Holy moley! I asked the same question of my T today. Actually I asked her why the hell she was still seeing me, since I told her I've been in therapy with different Ts for like five years and shouldn't I KNOW better by now about most of my ****?

My T said that just because you "know better" about something doesn't mean you can snap your fingers and just change.

Change is scary. Change is hard. Change takes a LOT longer than we'd like to admit.

Question: Why do you think you choose these things, if you seem to want to change them? What are you getting out of sticking with your current issues/addictions and stuff you want to change? What's the payoff - what are you getting from your 'negative patterns' of behaviour?

There's probably something there blocking you. Same with me. It's easier to stick with the bad stuff you know, then to risk trying to change things to something "better" and "healthier" which is an unknown.

Small progress. You're making progress, recognizing where you do the same things over again but slowly changing your patterns of behaviour or your thoughts about it. I bet you've changed since you started therapy, in fact I KNOW you've changed.

We all probably could give someone else great advice if someone else was in our exact same spot, but it's hard to take our own advice because sometimes we're our own worst enemy. Sometimes we need to hit rock bottom several times to change something. That's what addictions can be all about - it's "easier" to change once you've hit rock bottom than otherwise.

What other issues do you think you haven't worked on yet in therapy? What are your therapy goals? Do you have steps to achieve those goals?

(BTW, I hope you don't think I'm picking on you. I'm just regurgitating what I've been 'taught' in therapy for myself. Which, btw, is still impossibly hard to do).

I'm probably not very useful, but I do kinda understand what you're going through. It's like beating your head against a wall sometimes, trying to force change to happen and feeling like you're stuck in a rut. But even being stuck in a rut, you're still learning something. Really.