works for you, then your brain would start to even out and you could then start working on unlearning all of the negative patterns you had picked up when you were not getting proper treatment.

The steps I just talked about for fixing a chemical imbalance are sadly not going to be the same for everyone. it is the journey I took that worked for me personally. I am also blessed to live in a state where I am able to get medical insurance even though I make a low income.

I cannot give any medical or legal advice on how to treat a chemical imbalance if it is not covered or if you are uninsured, and I can really only share what I know works for me since I was not trained in advanced methods of psychology or psychiatry, but as someone who has been receiving mental health care for most of my life, I have been through the process of improving the way my brain functions.

I know we kind of got a bit off-topic, but I do hope you are able to see that we have more control over our attitude about life-changing events than we may realize or give ourselves credit for. Even if we do have a chemical imbalance that needs proper treatment, the doctors can’t force the medicine down our throats, our loved ones can’t make us start caring for our mental health if we don’t really want to, It is our job to take the first step to seek treatment, or take our medicine regularly. Even after we have started balancing our brain chemicals, it is still up to us to put in the work using our therapy tools and coping skills to change our habits and develop more positive ones.

Since I had been through the process of changing providers before, and since I had already developed some coping skills over the years, it put me in a better position to be able to challenge all of the irrational fears I had as well as the issues of abandonment I started to develop. It took me a bit of time to take a step back and begin using my deep breathing and self-reflection, but eventually, I started coming up with a pros and cons list of all of the positives of getting a new provider, and all of the potential draw-backs. this may be helpful for others so I will share that list now.

Pros

• I was thinking about getting a new therapist anyway since I didn’t feel as connected to my previous one as I did in the beginning.
• It will give me a chance to learn something new from a new person since I have learned so much from my previous provider.
• The new provider sometimes brings a therapy dog to the sessions and I love animals.
• I wouldn’t have to do only virtual appointments for the rest of my treatment.

Cons

• I would miss the unique bond with my previous therapist
• I had never met the new therapist before and didn’t know if she would understand me at all.
• I didn’t know if the new provider would be able to help me with all of my concerns, or even with any of them.

It gave me hope when I looked at the list I had made and saw that there were less con’s than there were pros. After going through the list of cons and challenging them to see if they still outweighed the pros, I was able to see that the bit of uncertainty I felt about getting a new provider was nothing compared to the excitement I felt that I was going to get the chance to meet a therapist who might be able to help me in ways my previous ones had not been able to help me in.

When I was finally feeling more comfortable with the situation, I started to feel hopeful, and then before I knew it, I had my first meeting with my new provider. I still had some of my walls up in the first session, but I didn’t give up or ask for a new therapist. A while ago, I learned that you should give a new provider a try for a few sessions to get used to their unique helping style and personality.

I am about 2 months into weekly sessions with my new provider and I will say, she is not exactly like my previous providers, and our relationship isn’t the exact same as the one I had with any of my previous providers. I am, however, no longer anxious, nervous, scared, or feeling hopeless about our interactions or about my prospects of healing more with this new therapist. Thing’s still aren’t perfect, but they are a lot better than they were, so I am happy I went through the process of getting another new healthcare provider.

I’m starting this new thing where I ask my audience relevant questions about their life experiences. This is the first post I’m doing this for so let me know how you like the change.

What about you…

Have you ever felt anxious or scared of getting a new healthcare provider or social worker? (you don’t have to go into any details as this is a public forum and not a substitute for therapy or other types of mental health care). If you have ever felt anxious about getting a new provider, what are some strategies you used to cope with that? Please comment with any other thoughts or questions as well.