15 Therapist Green Flags
Many enter the therapy professions. Few provide expert care.
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After I posted 50 Therapy Red Flags, readers immediately asked me for a companion list of “green flags”—qualities of truly excellent therapists.
This one is harder. The green flags aren’t immediately obvious. Many are about the therapist’s character, not specific things the therapist does.
The green flags list is shorter, for a reason:
There are more ways to be a bad therapist than a good therapist. There are only so many paths to excellence, and infinite wrong turns. I’m reminded of Tolstoy’s famous quotation: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
This list will draw fire too, but here goes.
In-depth personal psychotherapy for the psychotherapist. No one can know another person’s inner life unless they are intimately familiar with their own.
Unfailing honesty with themselves and their patients, especially when it’s difficult.
Unwavering commitment to self-examination. They know they also have unconscious motives; their willingness to face them keeps the therapy on track.
Seeks every possible opportunity for clinical supervision or consultation from expert teachers and mentors.
Never forgets that the purpose of psychotherapy is psychological change. When psychotherapy is finished, the patient should be different in ways that matter.
Understands that their own emotional responses to patients provide essential information about the patient’s inner world, and knows how to use that information constructively.
Discusses the therapy relationship. They know that people recreate their problematic relationship patterns wherever they go, including in the relationship with the therapist. Patients show us their problems before they can tell us.
Understands that the therapy “frame” and boundaries are essential for in-depth work and maintains them gracefully.
Humility about the limits of their knowledge—and a readiness to reconsider what they think they know when new information arises.
Generosity of spirit. This doesn’t mean neglecting their own needs or making unreasonable sacrifices. It means dedicating themselves fully, heart, mind, and soul, to the work of each session.
Recognizes that they can never fully understand someone else’s experience (understanding our own is more than hard enough) and tirelessly strives to understand more—knowing they are destined to fall short.
Has a hunger to know the full range of human experience, averting their gaze from nothing. This includes sexuality (not just the tame versions), aggression, hate, hopelessness, and despair.
Willingness to bear emotional pain. Psychotherapy isn’t reducible to interventions and procedures. When a therapist enters another’s inner world, they feel pain too. There are ways therapists can distance and protect themselves—but they choose, deliberately, to forgo those protections.
Deep curiosity about what is unseen and unknown. They know there are layers of experience, and far more than meets the eye. They look beyond the surface and don’t settle for superficial answers.
Appreciation of metaphor and symbolism. Hidden layers of emotional life reveal themselves through symbol and metaphor, never directly. They know how to listen on multiple levels.
Related Essays
For more guidance on recognizing an expert therapist, see my piece, How to Choose a Psychotherapist.
More writing, interviews, and related work on my Linktree.
This is a really rich and beautiful list. I love the simultaneity inherent in #11 — the limits of understanding combined with the rigorous attempt to try to understand. #12 reminds me a bit of Terence’s line “I am human and nothing human is alien to me.” #15 is an argument in favor of therapists’ engagement with poetry or other arts, in some form. I could go on! Thanks for this meaningful list.
Great list, thanks for putting into words things that are not easy to describe. However, unlike red flags, most items here would be difficult for a potential client to actually assess, perhaps over time, but not initially when choosing a therapist.