Thanks for trying out

Adventures in therapist shopping. I decided not to go with the woman who wants to heal my inner child. It wasn't the fact that her office was crammed with toys and a table-height sandbox. It wasn't that she chooses therapy approaches like cereal on the supermarket shelf. Nope. It's because she didn't get my name right and she had no idea what the deductible was I should be paying her.

Before we met for the first time, there was quite a bit of correspondence between the therapist (we'll call her Cindy) and me. We used our names liberally throughout. When we finally set a time and date for the appointment, Cindy told me she would leave some paperwork on a table in the waiting room and it would have my first name on it.

This was supposed to be a free, preliminary session, but a thick stack of papers was clipped with a pen and a note for "Faye." There was only one other person in the room, and she was leafing through a magazine. I picked up the clipboard and started writing. And writing. After about ten minutes, Cindy opened the door and walked over, hand outstretched, saying, "Hello, Faye. It's nice to meet you. I'm Cindy. "

I looked her in the eye, shook her hand and answered, "Hi. It's May." Cindy became a bit flustered and she said, "Is it? You know, I had a feeling I was writing the wrong thing when I put the papers out there. Sorry about that."

She continued to call me Faye throughout the entire meeting, despite my ongoing corrections.

The session was weird, the office was oppressive with oversized furniture and toys everywhere, making it overly cozy, cute, and way too kid oriented. I also didn't like the idea that the therapist had already chosen one specific therapy product for me before we had even met. It all felt wrong.

As the session wrapped up, we didn't talk about making a follow-up appointment because Cindy needed to check her availablity. Fine with me, fine with me.

That was a week ago.

I checked my voice mail on my cell phone this morning, and in addition to a message I was expecting, there was a message from Cindy.

She was muddled, to say the least. She called and said she missed me last night, and she hoped she hadn't screwed up. She was in the office until about 7:30 last night, but later she realized that I might have been waiting for her out in the sitting area. She went on to say that later in the evening, she remembered we had an appointment the previous Tuesday and she might have kept that slot open for this week thinking we had an appointment. [then it starts in earnest] Cindy started thinking out loud as she realized she was confused about being confused: "Oh, no, wait, I think we, now was it? I think we didn't schedule your next appointment when we wrapped up last week because I had to check when I would be available. Oh. I was supposed to call you..." And the rest of the message pretty much went like that.

I get the feeling that if I had hired this woman, eventually I would have buried her head in the little sandbox in her office.

Ding! Next!

Check in again on Friday for round two of Adventures in Therapist Shopping!