Ever wondered if your therapist gets you, or if therapy is even working? You’re not alone. This week, Dr. Elizabeth Kilmer is back to unpack the complicated, sometimes confusing, always human relationship between therapist and client (especially when ADHD is in the mix). Host Cate Osborn and Elizabeth dig into how different types of therapy work, how to tell if therapy is actually helping, and what kinds of conversations are and aren’t fair game in the therapy room. Whether you’re starting therapy for the first time or reevaluating a long-term fit, this conversation will help you trust your instincts and advocate for what you need.
Ever wondered if your therapist gets you, or if therapy is even working? You’re not alone. This week, Dr. Elizabeth Kilmer is back to unpack the complicated, sometimes confusing, always human relationship between therapist and client (especially when ADHD is in the mix).
Host Cate Osborn and Elizabeth dig into how different types of therapy work, how to tell if therapy is actually helping, and what kinds of conversations are and aren’t fair game in the therapy room. Whether you’re starting therapy for the first time or reevaluating a long-term fit, this conversation will help you trust your instincts and advocate for what you need.
Related resources
Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(00:43) What inspired this episode
(01:53) Relationship between therapist and client basics
(04:45) How do we know if a therapist is a good fit for us?
(06:50) What is a ‘therapeutic modality’? What is a ‘manualized treatment’?
(09:36) How do we know if therapy working?
(13:51) How do we give feedback to our therapist?
(17:29) How do we breakup with a therapist?
(19:35) What do we talk about in therapy?
(23:52) What do we do if we don’t have access to therapy?
(26:09) Advice on how to start therapy
(29:22) Outro and credits
We love hearing from our listeners! Email us at sorryimissedthis@understood.org.
Cate Osborn: Hi everybody, and welcome back to "Sorry, I Missed This," the show where we talk about all things ADHD and its relationship to sex, intimacy, communication, and, well, relationships.
And today, I'm actually really excited because we are delving into a new type of relationship that we have not really featured on the show before: the relationship between therapist and client. I am joined today by my dear friend and friend of the podcast, Dr. Elizabeth Kilmer. She is a clinical psychologist who knows a ton about therapy and a ton about the therapist-client relationship because she does it every single day.
Before we start, I do want to say a couple of things. This episode was actually inspired by a comment section over on TikTok. There was a video about a girl discussing her relationship with her therapist, and the comments were just full of people talking about, "I didn't know that I was allowed to ask my therapist that question. I didn't know I was allowed to give feedback to my therapist. I didn't know that I was allowed to ask for a certain type of therapy."
And I realized that I didn't know those things either. I didn't know what I was and wasn't allowed to talk about in therapy, what I was and was not allowed to ask for. And when you couple that on top of the perfectionism and people-pleasing that I am so wont to do, despite my own years of therapy, I realized that I think a lot of us have a relationship to therapy and to our therapists that could really grow and could really benefit from having conversations about just what a therapeutic relationship looks like, what we can and can't talk about. And so I asked Elizabeth to come onto the show today to give us a little bit more information on that. So without further ado, let's get into that conversation.
Dr. Elizabeth Kilmer, welcome back to "Sorry, I Missed This."
Elizabeth Kilmer: Thanks so much. It's great to be back.
Cate Osborn: I want to start off with a really basic question, which is when we talk about the relationship of therapist and client — well, that's less fun than what I thought it was going to be. But when we talk about the role of therapist and client, that relationship, can you break down a little bit about just what that looks like at the start, like when we're first starting out?
Elizabeth Kilmer: Absolutely. I think it's really important that we recognize that that therapist and client relationship is one that should be relatively egalitarian. So we're both bringing different things to the room. The therapist is going to be the expert around therapy and behavior change, and the client is going to be the expert in their own experience.
I think sometimes people will come into a therapy relationship and expect it to be similar to some other spaces in medicine where, you know, you come in and the doctor or the surgeon, whoever, tells you what is wrong with you and tells you what is going to happen. And sure, there's a level of choice, but there is a much more, I think, clear power dynamic. And there are still going to be differences. You know, your therapist is not your friend, but we want that power dynamic to be a little bit more equal because both the therapist and the client should have agency over what's happening in that room.
Cate Osborn: Can you talk a little bit about what that agency looks like from both the therapist and client perspective?
Elizabeth Kilmer: Yeah. So one of the really nice things about having a therapist is you don't have to worry about your therapist's feelings.
Cate Osborn: That seems fake, actually. What do you mean? Explain.
