I never thought of my sessions as just sitting with a person/friend and talking. If that was all I was getting, I wouldn't have continued.

My therapy was always pretty directed towards fairly specific goals. They weren't written down and formal, but it was always clear what we were working toward and why we were discussing certain things.

My therapists taught me skills for coping with depression and anxiety that I use to this day -- skills I had not been able to put into action on my own even in cases where I understood cognitively what I needed to do but couldn't actually utilize them due to factors I simply didn't understand about myself. In therapy, we processed through significant trauma that had left me dissociative, depressed, passive, and hopeless -- factors that had me stuck and quite ill actually.

Through that combination of skills and processing through my past, I was able to emerge from therapy in a much healthier place than I started.