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In my last column I talked about how important it is for all of us—straight, gay, bisexual, transgender, or just plain human—to be able to talk freely with our therapists and psychiatrists about our friendships, romantic feelings, sexual feelings and relationships. I pointed out that many care providers are more than ready to be accepting and welcoming.

Once in a while we need to remind ourselves that sometimes our care providers aren't perfect…they're human, after all. That's okay—everybody else in the world is human too! In a way, working with care providers who aren't quite perfect is great practice for dealing with all the rest of the imperfect people in the world.

Sometimes, though, we don't quite want our care providers to be human. We'd like our therapists to have superpowers: they should always say just the right thing at just the right moment. They should be mind readers who always know what we think, feel, and need—especially when we don't even know these things ourselves. They should tell us all those wonderful things our parents didn't. In short, we sometimes hope that therapy will magically repair everything that's ever gone wrong in our lives.

That wish is perfectly normal and very common. But I'm afraid it isn't realistic. When we let this wish sneak into our hearts and minds, it sets us up for feeling disappointed, hurt or even enraged when our care providers misunderstand us, or do something not quite perfect…as humans often do.

I'm a therapist, so I'm going to let you in on a secret. People are different, and they need different things from therapy. At any given moment in therapy, there's no single "right" thing for the therapist or the client to be doing. Sometimes my client needs me to sit quietly and listen. Sometimes she needs to see that I can feel what she's feeling. Sometimes he needs me to already know everything about what he's talking about and sometimes he needs to be able to teach me something new I haven't heard about before. Sometimes clients want advice from me, and other times it's the last thing they want me to give.

What all this means is that therapists don't always know if they're doing the most helpful thing they could be doing for you. The only way they can find out what helps you is if you let them know. Feedback is extremely helpful for therapists. I often ask my clients, "How do you think our work together has been going lately?" or "Was that helpful for you, what I just said?" Not all therapists do that…but you always have the right to let your therapist know if something was particularly helpful to you, or particularly not helpful.

Positive feedback is very powerful. Try this: think about saying something like, "You know something that really helped me recently? When you…" For instance, "when you listened to me talk about my relationship, and you didn't judge me, and I could tell that you could put yourself in my shoes." Or "when you encouraged me to talk to my boyfriend about the problems we've been having." Or even "when you listened quietly when I was crying last time. That really made me feel like you supported me."

There's a flipside, of course. Sometimes our therapists say and do things that aren't quite so helpful. This can happen to anybody, but it can be particularly true for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender consumers. It's okay—we can work with that situation too, and often we can help our therapists to do really great work with us (and other LGBT consumers who will come along in the future). I'll talk about that next time.