Thanks for the book suggestion. I will put it on my "look at" list -- unfortunately, my "to read" list is pretty long right now, and I'm trying to put topics other than therapy as priority. My top priority to read re therapy (I've already got it -- had it for several months but not had a chance to read it) is Critical Thinking in Clinical Practice, by Eileen Gambrill.

I think my needs may be somewhat opposite of yours. Psychodynamic/psychoanalytic therapy is one of the things that seems like a religion to me. I don't mean that at all in a deprecating way, just that it doesn't fit me. A lot of my thinking/seeing the world is behaviorally oriented, although it seems that behavioral therapists think behaviorally differently than I do. I don't know if that sentence is saying what I am trying to say, so maybe an example will help. A cognitive-behavioral therapist that I tried said that he saw his job as breaking up therapy into steps that were appropriate for the client -- if the steps were too big, the client would get frustrated, but if they were too small, the client would get bored. That sounded great to me. But then he went ahead and started into all the "You this, ...", "It's not that way, it's this way," etc., etc. stuff that was exactly the kind of thing I need to learn to cope with -- he didn't seem to have any sense that that was part of the problem. (Maybe it's not very nice, but I thought of him as "Mr. My Mind Is Made Up, Don't Confuse Me With The Facts".) That aspect of the experience was often the case in my experience with therapists -- they intervene before I've had a chance to explain what the problem is, or else they ignore my explanation and go on to their own agenda for me. This one insisted that I didn't need therapy, that I was doing fine on my own -- all on the basis of very few words I had managed to get in edgewise.

Objectively speaking, it's always good to hear that therapy has helped someone. Subjectively, I must admit that I feel a little envious that you found something helpful. I don't think that I would find analysis of what I'm experiencing relieving or clarifying, though. I went into therapy seeing more than one perspective, and hoping for help in integrating/managing that complexity. I didn't receive any help with that. So often it was like the therapist pointing out the facade of a building, while I was trying to say, "Look, there's also this side, and the back, and the other side, and the top, and look how they all fit together," only to have her again point out the facade.