IMHO, any time depression continues for a long time, there is some reason for it. Well, I think there is always a reason for depression. Sometimes it's short-term and related to grief or a traumatic event or something that has happened to you relatively recently. In that case, sometimes the depression can be resolved and go away fairly rapidly, and medication can be helpful with the symptoms in the mean time. Therapy can help people to work through it faster.

When depression goes on for a year or more, I think that almost always it probably is not just depression. I would expect to find some adverse conditions in your childhood, and ways that you had to cope then that prevented you from developing skills that would help you for the rest of your life. Medication can still make the symptoms more tolerable, but the only way to really recover is therapy to help you learn how to change those patterns and learn new skills.

The patterns that you learned as a child very well could be diagnosed as a personality disorder or anxiety disorder or any number of Axis I or Axis II categories, but try not to worry so much about the diagnosis because that's just a way for professionals to use a shorthand term to describe the kinds of patterns that you have. Changing the patterns is the thing that matters.

Again, DBT or psychodynamic counseling are a couple of strategies that professionals can try to help you change those patterns. Both of those are good ones, and there are lots of other approaches too. If you have found a psychodynamic therapist who seems to be able to help you, that's probably a good way to go. You might ask that therapist if they can incorporate some DBT techniques too. Mine started out with primarily psychodynamic, and has tried lots of things, including DBT concepts.