This book is about how you can get the most appropriate kind of help for your problems, goals, and personality. Specifically, When You Don't Know Where to Turn sets out to help you become adequately informed about the range of therapists and therapies—as these relate to your own assessment of your goals and interests—so that you will be able to make intelligent decisions about these issues:
* the kind of professional to seek out
* the type of therapy most likely to help you with a certain complaint or set of interests and values
* how to locate the form of therapy that seems most promising to you at a price you can afford and with an expected duration you can live with
* what setting to look for in which the help you would like is offered
This book uses two approaches, both presented here for the first time and both based on common sense and intelligent advance planning.
First, you will be able, through a series of carefully organized questions and easily followed instructions in Part I, to pinpoint one or more approaches to therapy that may be most promising given your initial objectives, problems, or interests. For the first time, a self-diagnosing map to the major approaches to therapy is made available.
Second, you will have the opportunity to glimpse what typically happens during the sessions of counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists as they treat clients or patients using the different main approaches to therapy. You will come to see what the experience of therapy is like in these different approaches.
In other words, the self-diagnosing map will point you in the direction of one, and sometimes more than one, approach to therapy that may be most promising for you to begin the process of self-change, and you will then be able to gain an insider's perspective on that approach so that you can judge how well suited to you the approach is and how it compares to the other main approaches to therapy.