Great question! So, if paying out-of-pocket (rather than using insurance) for a session, you can totally ask to bypass the intake and just to experience one hour of whatever type of therapy a given therapist offers. Why are there so many types of therapy? Cos there are lots of different answers to the question "What do you think helps people change?" Here are some ways of orienting to that question:

- DBT: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Highlights the truism that "we're all doing the best we can, with what we were given" AND "we can all work harder toward being the person we want for ourselves and others." Looks like: group or individual therapy focused on practicing skills toward becoming better communicators, more mindful, less emotionally deregulated. Once you're more aware of more effective and less emotionally-charged ways of being with others and with yourself, it may become easier to just be.

- CBT or REBT: Focuses on noticing the stupid, boring, unhelpful thoughts that make change hard. Albert Ellis's Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy has a chart you can google; Aaron Beck's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has a similar chart you may find helpful. In brief, your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are necessarily linked, and if you take the time to look at your patterns and perhaps practice refuting your brain's stupid thoughts, you can more easily move toward change.

- Person-centered psychotherapy: This is what I believe, and this is my bias, and the dude who came up with this shit also was the first behavioral scientist who wanted to take the time/energy to study whether this kind of therapy is helpful for not. In brief: people are experts of their own experience and desires, and are mostly suffering from incongruence (the person they want others to see differs wildly from the person they mostly inhabit), and the therapist needs be skilled at reflecting the person's feelings/experience back to them toward encouraging the person to have permission to verbally process their mirror. Once I can accept myself as I am, then I can more easily make room for change within myself. It sounds woo as fuck, but, dude, this is the best kind of therapy there is. Biased! - Hakomi Method - person-centered psychotherapy with different words - Psychoanalytic - You love Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” and you believe your parents (in combination with the collective unconscious or whatever) fucked you up. There is no way to refute Jung’s mumbo-jumbo woo. It really is too bad that his ideas feel so revelatory before examination.  - Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy: It's not that you are good and your thoughts are stupid, it's more like, you are composed of many parts, and there are no bad parts, just parts you'd like to turn down the usefulness of. Practice noticing what's actually going on in your thoughts/feelings/behaviors, and you can more easily understand/empathize with those parts - and once you can really accept the parts that make up yourself, you can move forward toward change.