My rational/critical thinking told me my therapist had seen lots of clients before me, met and studied a zillion cases/people probably and was "good enough" at it to make a good living from it. When she said to me, "it works, just try it and see" I had no reason to disbelieve her own experience with all these other people and could not see how her telling me that if it was not her experience would benefit her? Objectively, what I was doing was not working for me and I obviously was not very good at thinking up something that would work or I would have tried that and it would have worked?

What makes another person think something is true/not true is not as interesting to me as what makes me think it is true/not true. My response to someone else and what they say is often more interesting to me than what they actually say. I love the scene in "Runaway Bride" where Julia Roberts finally tries eggs all the ways she can find to try them to see what kind she does like instead of going with the automatic/knee jerk, "I don't know"/"I don't like that"/"it won't work for me" when one hasn't tried something. How much sense does that make?

I made fun of a work friend because she bought popular weight loss/exercise pills off TV before that brand was banned :-) Now that I think about it though, she was curious and wanted to try them, there was a money back guarantee (which she got) and knows for a fact they do not work (for her :-) I'm just there with my general knowledge that things like that don't work and are a waste of money but I have never tried any of those things, I'm just, as you say, a "skeptic" so make value judgments for myself on some things based on my interest/general knowledge. I argued with this same friend who believed in horoscopes too when I was taking a college astronomy course :-) but feel I had more specific knowledge than she had and she was not being skeptical enough.

I think that is the crux -- knowing when to be skeptical because you believe you have specific knowledge that says something positively will not work for you and suspending the skeptical self and getting curious instead when you have no information of your own.