Sara Mathews Dixon: Choosing the Right Therapist for Your Family

The therapist is not for you. It is for a twelve-year-old who has spent two years inside a custody fight, and the list you are working from is a directory page where every practice has ticked every box. There is no obvious way to tell any of them apart, and you get one phone call each.

Sara Mathews Dixon is a licensed clinical social worker with a private psychotherapy practice in Darien, Connecticut. She has been in the behavioral health field for more than twenty years and has run her own practice for most of that time, working with individuals, families and couples, with particular experience in trauma, depression and personality disorders. She has testified in divorce and custody matters, which is unusual enough among therapists to be worth knowing. This is her second time on with Lisa, and the episode exists because of a term that came up once in passing and stuck: cultural competency.

Dixon defines it without jargon. It is whether a professional assumes things about you before asking. She gives the examples she watches for in her own practice: asking a new client whether her husband is paying for the sessions, which assumes a marriage, a gender and a financial arrangement. Asking a child whether they live with their parents, when plenty of children live with one parent, a grandparent or a foster family. Filling in a demographic box from someone's appearance when they are Jamaican, Trinidadian or Puerto Rican. Her point is that these are not etiquette failures. A person who has been misidentified in the first ten minutes has already learned something about how much of themselves they can bring into the room.

The rest of the conversation is a practical guide to hiring one. What her office does and does not display, including the young Jewish client who objected to her Christmas tree and the answer she gave him. Why she keeps her family out of the office and off the internet. How she answers a client who says she cannot possibly understand their experience. How long rapport takes to build, and how she raises it directly when it has not arrived by week four or six. What she does when the problem is her own reaction to a client, and the one relationship in her career she had to end. The questions to ask on a first call, including whether asking about narcissism is fair game. What a therapist means by a success rate, which turns out to be about how soon you stop needing them. And why most therapists will avoid a courtroom, so you should ask before you are counting on one.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What cultural competency means, and why it decides how safe the room feels
• The assumptions to listen for in a first conversation with any professional
• The questions to ask on an exploratory call, and why to treat it like hiring an attorney
• Why a directory checkbox list tells you almost nothing, and what to read instead
• How long rapport takes, and what to say when it is not there yet
• When a therapist should refer you out, and what a good one does instead of just declining
• Whether it is fair to ask a therapist if they understand narcissistic behavior
• Why most therapists avoid testifying, and how to find out before you need them to

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What cultural competency is, and why it matters in these cases
3:00 The intake questions that reveal whether someone gets you
5:00 The assumptions that shut a client down
7:00 The menorah, the family photos, and what an office says
11:00 "You haven't lived my experience," and her answer to it
14:00 How long rapport takes, and the one client she let go
19:00 Shopping for a therapist: what to ask on the first call
23:00 Narcissism, success rates, and therapists who will not go to court

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Sara Mathews Dixon, LCSW: https://www.smdpsychotherapy.com/

🎧 More with Sara Mathews Dixon on this podcast
Ep 103: Teen Therapy in a High-Conflict Divorce

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.