Since I decided not too long ago that even in the midst of the biggest depressive episode of my life I'm still the only person suitably positioned to direct the management of my own mental health concerns, I've started considering therapist visits to merely be consultation meetings. I'm sure he has his own ideas about what they really are, or what he thinks he's surreptitiously providing to me, and that's fine. I ask him questions about the things I'm looking at, about various intersections of sociology and psychiatry and philosophy that I find helpful and enlightening, and when there are topics he doesn't know so much about I share the fine points I've discovered and ask his opinion. He tries to poke holes in the nature of my interests and also tries to insert his more psychiatric-industrial-complex hypotheses in their place, and in responding I get the opportunity to re-consider and re-confirm what I believe to be true, a more expansive and less industrial knowledge base that speaks to my intellect. I'm now at least moderately empowered by the same meetings I once found almost wholly depleting.

It's much better than whatever it was we were doing before. Talk therapy. I think he was even trying to do some re-parenting, which was really not up my alley, along with many other standardly accepted varieties of what is perceived to be helpful therapeutic methodology.

But that's just me, folks! If you're a fan of things that don't work for me don't bite my head off for finding my own variety of success. I only talk about it because there might actually be a population of others on this planet who feel the way I do and could be benefited by the solidarity of my expression.