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5 Questions to Ask Your Potential New Therapist when You have a Chronic Illness
Updated: Jul 22
Finding a therapist who “gets it” when you have a chronic illness can be tough. The therapeutic space should be a place where you feel deeply understood, but sometimes for those with complex health conditions, disability or chronic pain, it can be another experience that compounds the isolation of living in a body that doesn't operate the way other bodies do.
However, there are therapists out there that have set out to specifically combat the isolation that individuals with complex chronic illness face. The tough part is finding them. Here’s 5 questions you can ask in your 15 minute consult that might help identify if your potential new therapist is the right fit:
What do you know about my diagnosis? Are you open to reading about it?
Your therapist may not be well-versed in your health condition, but let’s not rule her/him/them out just yet.
A therapist who researches your condition, perhaps in a way that others in your life haven’t, can be a reparative experience for the parts of you feeling chronically misunderstood. However, if you need a therapist that knows the ins and outs of your diagnosis, that’s valid too. Having to over-explain depletes limited resources. This question will help you feel into your needs around your therapist's knowledge, or their willingness to learn.
If you’re comfortable with this self disclosure, do you have lived experience with chronic illness?
As a relational therapist, if my client is of a marginalized identity, I believe that it's important they know about my identity and my social location as the therapeutic space holder. It helps clients understand if they’re going to be safe and inherently understood. Your potential new therapist has the right to decline answering, and can determine what is appropriate or not appropriate to share about their own life or health. My answer as a therapist might sound like: yes, I have almost two decades of personal experience.
What is your perspective on the relationship between mental health and chronic illness?
For those with medical trauma, some of the most invalidating experiences are the times that a healthcare provider suggested that their chronic physical symptoms or their pain were all attributed to mental health. As a chronic illness informed therapist, I might answer this question this way:
Typically, I don’t believe that anxiety, depression or fear solely or directly cause complex chronic illness. However, living with chronic illness can cause anxiety, depression and fear. The volatility of chronic illness is a harrowing experience. When I address anxiety or depression with my clients, it isn’t because I think it’s going to cure their disease. I’m hoping to support their quality of life while they live with its impacts, and lighten some of the weight of what they carry by processing together.
Do you treat medical trauma, and if so, how? And, how do you try to avoid compounding it?
It’s important to understand if your therapist is medical trauma sensitive, and if they have tools for medical trauma processing. Sometimes that looks like EMDR or Brainspotting. Sometimes that looks like a relational approach exercised through therapeutic rapport, that allows you to be able to trust and lean on a healthcare professional again. It’s important that your therapist feels like someone who believes you, someone you can correct, or someone you can express your needs to so this doesn’t become a space that compounds the trauma.
How do you address hypervigilance in clients with chronic illness or chronic pain?
This question is going to help you understand what tools you might glean from therapy. For those of us with chronic illness, we can become hypervigilant in the effort to try to avoid symptom flaring or pain exacerbation. We sometimes live in a state of high alert for environmental triggers, food triggers, or sensations in our body. It’s helpful to understand how your therapist thinks about hypervigilance, and what their tools might be to address it. In my work for example, I focus on differentiating a client’s discernment from their hypervigilance, and honor that discernment and intuition.
Trust your nervous system and body’s response to the 15 minute phone consult.
Your system knows. Was your body bracing itself the entire conversation? Were you able to exhale, and relax into the chat? Did you find yourself nodding, or were there times you furrowed your brow? Trust that.
You’ve got this.
Candice Craft, LMFT
LMFT # 154305
