[wruza]

A lot of people think therapy is about changing yourself

This was my concern as well, I asked about it on third or fourth session right after acute symptoms relaxed. I really didn’t want to change into someone else. The therapist laughed and said to not worry, because I lived more than 30 years along with my core beliefs and it would take an inhuman effort to move that mountain even slightly. All you do is getting familiar with yourself and being aware of tons of your automatic thoughts and what they result in, if you allow them to act without your noticing. Speaking in software terms, we are legacy monsters with no source code or self-testing, and CBT is basically a set of (pretty effective) blackbox testing methods with a goal to (a) create additional routines to work around detected issues and (b) accept that this is you and it’s normal/okay/justthat.