I saw a therapist for about a year and a half after my father died. I couldn’t go to family because THEY were part of the problem, and it’s difficult to approach and deal with your problems on your own when you’ve grown up in a home environment that paralleled North Korea in some regards—i.e. you have no grasp of what’s “normal”.
My therapist was of a “tough love” bent—she didn’t want to hear the same crap over and over again, and she pushed me to face and deal with my problems. It helped in some areas more than others, but it definitely did help me.
Some people spend more time in it than others, but some people have deeper problems, and you have to WANT to fix yourself. I think the latter is a key problem of people who lean on a therapist for years without any progress...they want somebody to magically fix them without any effort on their part, not somebody who will enable them to fix themselves. (And yes, there are plenty of unscrupulous therapists who regard patients as income streams.)
Actually I can relate. The majority of my ‘family’ (immeadiate and extended) was anything but ‘family’. Mine was more Alice in Wonderland (heavy on the Queen of Hearts) than NK though. Living in a fantasy world where reality and imagination intertwined effortlessly. Those of us half way sane left and never looked back.
And I do understand that in some cases there are indeed genuinely good therapists. But it’s also my belief that they are so few in number that the vast majority of the profession is nothing more than a scam/propaganda operation.