Choosing a therapist: what actually matters, and where we fit in

Most people who start looking for a therapist are not doing research for its own sake. Something has been building for a while, or something happened that made it clear this was no longer something to handle alone, and now there is a list of names and clinics to sort through with no obvious way to tell them apart. This article is meant to help with that sorting, first by laying out what actually distinguishes one therapist from another, and then by explaining plainly what we built at The Psychology Square and why we think it holds up against that same standard.

What to check before booking anyone

The first thing worth checking is training, not warmth or website design. In Pakistan there is no strict, widely enforced barrier stopping someone from calling themselves a therapist, counselor, or life coach without formal clinical education.

Here is what you should look for:

• A therapist who has an MS Degree in Clinical Psychology from an HEC recognized University.
• A therapist who has a Ph.D in Clinical Psychology from an HEC recognized University.
• A therapist who has completed at least ADCP (Advanced Diploma in Clinical Psychology) from an HEC recognized University.
• A therapist who has gone through at least 3 supervised clinical placements/internships as is the requirement from HEC under the supervision of a competent supervisor from an HEC recognized University.
• A therapist who knows what they are doing rather than just claiming that they know a bunch of therapies.

A clinical psychologist has completed graduate-level training specifically in assessing and treating psychological disorders, under supervision, before ever seeing a client independently. That distinction is not a technicality. It affects what a person is actually equipped to do when a session gets difficult, whether they can recognize when a symptom needs a psychiatric referral rather than talk therapy alone, and whether their training included direct, supervised clinical hours rather than a certificate completed independently online. It is worth asking a prospective therapist about their actual degree and supervised experience directly, rather than assuming either from a title or from how a website is written.

The second thing worth checking is what approach a therapist actually uses, and whether that approach has evidence behind it. Cognitive behavioral therapy, usually shortened to CBT, is one of the more thoroughly tested approaches in the field. A review covering more than a hundred meta-analyses across a wide range of conditions found consistently strong support for CBT, particularly for anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, bulimia, and anger control problems (Hofmann et al., 2012). That does not mean CBT is the right fit for everyone or every problem. It means that when a therapist says they use CBT, it is fair to ask what that actually looks like in a session and to expect a structured answer, not a vague one. Beware of fake therapists and therapies. Therpeutic modalites with no or limited evidence, such as NLP, hypnotism, etc, should be avoided at all costs.

The third thing is knowing which kind of therapy the situation actually calls for, because it changes who should be in the room. Individual therapy works with a person’s own patterns: thoughts, behavior, mood, the way stress or anxiety shows up in daily life. Couples therapy works with the relationship itself, which is a different unit of analysis entirely. Someone whose anxiety happens to be straining a relationship usually needs individual work first, with couples sessions added later if the strain persists once the underlying anxiety is being addressed. Someone whose primary complaint is repeated conflict, disconnection, or a breach of trust needs couples therapy from the start, even if one partner also has their own individual concerns running alongside it. Getting this wrong at the outset is one of the more common and avoidable reasons therapy stalls before it has a chance to work.

The fourth thing is delivery format, and this one has genuinely shifted in the last decade. Andersson (2016) reviewed well over a hundred controlled trials of internet-delivered psychological treatment and found that therapist-guided online programs can match face-to-face treatment in effectiveness across a wide range of conditions, with improvements that tend to hold up over time. Online therapy is not a fallback for people who cannot get an in-person appointment. It is a legitimate format on its own, and for people managing work schedules, family obligations, or long commutes across a city like Lahore, it is often the format that actually gets used consistently rather than skipped after a few weeks. In practice an online session looks almost identical to an in-person one: a scheduled video call, the same length, with the same psychologist a person would see in the office, rather than a rotating pool of whoever happens to be available that day. The only thing that changes is where each person is sitting.

Why are so many people seeking therpy?

A household survey conducted across three of Pakistan’s largest cities found a depression rate of 53.4 percent in Lahore specifically, the highest of the three cities studied (Muhammad Gadit & Mugford, 2007). Numbers at that scale do not describe a crisis limited to a small group of people. They describe something closer to background weather: common enough that starting therapy should be treated as an ordinary, sensible decision rather than something that requires reaching a breaking point first.

What we built at The Psychology Square

The Psychology Square is run by two professional clinical psychologists, Muhammad Sohail and Sehar Waheed, who between them cover individual and couples work, and whose training and clinical backgrounds are listed in full on the site’s team pages rather than summarized in a single line here. Sessions run both from our practice in Johar Town and online, so the choice between in-person and remote therapy is a genuine option rather than a workaround for people who cannot make it to the office.

CBT is a core part of how we work, which is also why the worksheets on this site (thought records, cognitive distortion checklists, the downward-arrow technique) are drawn directly from the same approach used in session rather than borrowed from somewhere else and republished. Someone who tries one of those worksheets on their own and finds it useful is, in effect, getting a preview of the kind of structured work a session with us actually looks like.

We are not going to claim to be the only credentialed practice in Lahore, because that would not be true and it is not the point of this article. What we can say plainly is that if the four things above, training, evidence-based approach, the right format of therapy for the actual problem, and a delivery option that fits a person’s real schedule, are the things worth checking before booking anyone, we built our practice around meeting all four rather than assuming a client would take our word for it.

What a first session actually looks like

Part of what keeps people stuck at the searching stage is not knowing what happens once they actually book. A first session is not a test, and it does not require arriving with a diagnosis already worked out or a full explanation of what is wrong. It usually starts with the psychologist asking what brought the person in, followed by questions about how long the difficulty has been going on, what has already been tried, and what a person is hoping changes. For couples, both partners are typically present from the first session, since the point is to observe how the two of them talk to each other, not just to hear each side separately.

There is no obligation created by a first session beyond that hour. Some people know within one meeting that the fit is wrong and look elsewhere, which is a reasonable outcome and not a failure on either side. Most people continue, because the value of therapy tends to show up gradually across several sessions rather than in the first one. Either way, the only way to find out is to book the first appointment rather than trying to predict the outcome in advance.

Booking a session

If any part of this matches what you are dealing with, whether that is ongoing anxiety, a low mood that has not lifted, or a relationship that keeps circling the same argument, the next step is a first session, not a longer research process. Individual and couples appointments, online or in person at Johar Town, can be booked directly at thepsychologysquare.com/book. More detail on how we work is available on the therapy services page, and any specific questions about fees, scheduling, or which of us is the better fit for a particular concern can contact us before committing to anything.

The hardest part of this process is usually the decision to start looking in the first place. Once that decision is made, the rest is a matter of checking the right things and then booking the appointment.

References

Andersson, G. (2016). Internet-delivered psychological treatments. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 12, 157–179. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-021815-093006

Hofmann, S. G., Asnaani, A., Vonk, I. J. J., Sawyer, A. T., & Fang, A. (2012). The efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy: A review of meta-analyses. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 36(5), 427–440. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-012-9476-1

Muhammad Gadit, A. A., & Mugford, G. (2007). Prevalence of depression among households in three capital cities of Pakistan: Need to revise the mental health policy. PLoS ONE, 2(2), e209. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000209