SOME REFLECTIONS ON WHERE YOU GO FOR COUNSELING You should bear in mind that where you go for counseling or therapy is nothing more than an address. What is important is what happens in your relationship with your counselor or {58} therapist. If you have found a therapist whom you respect and feel motivated to work with, it makes little difference, as far as the benefits you obtain from therapy are concerned, whether your therapist works in private practice or offers his or her services through an agency, school, hospital, or residential facility. On the other hand, where you go for counseling _will_ greatly determine the price you will pay for services and frequently whether health insurance will cover your expenses. To some extent, where you go can sometimes, as we have noted, influence the quality of care and individual attention you receive. But this is a generalization; you frequently will be able to locate excellent care through less expensive facilities. This will depend to some extent on luck, but more on the amount of effort you put into locating the kind of help you may need. Since you are reading this book, you already have initiative like this: you have the ability to influence what kind and quality of therapy you will receive. For you, it will be less a matter of pure luck than it is for people who choose a therapy and therapist arbitrarily. {59} 7 SELF-DIAGNOSIS Mapping Your Way to a Therapy This chapter is central to your use of this book as a guide. There are two main ways to use this book to help you to choose a therapy: 1. You can familiarize yourself with all of the major approaches to therapy, weigh their advantages and disadvantages in relation to your needs, and then make a choice. Twenty-six approaches to therapy are discussed and evaluated in this book, so keeping your judgments of their pros and cons clearly in mind can be challenging. Although comprehensive understanding has a value of its own, it may not be essential to you. 2. You may prefer to go through three simple steps to narrow the alternatives down to a small number of therapies that have been most successful for specific goals, problems, and personal attributes that most closely approximate your own. This is a less time-consuming process, and it will take into account professional evaluations of the different therapies. In either case, your informed judgment will be the basis for your eventual choice. This chapter is intended to help you if you prefer the second route--to narrow down the alternatives in a clear and logical way. If you prefer, however, to become acquainted with all of the major therapies discussed in this book, {60} you might skim through sections of this chapter to give you a framework for more efficient understanding.