I’ve made a few therapeutic journeys in the last few decades. All of my therapists have been skilled. But I would say that my last therapist, Andrew Feldmar, is a master therapist. What constitutes mastery in a therapist? In part, it’s time. He’s been at it for over forty years and has seen pretty much everything. But time alone doesn’t make master therapists. It’s time plus practice in being a true human being. You want your therapist to be one of those! But what does a good therapist do?

1. S/he isn’t performing therapist. S/he is being a human being. A good therapist isn’t perfect. And s/he will admit it when necessary. To use, psychoanalyst, W.D. Winnicott’s phrase, she’s “good enough”. She’ll resist your every attempt to make her into a goddess or a cult figure.
2. S/he will let us suffer what is ours to suffer without increasing our suffering. Having undergone her own suffering for how she was treated, a good therapist will not be afraid to let you go into your own. If a therapist hasn’t done this work s/he will prevent you from going there because of her own anxiety.
3. S/he isn’t there to “help” you. This would put her in a position of power. S/he does what s/he does because she loves her work and s/he is constantly learning. S/he isn’t using her to make her feel good about helping you.
4. A good enough therapist has done her own trauma work. This is why she knows that suffering what is ours to suffer is the only way back to reality and therefore health. She can’t take you anywhere she hasn’t been. I’m not saying that she must have experienced your exact circumstances. But she has come up against it in her own way, summoned courage, been broken open, and has risen from the dead with some knowing that might be an aid on your journey. Not that she incessantly peppers you with wisdom, thus establishing her superior knowledge. No, she offers you a gem, not the whole field of precious stones, at just the right moment, when you are ready to hear. This is a matter of intuition.
5. A good therapist is without ambition. If you as client get the sense that it’s critical that you perform her preferred feelings or produce that right archetypes in your dreams, it can re-trigger the trauma of having to perform to be loved.
6. A good therapist has given up on techniques. Technique is related etymologically with technology, and technology is effective with machines and systems, not humans. Your therapist is not a Mr. Fix-It, even though he has been tempted by myriads of professional workshops claiming that this or that approach is both fast and “evidence-based”. All you have to do is remove the human being from the equation, enact a method on the object of your well-intentioned intervention, and presto, off you go into a better life. Your heart was broken in relationship and in relationship it will be healed. (And yes, there are techniques that can remove symptoms and provide temporary relief, and yes, they have their place. But I’m assuming a goal of getting one’s true life back).
7. A good enough therapist cares about you, and you can feel it. This might seem obvious, but if you don’t feel it don’t hang around. 
8. She understands that you are an absolute other. Philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas was right when he wrote: “If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other.” What likely brought you to therapy, in one way or another, was the external demands to capitulate to a false unity of the group/family/collective. It is your uniqueness more than anything that you are in need of recovering. If you have a religious background, chances are that this denial of individuality was reinforced and turned into a virtue. Call it “selflessness”, or “meekness” or even “humility”, if you want, but where there is false unity, there is no self to express true virtue. A therapeutic relationship is one in which a therapist is making space and time for you to exit the false unity and show up for relationship, which is comprised of two individuals bridging differences with caring. Your individuality is the very thing that you were required to give up in order to survive the “other” who demanded sameness. The non-dual unity of All That Is will be discovered on the other side of the discovery of one’s individuality. Too often, it is introduced before the individuality has been achieved (and it usually is a courageous achievement). You end up with false unity, false individuality or both.
9. A good therapist won’t diagnose you (unless your health coverage requires it, but even then both you and he know that you can’t be reduced to a label). R.D. Laing once called this “denigration by diagnosis”. When you walk into the office, he sees you as though you are walking in for the first time, even if you’ve been coming for years. The past is past. Heraclitus wrote that nobody steps into the same river twice, because it is not the same river and you are not the same person. He’s been around enough to recognize our tendency, born of the survival instinct, to reduce ourselves to certain habits, beliefs and behaviours. But he’s patiently holding out for the ever-new, un-categorizable you to show up.
10. Similarly, he respects you too much to have a treatment plan, other than to show up and be present to the ever-changing you and ever-changing conditions of your life. He doesn’t usually interpret what you bring him because he’s not there so much to examine you from a distance, but experience you and how you are making sense of your world. He respects you too much to tell you who you “really” are. You are the final authority of your life, not him and not anybody else. Developing a dependence on somebody outside of you telling you who you are and why you’re doing what you’re doing undermines self-responsibility.
11. Perhaps it obvious by now, but it bears stating explicitly, that the good enough therapist is not trying to change you. This is because, wait for it…there’s nothing wrong with you. We’ve been changed enough for a lifetime, before we even had a say in the matter. Most of us carry around with us a deep, yet unconscious belief, that a) something is very wrong and b) that something is us. That belief is just waiting to be confirmed by reality, and we can find plenty of evidence for both. If we can’t find it out there, we create it ourselves, in order to align with the core unconscious belief that we’re essentially wrong.

The moment we find ourselves relaxing, breathing, trusting and feeling free in the presence of another, our work is done. We have “dropped in” to our nature, to life personified and individualized as “me”. We finally are able to be in relationship without giving up being ourselves. We have discovered that we learned to avoid suffering at a time in our life when we had no choice, because it would have overwhelmed us. Now, we can let life be, let the other be and let ourselves be, which means that we can undergo reality/life as it is, moment by moment, without having to change it or ourselves. We have tapped into a resilience that we didn’t know we had through which we discover that reality is actually not too much for us to bear. Life can flow again: tears, laughter, fear, ecstasy, terror are all part of it. But when they are flowing without our need to interfere, the infinitely creative life process is having its way with us, and we discover that we can enjoy the ride on the dragon’s tail of the great mystery. Your neurotic suffering has ended. Your true suffering—your willingness to undergo reality—will never end. And still, you will know that whatever this life brings is of absolute value.

Live Your Own Life Course