Therapy

I might have to cut ties with my therapist and start over with a new one. It’s unfortunate. We have a good report. But I need to keep appointments, and have reliable a certain level of response from the staff.

My therapist is great, but she needs more than one person handling her administration, scheduling appointments, responding to emails, answering phones. Maybe it’s not that the office assistant isn’t adequate, maybe it’s that my therapist allows the assistant a significant amount of slack in the rope. For example, my therapist’s assistant won’t reply to emails after 4 pm.

An email. Even a time-sensitive one for example, one from a patient asking if a scheduled appointment is going to be kept in lieu of an outstanding issue with payments and insurance. Even when that email was sent on a Friday, then sent again on a Tuesday, because no reply was received on Monday, and eventually the client calls during a Wednesday lunch break to ask over the phone the same question the two emails asked prior to the call.

I’m pissed off. It took a conscience effort not to be an asshole during class after lunch today because I was fuming. What I made about specifically is that I have to decide to cancel seeing my therapist and meet with a new therapist at the VA. What I’m angry about that is there is no such thing as a same week or same month appointment at the VA. The soonest appointment with a new therapist I might or might not want to talk with is the second week of January.

The wait time for appointments is not the VA’s fault. Their problem is just a matter of volume; there’s not enough doctor’s and nurses to serve all the veterans. I explain that to give context to why I’m extremely angry.

I literally can’t make sense of why my therapist doesn’t realize she needs a second person on staff if even part-time, even virtual to handle some of her business’s administrative tasks. Or, maybe I just need to take the hints that it’s time to move on to another counselor.