Boy can I agree with that conundrum, StressedMess! I think that for myself, therapy has been a go, stop, go journey. When I first entered therapy, what I needed was stabilization. I needed someone to help me get back my sanity and feel confident enough to continue functioning and living . . .After all, I needed to support myself financially and needed to function in the real world in order to do that. It really wasn't the time to do a lot of deep self-exploration or analysis, no matter how much I wanted to do that at the time. I needed to learn skills to function and then, when I could function, I stopped therapy for a while.

Then I reached another stumbling block in my life and needed to enter therapy again to, as you say, learn how to do a.b.c. , something I wasn't ready for the first time. Now that my life stresses are a little less or maybe focused in another area is a better way to describe it because I'm still "stressed, I find that I can take the time to really examine my emotional reaction to a.b.c. I can't say enough good things about DBT. I didn't live in an area that provided DBT skills, but I dug in and learned them myself. I practiced them religiously . . . failed at them quite a bit, but got back onto the horse and used them some more. Because I learned them, I feel as though I'm better able to dig into the hard stuff, my biggest stumbling block--avoidance attachment style. So using those skills and getting back into therapy is my focus now.

I've learned to recognize that how I relate to people on an intimate level is to avoid personal relationships (my biggest a.b.c. issue). I'm fine in a work environment; in fact, most people never even recognize my avoidance because I have such a good "work persona." But I want to change my style at least a little because I've begun to recognize that it causes me personal pain in the long run. I can't say I'm not still "resistant" to changing, but I have a good, patient relational therapist and I'm trying! Guess we just have to keep plugging along.