I agree, the therapist can't do it for you. But the therapist can definitely help you move forward in a positive way, try out new ideas, come up with action plans, share in your successes and setbacks, trouble shoot when you get stuck, etc. etc. The therapist is not just for doing painful trauma work.

In an early session with my T, he described to me 6 areas of life in which to develop oneself. Some people focus more on a couple and some people give lesser effort to more of them. I can't remember the 6, but they were something like work, love, friendship, spirituality, creativity, etc. He was talking about making a plan for your life, and then doing it. At that time in my life. I was so not ready for that, as I was stuck, had all these major problems, and we ended up doing trauma work to get me unstuck. And then I had my divorce to do too, which occupied me for months and months. As I was doing all this difficult work, little by little I started doing more positive things too. Looking back, I see I was starting to develop in some of these 6 areas T had listed. Now I am doing that much more, and have less of the trauma stuff hanging with me. But still I go see my T. It's not like for the first year of therapy we do trauma work, the second year we do divorce, and the third year we do positive development. It is all mixed up and overlapping. I don't just wake up one day and suddenly change my life in a positive way and leave all the difficult stuff behind. I work on these things simultaneously. I wouldn't want to have my T just for the trauma work. That would be so sad! Right now in therapy, our topics include: my career change (I have recently quit my job and gone back to school fulltime--after 20 years- in a completely different field); my grief over the coming end to my father's life and trying to improve relations with him; improving relations with one of my daughters (always a challenge and something I have worked very hard on); and events from my past when I was a teenager that have haunted me for decades (some trauma here, but this is an era we skipped over when we were doing our main trauma work). There is a ton of stuff to work on.

I guess my point is that you don't have to quit therapy just because you are ready to do positive things in your life. Being in therapy doesn't mean you can only work on past traumatic events. There are so many things in the here and now that therapists can help with, such as learning to communicate better, having better relationships with family members and friends, being happier in work and love and life, etc. It is great to have a T along as you do those things. I don't see my T as often now as I used to when we were doing the difficult work, but I see him often enough that he can help (every 2-3 weeks).

For me, the big thing now is changing careers and going back to school. I cleared a lot of negative stuff out of my life. There would be a hole if I didn't have something new. Another motivator is that I'm not a youngster anymore. I don't want to end up at an advanced age looking back and having regrets: "I wish I had done this, and I wish I hadn't done that, etc." I feel that the time for me is now or never.