How to Find the Right Therapist by Using Your Intuition (It Works!)

First, what is intuition? And how does it work?

If you’re a spiritual person, you might understand intuition as a spiritual function that connects you to a higher power or greater reality. Spiritual practices like prayer and meditation can help you develop your intuition.

However, you don’t have to be religious or even spiritual to appreciate and use intuition. There’s a scientific way to understand and use it, too.

Your brain keeps much of the work it does secret from you.

All day long, in countless ways, your brain is processing information below the threshold of your awareness.

This is why you can do complicated activities in a state of total distraction or zone out when you drive and still get to your destination safely. It’s also how you can know something without knowing how you know.

When your intuition kicks in, it’s as if your brain went from the beginning to the end of a thought process in a single step. Beneath the threshold of your awareness, your brain adds up all you’ve learned from all of your past experiences and gives you an answer based on the sum total of that knowledge.

This might be why intuitive decisions are accurate so much of the time. It’s also why it’s important to learn how to make intuition part of the process when you’re making a choice that has the power to change your life—like choosing a therapist.

It takes practice to learn how to tell intuition from anxiety or bias. But once you get the hang of it, you can start following your inner compass with confidence.

One way to tell the difference is that intuition comes through “clear.” It’s a simple knowing that seems to come from a deep place. It makes you feel like you’re breaking out of a loop instead of getting stuck in one. It might surprise you with how different it is from how you normally think.

Intuition tends to give you a sense of peace and clarity even if it’s not giving you the answer you wanted or expected. It’s steady and consistent, unlike anxiety, which causes you to waver back and forth and second-guess yourself. Intuition also tends to be “quieter” than anxiety.

While anxiety keeps you doubting and worrying, intuition makes you feel centered and calm. It helps you focus on the choice you know is the right one. Doubt might make you question your intuitive choice, but over time, you’ll keep coming back to what your intuition knows is right for you.

It’s worth practicing until you learn how to recognize your intuition. You might be surprised by how much more effective your decisions become once you’ve got the hang of it.

Sometimes, intuition can lead you right to where you need to be without having to do anything to get it to work.

Your gut might tell you to show up at a certain place at a certain time, for example, and when you do, you find exactly what you’re looking for.

This can happen when you’re looking for a therapist, too. You might suddenly get an idea of exactly what to search for and know you’ve found the right person as soon as you see the third search result.

But this is rare, even if you’re a really intuitive person. Intuition usually needs a kickstart. It works better if you take a few other steps first.

The main way to prime your intuition is to follow your reason as far as it will take you. Put effort into thinking about your options. Compare them. Think about how they’re similar and different. Make lists. (We’ll go into more detail about how to do this in the next section.)

Intuition is a mostly unconscious process that helps you finish what you started. The more you think and research, the better it works. It takes into account all of the information you’ve filed into your brain as well as information you may not be consciously aware of.

Certain therapists may remind you of people you worked well with (or didn’t work well with) in the past. They might have qualities that you appreciate on a subtle level but can’t name. Your intuition will help you connect the dots.

Reason helps you make choices based on what you can measure or map into rational categories. It’s what you use to put together a list of therapists who meet your “must-have” criteria.

For example, you can decide how much you can pay for therapy and narrow your list to therapists who accept your insurance or offer sliding-scale fees. You can determine how far you’re willing to travel and narrow your search by distance or online availability. You may also have preferences about a therapist’s area of expertise, counseling philosophy, or the method they use.

Next, you can narrow down your list based on your preferences about a therapist’s gender, race, ethnic background, sexuality, and religion. It’s reasonable to assume that a therapist who is more like you will have more shared life experiences, understand you in a more personal way, and be less likely to unfairly judge you.

(Alternately, you might have personal reasons for preferring a therapist who is different from you in one or more ways.)

By the time you’ve made a list of therapists who use the right method, are available at the right times, charge the right price, and have the right personal and professional background, you’ll have probably narrowed down your list significantly. You’ll have also really primed your intuition to take you through the next steps.

So, once you’ve done all of that, how do you choose from the remaining therapists on your list?

Even if you’ve limited your list significantly by filtering out all of the therapists who don’t meet your minimum requirements, you might still have many to choose from.

This is as far as the rational process can take you. When you can’t sort your list any further, intuition is the only way forward.

It may sound strange, but choosing a therapist is a lot like dating. In both cases, you are seeking a long-term relationship with someone you hope will change your life.

You share your deepest hopes and greatest fears with your therapist. You want many of the same things from them you want from a partner: for them to help you be less alone, feel more alive, and unlock the fullest potential inside of you.