Elizabeth Kilmer: What I mean is that it is your therapist's job to be able to kind of manage their own reactions and their own kind of thoughts and opinions. Your therapist should respect you, absolutely. Your therapist should have some level of kind of like or care for you. But it is your therapist's job to show up and like listen to people talk about stuff and listen to people talk about things that they might not feel comfortable sharing with anybody else in their life and provide a supportive and caring and respectful space for that.
Sometimes when we are talking to a friend about our problems or our issues, we've all had that moment where we can see that like, "Oh, what I just shared is too much for this person." They don't understand how to handle what I've just shared. And we want that not to be people's experience in therapy. It is your therapist's job to know if they say like, "Hey, I woke up with a headache today, and like I can't be a good therapist, so I need to cancel my sessions," right? So we want people to feel comfortable coming to therapy and being able to engage and talk about, to the depth that they feel comfortable, the issues, the challenges, the areas of shame that are coming up in their life.
Cate Osborn: So how do we know if a therapist is a good fit for us?
Elizabeth Kilmer: So there are a couple of different things that I like to pay attention to. And some of these things you can figure out from their profile page on a therapist finder website. So this can include things around identity. You do not need to have your identity match your therapist, right? However, for some people, they may say, "Hey, I'm going to feel much more comfortable opening up to a male therapist or a female therapist or a non-binary therapist." Or, "I'm going to feel much more comfortable, it's going to be easier for me to get into therapy with somebody who has a similar race to me or has a similar background in X, Y, and Z ways or similar interests."
I work a lot with gamers and people in the games and tech industries, and some of that kind of shared identity can be really helpful. The next piece is understanding the modality that the therapist is engaged in. So if you have an idea of what you want to go in and talk about in therapy, you really want to lead and direct that session, that can be a great fit for some people.
Other people are like, "I don't know what I want therapy to look like, but I have a really specific problem I want solved." So I am really afraid of spiders, or I experienced a traumatic event and I want to work on that, or I'm dealing with insomnia, and that's something that I want to target in a really structured way. Looking at a therapist that does more manualized modalities where you're going to have kind of a game plan for every session and therapy is expected to last, you know, 10 to 12 sessions, versus somebody who wants to go in and kind of collaboratively explore with their therapist. They want there to be more of a back and forth. Those are all questions that you can ask in kind of an initial interview or even in an email. The other two pieces are just around, do you like talking to this person? Like, is this person a good fit interpersonally? And expertise and knowledge. So if I have, you know, ADHD and I go talk to somebody who doesn't know anything about ADHD, that's going to be hard. Or if, you know, I'm queer, and so having a therapist that at least kind of has that knowledge, even if they're not part of that community, is helpful because it means I don't have to spend a bunch of time explaining pieces.
Cate Osborn: Can you talk just very specifically about what a therapeutic modality is?
Elizabeth Kilmer: So that's going to be the kind of type of therapy. So this can include things that are what we might call more manualized treatments. So a manualized treatment is going to be a treatment that has almost like a lesson plan for each session. So each session is going to be relatively structured. If you go to two therapists that do that same kind of modality, that same kind of manualized treatment, it's going to look really similar. So these are things like cognitive processing therapy.
Cate Osborn: Manualized, like there's a manual. I thought you meant like doing it like manually, and I was trying to figure out, isn't all therapy manual? It's fine. Okay. Sorry. There's like, yeah, it's like you have, there's like a set way of doing it. I see. My brain makes the connection slowly some days.
Elizabeth Kilmer: Manualized treatments are often for specific challenges. So if I'm looking at a phobia or I'm looking at anxiety or there's several around trauma. Part of the reason that we use manualized treatments, to be totally frank, is because manualized treatments are easier to research. A lot of therapists will have some level of eclecticism, meaning that they may pull from different areas. So my background is primarily acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, which is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy. But I also use modalities like cognitive behavioral therapy and prolonged exposure for trauma. I also pull in pieces from gestalt and kind of other areas as well.
Cate Osborn: How do I know which type of therapy is going to be right for me? Like, when I first started, I was doing a lot of like talk therapy. I was doing a lot of like dialectical behavior therapy type stuff. And it really wasn't working. And it took me a really long time to realize that what I actually needed, what actually really worked for me was a more like somatic parts-work type of therapy. And it took me several years to find that. So like, do you think that there's like a knowledge base that people need to start with? Is that something that the therapist should be handling? Like, how does that component piece work?
