Patron Saint of Falling Over Things

Man, that sucks.

I'll give my perspective as someone in therapist school, which is a YMMV thing in terms of advice.

All the research into what makes therapy work, for the last few decades, says that the single most important thing that the therapist has any control over that makes positive change is the "therapeutic alliance"--a sense that both therapist and client have mutual trust, understanding, and respect, and have committed to work together on mutually agreed-upon goals. This may not form instantly, but a rule of thumb is, if it's getting worse, not better, after three sessions, you probably have a therapist-client mismatch. And your therapist should definitely know this.

So what we get told--in this school, and in my intro to clinical psych course at my last school, and at random professional development workshops, and just all over--is that clients always, always have the right to terminate and ask for a referral; and that sometimes, it's nothing you've done wrong, it just didn't work out.

So from everything I've learned about counselling and ethics, it is quite widely accepted as your right to say to your therapist, "It just feels to me like we aren't clicking, so I want to try someone else on for size. You know me, and I trust your judgment--who else do you think I might try?"

Because your therapist does know other practitioners in the area, or bloody well ought to, and have a sense that so-and-so does a lot of brief CBT work with kids, and such-and-such does Jungian art therapy with trauma survivors, and so on. And it's their ethical responsibility to you to give you options.

I mean, I cannot guarantee the person will be professional. I know people who have done this and gotten rants about how they don't want to get better and don't want to face unpleasant truths. But that kind of behaviour from a therapist means a shocking failure of professionalism on their part because they got their peepee smacked, not because it's true.