[jodrellblank]

I've listened to dozens of hours of Dr David Burns' Feeling Good Podcast[1] about CBT, he's in his late 70s and was one of the pioneers of it. I tend to come away thinking of it as a panacea and have to remind myself that diseases are complex and multifactorial and treatments won't work for everyone ...

Then you say "The core premise of CBT is more or less "it's all in your head" [...] it is absolutely not all something I could just handwave away with positive thinking." which is insultingly misrepresenting it, like grandpa disparaging everyone who works on computers in any capacity because "playing computer games all day isn't a real job".

It's nothing to do with handwaving things away, it's not positive thinking, it's not "just" any one trivial idea, and it doesn't come down to sucking anything up or accepting 'your place' (unless that means a terminal disease diagnosis, perhaps). It's as involved, interesting as debugging software - debugging how and why your thoughts generate your feelings - and you don't debug software by handwaving the bugs away or accepting that you will be stuck with broken software forever. There's counter-examples to your claim through the podcast: people who have been helped to get jobs or promotions, to be more effective or less stressed at work, to improve and rebuild their relationships with partners, friends, estranged parents. There's no colouring-in involved and Dr Burns is constantly banging the drum that patients must be tested at the start and end of every session to self-report their feelings in different areas to make sure they are improving because it's too common over the industry for patients to 'suddenly' leave after weeks and weeks of treatment saying "this hasn't helped me at all!" but when it's working well, patients will self-report significant improvements in very few sessions, and if they aren't, change something.

[1] https://feelinggood.com/ - podcast menu, at the top.