Elizabeth Kilmer: I think it's a little bit of both there in terms of the therapist should have an idea of kind of the work that they're doing and what they're able to offer, and they should be able to help identify with the client like, is this working for you or not? And when I said it around like the client is the expert in their own experience, this is the piece that's really important. You're going to probably be able to better tell like, "Oh man, I seemed to be making change so much faster in therapy two years ago," or, "This feels really slow," or, "It doesn't feel like I'm gaining insight or I'm moving." And so that kind of feedback is really important.
Cate Osborn: So I'm in therapy. I'm going to therapy every week. I'm talking for my hour, whatever. How do I know if the therapy is working? How do I know if things are going well, if things are going badly?
Elizabeth Kilmer: I'm going to give you the easy, boring answer first that is not complete because I can just get it out of the way. The first one is routine outcome monitoring measures. So that means like the thing that your therapist or your psychiatrist or whoever has you kind of fill out before you show up for a session, which is also like the GAD-7 or the PHQ-9 or the DASS-22. They're just screeners, right? Like that's not a diagnosis in itself, but it can really help identify patterns. So, you know, you're looking at yourself in the mirror every day and everything looks exactly the same.
If you've ever been really excited for your hair to grow out, and it takes so much longer than you think it will, being able to look back at a little chart, sometimes it comes in fun colors, and be able to go, "Oh man, like, I'm reporting that I'm doing so much better than I was before," or, "I'm reporting that I'm doing so much worse than I was before." That, you know, big event that happened in my life really did impact me more than I expected.
The piece I wish more clients thought about or talked about is kind of the treatment plan and treatment goals. So you as a client don't have to have a very clear idea of what your goals are going into therapy. Your therapist can help you identify those. But figuring out what some of those goals are that are allowed to change, but having those goals, talking with your therapist about what is the specific approach they all are going to take around those, and how do we know if this is working? For example, a goal might be someone wants to kind of better identify how they're feeling. So instead of just going like, "Oh, I feel angry," going like, "Okay, well, I feel angry, but usually anger is like showing up to protect me from like feelings of fear or loss. And so like, if that's showing up, okay, well, what do I do with that?"
So a goal, an overarching goal might be like, "increase clients' in-the-moment emotional insight," and then we might talk about how are we going to identify that? And we're going to do that through they're going to fill out some worksheets and we're going to talk about this in session and build their kind of knowledge and skills around emotional identification and we're going to build their knowledge and skills around the different kinds of thoughts and physical sensations that might be associated with those emotions so that they're better able to connect with those. And so I've just kind of outlined one section of what a treatment plan might look at. And then we can check that. We can say like, "Okay, it's been four weeks and you're telling me that now when you get angry, you're also able to identify you're feeling overwhelmed," or, "You've got some sensory input that it's really less that you're upset by the situation, it's really more that you're upset by the fact that the fan over the stove is a horrible, horrible noise."
Cate Osborn: That is true. All right. So we're starting the process of therapy, or maybe in some dear listener's situations, they've been in therapy for a while. How do we start the process of therapy? How do we change the process of therapy? Like if it isn't working for us, are there certain like questions we can ask? Is there feedback, concerns, that kind of thing?
Elizabeth Kilmer: Absolutely. So whether you're just starting or whether you're in therapy for a while, it is totally appropriate to go to your therapist and say, "Hey, I want to make sure that this is working and it's working as best as it can. Can you help me understand how you're judging whether or not this is working for me? How do you track progress over time? What does that look like?" And that's a question you can ask to somebody you've been seeing for three years or three weeks, or you are on kind of a consult call to see whether or not they'd be a good fit.
Cate Osborn: Is it like a quantifiable thing of like, "I'm using this chart or this methodology to track your progress?" Is it more of like, "Well, I'm seeing you be able to open up and emotionally regulate?" Like how would a therapist track that kind of progress?
Elizabeth Kilmer: It can be both. So I will say in my own practice, some of my clients are not filling out the weekly forums, and I have just accepted that that is not a thing that they are going to do. And so we're not using that kind of routine outcome monitoring in that particular way. But I'm taking notes, I'm updating a treatment plan on the back end. And so if a client is saying, "Hey, I want to understand, you know, have we done anything useful in the last six months?" I should have an answer for that for every single client.
Cate Osborn: What about like feedback? Like, I started going to therapy and I had a really, like, nice therapist. She was really nice. She was so nice. And I would just sit and I would talk and I would rant, and then she'd be like, "Wow, that does suck." And then end of session, and then I would come back the next week. And so I realized like I didn't really feel like I was getting anything really out of the experience aside from a place to vent, which I think is valuable, but I was looking for tools. I was looking for concrete ways of managing things. So like, are you allowed to ask for what you want? Are you allowed to give your therapist feedback and be in terms of like, "Hey, this isn't working for me?" Like what, what is appropriate to do?
