I'm aware the premise makes no sense.
Over the years I've been in and out of therapy. In my teens I had a serious enough depression to necessitate medication to somehow level me, a few years after that I went back because I felt I wanted to unpack a few things from my early years, after that I went back to pick up on the work I left behind, after that I went back to try to find a way to cope with the eminent loss of someone very dear to me and very recently I went back because I felt the need to give it another try to unpack a lot of wrongs in my head.
Unfortunately, every single time, as I try to go back and pick on the process - and I feel the need to stress that I've been received by multiple professionals over the years - I'm always directed, more or less openly, not towards what I want to resolve but towards something completely unrelated. And no, I am not a professional in mental health but I think I am minimally qualified to know what I think/understand is bothering me and want to explore and try to find a solution/rationalisation for so I can drop that issue or at least drop it in value in my mind so I can move forward.
Instead, my concerns have constantly been ignored or overlooked and all type of approaches been tried to deviate me, as such:
- hypnosis (went horribly wrong)
- cognitive and behavioural shift (as in "You are acting/feeling/thinking wrong.")
- completely ignoring my concerns
- openly antagonising me
- a very veiled attempt to create in me a notion of "faith in a higher power" (I'm laic)
The last approach is to try to teach me how to meditate.
I have always been received by licensed professionals, two of them through my NHS; no spiritual counsellors nor anything in the like.
I've been able to make more breakthroughs by reading philosophy books than by sitting in a chair and talking back and forth with a therapist. But I always get the feeling that I really need some degree of counselling I am not getting.
Am I being paranoid, unlucky or just expecting something that isn't at all aligned with reality?
It might be a combination of bad therapists and not having the right style of therapy.
I finally went back to therapy after a couple decades last year, and the therapist I found does TEAM-CBT (Testing, Empathy, Agenda-Setting, and Methods). I still get a lot of the CBT style methods, but this way forces me to put down actionable goals or at least quantify the feelings/beliefs/problems I have. I absolutely despise putting a quantitative label on ephemeral topics/ideas/concepts, but I will say, it has done a lot for me and has made enough of a difference that people close to me have commented on my improvement.
Might be worth looking into, since part of the TEAM process is figuring out what you want to work on, and from there they can help you figure out the steps to get you there.