What is it like to be treated here?

We start with the basics: 

1. Empathy:  any good therapist should not have to ask the stupid question "how did that make you feel?"  They should be able to understand how you feel without asking most of the time.  They might ask for a clarification if needed; and they should always make sure they've got it right.
2. Genuineness:  the therapist acts like a real person, not a "blank screen" saying "uh-huh" or "hmm..."   The therapist is "congruent", meaning that  what they think or feel while sitting with you is not hidden or disguised.  
3.  "Positive regard":  which means assuming that you're a good person with some bad symptoms, perhaps, or even bad behaviors; but there are probably explanations for those symptoms and behaviors, as well as ways to help you change them.  

You might recognize these as "Rogerian", if you know the history of psychology a bit.  In fact, Dr. Rogers' research team showed many years ago that these three characteristics of  therapy strongly affect how well treatment works.   Every good therapy should have them. 

You can sometimes get these basics from a friend, or family, or within your church/synagogue/mosque.  A good therapist should be able to add specific techniques like "behavioral" or "interpersonal" therapy to these basics.  

In this clinic, the most common additional techniques are cognitive, behavioral, interpersonal, and psychodynamic.   There is no Freudian analytic stuff as such (the couch, the silence -- like the stereotypes). 

Medications and psychotherapy are routinely mixed together.  In any visit longer than the briefest medication checks (10 minutes or less), there will at least be some sort of "psychotherapy".  This might be as simple as figuring out how to help you stay with a medication; or to clarify just what's getting in the way of taking the medication as we'd planned.  It might be celebrating your successes as a means of reinforcing your plan to continue what got you better.  

More often, there is some examination of how your life is going in the "big picture", with attention to your way of seeing it that might be moved a little (the "cognitive" part, in which a new way of looking at something is offered).  Or there is attention to your relationships, your satisfaction in them (the core of "interpersonal therapy").  Medications are supposed to have some impact on these kinds of things, so I look at them often -- and use psychotherapy as well, as much as possible, while we're at it. 

Finally, there is something called "transference", a term originally from Freud's work.  This describes what happens to a person in the "patient" position.  In most cases something happens over time that adds to the power of what we do:  the "patient" comes to trust the therapist, and talk about things it's hard to talk about elsewhere.  This creates a special connection, an often intense emotional connection, that must be respected by the therapist.  In fact, this connection can be used to help make the therapy more effective.  It can also be very badly managed, leaving the patient feeling strangely violated, such as when the therapist blames the patient for something beyond her/his control, or worse, when the error was partly the therapist's.  Therefore in my work the "transference" is always being attended to, even during "medication management".  This is one of the trickiest skills I've learned over the years (and there's always room to be better at it).  So when I charge you for "psychotherapy" as well as medication management, this is a major part of the reason why.  

For a nice description of serious therapy, in case you have no idea what that looks or feels like, here's a very detailed site:  About Psychotherapy.   The author is basically talking about "psychodynamic" psychotherapy.  The sections on how therapy works, and what therapy is not, are particularly good (see the navigation bar to read those; there's quite a bit to explore.  He's got a good sense of humor, and just plain good sense about the whole thing.  He hasn't adopted "he/she" yet, though; too bad.)