Elizabeth Kilmer: Your therapist is doing this job theoretically because they want to help people because it doesn't actually pay — I'd go be a computer programmer if I just wanted to make money. Your therapist is also not a mind reader. We are about as close as it gets, but we can do our jobs better if we get feedback. And back when I said like you don't need to worry about your therapist's feelings, this is also a space in which like if you struggle to give feedback, practicing giving your therapist feedback is one of the safest places that you can give feedback. It's also totally fine to start that conversation with, "Hey, I am anxious about giving feedback or I'm anxious about giving you feedback because like you're a really important part of my life or my treatment team. Can you help me give you feedback?"
That is a totally fine question and a great way to kind of start that process. You can give feedback written, right? Like I have a, like, secure message portal that clients can message me. The really nice thing about giving a therapist feedback is often that therapist can help you give feedback in a way that you probably won't get from somebody else. If you go to your boss or your parent and you say like, "Hey, I want to give you feedback, but like I'm struggling to figure out the words and I'm worried I'm going to say something offensive, can you help me?" Hopefully they'll help you some amount, but probably they'll be less comfortable and more defensive than if you're trying to do that with a therapist.
Cate Osborn: But what if your therapist sucks at their job? What if you give them feedback and they start crying or they get mad at you or they get super defensive?
Elizabeth Kilmer: If you are giving your therapist feedback and I'm assuming you're not like cursing and yelling and screaming at your therapist.
Cate Osborn: Yeah, a respectful conversation occurs.
Elizabeth Kilmer: Absolutely. And they get really defensive or they get really angry with you or they start crying and you don't feel comfortable or safe in that relationship anymore. Like that is a good sign to find a new therapist. Paying attention to whether or not your therapist looks kind of sad. That's different than your therapist, you know, starting to cry or your therapist has a response for, "Oh, actually, I do have all this way that we've been tracking progress." Some level of explanation is not always the same as defensiveness. But if that like defensiveness is coming out, if you're feeling really uncomfortable, you're feeling really unsafe, that is a good sign to find another therapist. I wish I could say that all therapists are great, and that's not true.
Cate Osborn: I think part of it too that I've really come to realize is that some of it isn't even that that therapist might be crappy at their job, it may just be that that is not the therapist for you.
Elizabeth Kilmer: Oh, absolutely.
Cate Osborn: There has to be that like personality match. There has to be like a lot of things that fall into place.
Elizabeth Kilmer: That's huge. I'm a pretty active therapist. Like you're going to know what my opinions are. You're also going to know that I respect you and I care about you, but you're going to know what my opinions are. And I don't do a lot of what we call kind of supportive therapy, which is more of that space to come in and like kind of vent and get that validation. That can be really valuable and important for some people, but that is usually less focused on making progress.
Cate Osborn: How do we end a therapeutic relationship? How do we, quote unquote, "break up" with our therapist? If we realize, you know, even if it's they're doing an amazing job, even if they are doing the best job that they possibly can, but we're realizing in this moment that like, "Hey, maybe this therapist isn't right for me." What is the best approach for moving on from that relationship?
Elizabeth Kilmer: Ideally having a conversation with that therapist about that being where you're at. Not for the therapist's benefit, to be clear, although it will probably benefit the therapist, but because getting whatever kind of feedback or information from that therapist about what they thought maybe was the challenge or what they thought wasn't working or what they would recommend for you moving forward can be helpful when you move forward to your next therapist. Honestly, even just to get that sense of closure of like, "I said this relationship isn't working for me, I want to move on," and the person respected that, can be really powerful for people.
Cate Osborn: Are there situations where we should tell like a new therapist that we've had bad experiences in therapy before? Like how do we handle coming to a new therapist coming out of like a bad experience?
Elizabeth Kilmer: Anytime you meet with a new therapist, you should talk to them about your past experiences with therapy, about what worked and what didn't work. You don't have to protect your old therapist. Now, it's very reasonable that you might not feel immediately safe right off the bat and want to share all of those experiences, but as much as you can, setting that new relationship up for success by identifying some of the things that were challenging in the past. And that can include both things from the therapist, so like, "Hey, I find that I would get to therapy and I wouldn't know what to say, and then we would just, I would end up storytelling for the whole hour as opposed to us working on the goals that we had previously identified. So it would be helpful for me if you were more directive," or whether that's like, "Hey, I know that I really have a hard time opening up to people and I think that sometimes got in the way of my past relationship with a therapist because they didn't, you know, check in with me when I gave short answers," or something like that.
