I think (at least I hope) that looking at the past for causes of current negative feelings and maladaptive behaviors helps to decrease them over time. Learning skills to manage them when they occur is very useful, but they're still occurring. For me, it's good to have both - ways of coping with them when they occur, but also looking at how they came to be and recognizing when I'm reacting to the present as if it's the past.

It's difficult and painful to review the traumas of my childhood. But just in the year I've been with this T, I've come to understand my behaviors (ok, foibles) much better. I'm starting to recognize the patterns and that's the first step for me in changing them.

Part of it is how we frame it for ourselves, too. At my last session, I told T about a meltdown I'd had a couple of days before. Things just got to me and i was feeling sorry for myself. We talked about things for a while and then he said, "I don't think you were feeling sorry for yourself. I think you were feeling empathy for yourself." Just that semantic re-framing made a big difference in how I felt about it. Now, if I could only do that reframing for myself, I'd be all set.