The similarities don’t end there. When you search for a therapist or a romantic partner, you start with your must-haves, like the criteria we discussed above. You might have some pretty strong preferences about gender and location, for example.

But you don’t choose someone simply based on the categories you can sort them into. You might start there, but you need more. You need to know what it’s like to talk to them or be with them. You need to know how they make you feel.

When you’re dating, you save time by seeing how you feel when you look at someone’s profile before you decide to go on a date with them. You can do the same thing when you’re looking for a therapist. Once you’ve narrowed down your list based on all your must-haves and dealbreakers, you can get a sense of which therapists on your list you’d actually like to meet by looking at their webpage or bio.

Therapist profiles give you a lot of information you can use when you’re in the analysis phase of your research and are still separating things into categories. But they also give you a lot of information that’s valuable to your intuition.

Intuition is a holistic response. It’s a sense of “Yes” or “No” your brain generates based on your overall impression of someone. For example, they might remind you of someone you loved—or hated. You might not know why, but that’s still valuable information.

Making a connection with someone is about having a good dynamic. You can often sense whether you click with another person right away, when you first meet, or even before you’ve met in person. You might understand something about them you can’t explain to yourself (at least not yet).

So, try to focus on things that help you form that impression. See how their picture makes you feel and if you can get a sense of how they talk and what they sound like by how they write. Lean in to the sense you get when you add up everything they share about where they’ve come from and what moves them.

Do they seem like someone you’d like to talk to? Do they seem like someone who would get you? When you’ve found a few who feel right, you’re ready for the next step.

Sometimes you might get a clear feeling about one person just based on their profile, and sometimes you have to meet a few therapists first before you can decide which one feels right.

You can only get so far with information you find online. To fully activate and use your intuition, we suggest setting up trial sessions with the therapists in your shortlist. Think of these first sessions as job interviews.

Intuition picks up on subtle cues, and online profiles hide those from view. But when you’re in the room with someone, they’re all available to you: their mannerisms, facial expressions, tone of voice, sense of humor, personality, warmth, wit, and other qualities that will determine whether they’re right for you.

Obviously, it’s not reasonable to meet with dozens of therapists—even if you had the time and money, it would be easy to get lost in the process.

So, start with a rational process of elimination, then sit with what you feel about the therapists who are still on your list. Do this until you’ve narrowed your list down to five or less—ideally three.

Most therapists will be completely comfortable with you coming in to see if they are a match for you. If it helps, you can explain your purpose when you call: “I’m searching for the right therapist and want to see if we’re a good fit. Can I schedule a consultation to meet you?” On the rare occasion a therapist says no, it’s a good sign they weren’t right for you—and that you just saved yourself a lot of time.

Most people who do this find that one therapist stands out as the right one. Once you get to that point, your decision is easy. It’s like when you date—you know you’ve found “the one” when you can’t wait to see them again, tell them your secrets, and simply be in the same room with them.

That feeling of wanting to be with someone comes from a pretty deep place. Having a good (or bad) feeling about someone often points to a hidden truth that you discover later. So trust it. If the thought of seeing a particular therapist makes you feel excited and hopeful, and you feel like you could open up to them, that’s the one to go with.

You might feel like you’ve almost made your decision, but you’re not completely sure. When you can’t quite make a choice, you can end up overthinking and getting stuck. Fortunately, you can break through this block by following the classic advice to “sleep on it.”

One reason “sleeping on it” works is that, well, your brain needs sleep to work. Sleep is how your brain repairs itself, strengthening important connections and shedding others. Lack of sleep causes you to make poor decisions, because your brain isn’t at its best when you haven’t rested.

“Sleeping on it” also works for the same reason intuition works in the first place. It’s also the reason therapy helps: the unconscious mind is very powerful. When you leave your brain to come up with decisions on its own, it can access and use more information than you consciously know.

Your brain is constantly operating outside of your awareness. And it works pretty efficiently that way. It makes your life easier by doing a lot of things automatically for you. For example, it’s easier not to have to make a decision about every breath you take or recall the exact steps involved in tying your shoe.

But your unconscious can do more than that, too. When you spend a long time consciously thinking about something, you prime your unconscious to continue working on the problem even after you shift your attention to something else. And that’s often when things finally click into place.

Research has shown that no matter how you shift your conscious attention off of what you’ve been thinking about—whether with sleep, a distracting task, or simply thinking about something else—it helps you make a better decision than if you never take a break.

So if you’re stuck trying to decide, stop thinking about it for a while. Come back after a day or two, and it will probably be a lot clearer which therapist feels like the best match for you.