Cate Osborn: I feel like I'm about to win an award for the broadest question ever asked on a mental health podcast in the history of the world. But what do I talk about in therapy, Dr. Elizabeth Kilmer?
Elizabeth Kilmer: Oh man, that's not the broadest question for sure. The things that are kind of generally off limits are usually personal questions about the therapist. And even within that realm, right? Like it is okay to ask me about I have a dog. It's okay to ask me, especially because you can hear her snoring during sessions a lot. Sometimes she gives really dramatic sighs right after someone says something incredibly poignant and vulnerable.
So you can ask your therapist questions, but making sure that you kind of respect boundaries, right? Like I'm not going to share a lot of personal details about my life or my relationship. But there are times in which a client might want to ask questions that are directly related to our work together and their feelings of comfort and safety within the session. So that can include questions about some of my beliefs around politics and the world and the way that things are currently going. And that's a place, especially when we're working with individuals who hold any kind of a marginalized identity, that willingness to share some of that more personal information can be important and valuable. How much therapists are willing to share about themselves is going to be really variable and varies in part around therapeutic orientation, as well as the setting. Certain settings, you may not be allowed to share very much about yourself. But you can talk about or ask questions about anything. That includes the stuff that makes you feel really uncomfortable about yourself. That includes things around your own identity, includes things around your own relationships and sex life and stuff that you've done that you think is awful and you can never be forgiven for.
Cate Osborn: Is there a recommended pace by which you do that? Because I tend to be a person who goes into therapy and I will story tell for like three sessions. I'll be like, "And then this other time, this other thing happened, whatever." But what I'm really want to do is like, "Hey, I'm really worried about this thing," but I want to dance around it. I know I have other friends who go in and the first thing they say are like, "This is my issue, this is what I want to solve." Like how do we know what pacing is right for us? How do we know when we are maybe not challenging ourselves or stepping outside of our comfort zones as much as we could? I don't want to say should.
Elizabeth Kilmer: This is a common problem. I think it's especially common for a lot of neurodivergent individuals that sometimes have a hard time understanding like how quickly we should share information in a relationship, like how quickly we get close to people.
Cate Osborn: Yeah, that like overshare.
Elizabeth Kilmer: Mm-hmm. And I will say that generally speaking, therapy is a safe space to do that, especially if you're working with somebody who's used to working with individuals with ADHD or autism. And you come in and you go, "Here are my deepest, darkest secrets right off the bat, let's go." A lot of therapists are going to be really comfortable and on board with that. And if you know about yourself that you came to therapy for a reason, but left to your own devices are not going to want to talk about that for six sessions, letting your therapist know that up front can be really helpful. Even if you're like, "Hey, I need at least one or two sessions to feel safe with you, but if I still haven't told you this thing by session three or four, like please call me out on it."
Cate Osborn: How do we figure out those things about ourselves without having gone to therapy first?
Elizabeth Kilmer: So you can figure out those things in therapy. That's part of what therapy is for.
Cate Osborn: Assuming that our dear listener is somebody who's like, "I've been wanting to go to therapy, but I've been nervous or I've been afraid or I haven't known the right procedure," so it's like, what if you don't know that you take a while to open up or what if you don't know that you need that structure, right? Does that make sense?
Elizabeth Kilmer: Absolutely. Yeah. Going to therapy and saying, "Hey, I've never been to therapy before and I don't know what this is supposed to look like and that makes me anxious," is a really appropriate thing to do. It's great to get a client who's never been to therapy before because they definitely haven't had a bad therapist before, which is just great. And so if someone comes in right off the bat and they say, "Hey, I don't understand how this is supposed to work. I don't know what I'm supposed to ask about. I don't know what this is supposed to look like," that creates a really nice opportunity for us to get to have that conversation and talk about what might typically happen, as well as talk about the space in which they have a lot of leeway in terms of, for example, how structured a session is.
Cate Osborn: I also feel like it is important to acknowledge that this whole episode is one massive point of privilege. There is definitely a lack of care and there's a lack of access, there's a lack of insurance coverage, there's a lack of finance. You know, like there are a lot of situations in which a person may not be able to access therapy or access therapy regularly in a way that would, I think, be the most therapeutic, which leads me, Elizabeth, to my hard-hitting journalism question, which is I would love for you to talk to me a little bit about the new trend of people using those large language models for their therapist and your candid, trained, doctor opinions on it.
