A little more than a year ago I started seeing my current T. A few weeks after my first appointment he went on holiday for two months so it's really only been ten months of regular T, but on the other hand I've seen him twice a week since early November (with a couple of weeks' holiday for Christmas, and another couple of weeks off over Easter). My point being that I've had therapy for quite a while now.
When I started I was a bit of a wreck; I was feeling very unhappy and I didn't know where that came from, and I was having trouble focusing on my work. I was not suicidal and I very rarely did any SH (and never anything serious) but I wanted to be dead, most of the time. I didn't even know quite what it was that made me unhappy, other than the biochemistry in the brain thing. I knew that my unhappiness was my own responsibility and almost certainly my own fault, and that I was objectively worthless.
After a few months there was a shift and I could understand, emotionally/intuitively as well as intellectually, that I was not, in fact, worthless. This is progress. It's a change that has stayed with me.
I have also come to an insight about a couple of external factors that are important. I don't want to go into too much detail here. But the bottom line is that I've misunderstood things about what it means to be in a relationship, and I've never learnt some basic things about how to communicate with others, and I'm forty years old now and it is too late for me. Or maybe it wouldn't be, but I'm too much of a coward to change things - even if I knew exactly what to change. Which I quite frankly don't. This is also progress in a way, because I have gained insight, but it doesn't improve my mental state.
I feel trapped.
Therapy is making it easier, because it means I can say these things which are not ok to talk about to other people. (I know I'm saying things in this post that are definitely not all right to mention to others. I apologise for this, but since I'm a faceless stranger to most of you I hope it's all right anyway.) But T is asking me questions which make me understand how malfunctioning I am. In a way I hate therapy for making me ache with longing for something that's impossible, and for confirming that my unhappiness is my own fault. (My interpretation, that, and not T's.)
It will be another difficult summer, I think, with another two-month T holiday and less RL support than I had last summer. But at least I know that when T returns at the end of August the work will start again - last summer I didn't know that for sure, since I'd only seen him a few times.
So, yes, on the whole there's been progress since this time last year, I think.