[southernplaces7]

This is not to try and devalue the nature of your specific experience at all, okay? But, with your and some other descriptions here of how therapy works and how much looking around and trying out a number of vaguely defined things it involves, i'm getting a distinct woo vibe from much of the industry, made, maybe, all the worse given how much more fashionable the idea of therapy has become in recent years and how few concrete standards some parts of the business (and it is a business in large part) really require.

Add to the above the subtle notion of the onus on improvement lying with oneself as the patient, and it becomes all the easier for a therapist to fail because they don't know what they're doing, and then claim their patient failed because they didn't "try hard enough" or do the right things.

I've seen cases of therapy working, and know there's a lot of good exploration in related psychological fields, but it's definitely an area in which to tread carefully as someone seeking help.

[throwaway173738]

There’s no silver bullet. Only a lot of flailing around and unmaking patterns that don’t work and sometimes patterns that did work.

[southernplaces7]

That's fair enough, and common even in medical areas where the hard science and research are far more firmly established. However, with therapy, the looseness of those very things make the field much more open to easier quackery and that's what my point was about.