Elizabeth Kilmer: I agree that therapy is for a lot of people a privilege, and it shouldn't be. It should be a thing that people have more access to. And I think that there are a lot of ways in which some kind of automation or resource sharing or guides and support can help people get access to and move towards some of the change that they want to see, right? Like self-help books, not all of which are good, but have been a thing forever, right? This idea of I'm going to talk to not a therapist — I'm going to talk to a friend, I'm going to talk to a pastor, I'm going to talk to a colleague, I'm going to talk to my dog — have been ways that people have been finding healing and helping and community and support for ever.
I have not yet seen any kind of AI conversational model that hasn't had massive problems around issues of discrimination, around issues of kind of just giving really bad advice or furthering people's own kind of confirmation bias in a way that can be really detrimental, especially if you are somebody who is struggling with mental health or is struggling with feeling like you don't belong or you shouldn't exist here, or feeling like some other group of people is wholly at fault for your problems. And so I have a lot of hesitancy around the kind of current models and the way that we are able to safeguard them.
Cate Osborn: Do you have any advice, any encouragement, any sort of thoughts that you can share with somebody who's maybe not sure if therapy is right for them or how they might go about sort of starting that process in a way that feels good and authentic to them?
Elizabeth Kilmer: I would say start. It's a space where for a lot of people, myself included, right? We wait kind of too long to go to therapy. We wait till things are like really hard and everything is on fire and we feel like we're actively drowning. And then you have to build trust in a relationship with someone while you also feel like you're actively drowning, which is not an ideal time. It's still like better than not doing it, but I would say just get started.
So go on one of the several different therapist finders for your area. If you are open to telehealth, that can open you up to therapists that are kind of in your whole state, or even therapists who are in different states who are licensed in your area. I would reach out to two or three therapists and try and set up a consultation call or set up an initial session with one or two of those and just have that experience so that you're not getting stuck. Hopefully this episode is not saying like, "And now this is all your responsibility," but instead, ideally empowering you to go, "Hey, you're allowed to ask about these questions and you get to be kind of an equal partner in this. It's not just you're going into the person who's the doctor with the white coat and they say, 'Well, this is what you should do.'"
Cate Osborn: If I can add on to that because I know that so much of our audience tends to be in that zone of late diagnosed, people-pleasing perfectionists, myself included. I know that something that I've really struggled with was feeling like I was going to upset or offend, especially if I got a couple sessions in and I was like, "Wow, this really isn't feeling like a good fit. This really isn't feeling like this is going to work for me."
And so if you are a person who tends to struggle with this, I encourage you to use your search for a therapist that works for you as practice in just that communication, in your ability to sort of say, "Hey, thank you so much, but I'm going to be moving on." Because I stayed with a lot of really bad therapists because I didn't want to hurt their feelings. And I recognize that now as like a pattern of behavior that is so specifically tied to like my people-pleasing tendencies. And so it's just, therapy is like dating. You really got to sometimes try a little bit to find a good fit. And so being patient in terms of like the executive dysfunction in terms of like emails and calling and all of that stuff. Give yourself grace, give yourself time, but therapy can be so immensely helpful, especially if you are a person living with ADHD.
Elizabeth Kilmer: You can also get some help from somebody who's an okay therapist, right? Like who is an okay fit. That same idea of the perfectionist. I'm not saying you have to stay with somebody who's not very helpful for a very long time, but if you're drowning and you just need some help, and this person's maybe not the most helpful, but they can help you like figure out a life raft for now, you are allowed to stay with that person for a little bit and then kind of move on. Like this is a space where you don't have to do therapy perfect. You just have to do it good enough that you're making some forward motion.
Cate Osborn: Dr. Elizabeth Kilmer, thank you so much for being back here on "Sorry, I Missed This."
Elizabeth Kilmer: Thanks so much for having me.
Cate Osborn: Anything mentioned in the episode will be linked in the show notes with more resources. Have a question, comment, burning story you'd like to share? Email us at sorryimissedthis@understood.org. This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give.
"Sorry, I Missed This" is produced and edited by Jessamine Molli and Margie DeSantis. Samiah Adams is our supervising producer. Video is produced by Calvin Knie and edited by Jessie DiMartino. Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright, who also mixes the show. Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director. For Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Jordan Davidson. And I'm your host, Cate Osborn. Thank you so much for listening.
That's why I can't have my friends on the podcast because I just have too much fun.