For context, I (23M) live in the United States. In Ohio. A bit concerned about privacy because of the whole Nazi problem and the fact that I live in an abusive household.
I’ve been working on myself a lot recently and realized that I can’t do this alone anymore (or rely on Internet strangers to talk about my issues). I feel like I finally have the strength to ask for help in the real world. I’ve just never done this before. What’s it like? Is it warm and fuzzy, or cold and analytical? (Does it feel like someone is providing care and comfort, or is it more like an emotionally detached scientist meticulously studying you and scribbling down notes while mumbling “Hmm, I see, I see” while you yap at them?) Do you start to see results right away, or are things slow at first? How much stuff is recorded in a database that other systems can look up?
The work happens entirely outside therapy. Therapy is just a method to give you another way of thinking about certain scenarios that you can apply in the future to get out of the train of thoughts that made you feel like going to therapy in the first place. So more akin of picking up a book from the library, you still have to read it yourself.
This is very boiled down, but ultimately what I feel about therapy. I’ve been in and out of therapy for half a decade and are only now seeing benefits from it, and that mostly is due to me having the wrong idea about what therapy provides.
Different therapy forms give different tools but if you aren’t on the hunt for a specific one you’ll likely end up with CBT which fits my description the most. In VERY tough terms, if you have a good listener in your close circles you can talk to about anything it’ll come close to what CBT offers.
I disagree with you about CBT and good listeners, at least done right. Talk therapy is like a good listener, but CBT is more about retraining your thought patterns. I think a big part of the problem is that a lot of therapists mix the two and try to use one where the other is better.
To compare it to physical therapy, talk therapy is more like exercises meant to safely and healthily push through stiffness and pain, whereas CBT is more like the “yeah you do these things wrong and it’s hurting you, we’re going to retrain you to do them the healthy way” style of physical therapy.
There’s also DBT which for those who need it, nothing else suffices. It’s like CBT but especially designed for people with BPD and works wonders on people whose emotional issues result in destructive behavior.