There are a lot of interesting points in your post, and my reflections are both similar to and different than yours.

Although I have been in therapy, about eight years now, I came with some serious trauma resolved and some not. In this round, when my youngest child reaches the age I was when I was abused, I knew I needed to go back to therapy that I ended 15 years earlier. In this round of therapy, I have worked directly on the traumas themselves. I don't know what it means to work on symptoms like anxiety and depression, except I usually raise them as part of my agenda for session. I don't see my therapist is. doing anything directly, but I find it useful to talk about things that make me more anxious or depressed and what I can do to feel less. This works pretty well for me.

Like you, I have engaged in a lot of body therapies, including now a five or six year Tai Chi practice. I also do massage therapy at the same rate I now do therapy, every other week. I think I do them both for what you are calling support, I call it self-care. I don't see what's wrong, if that's what you're saying, in using therapy for support. I have good friends and I do receive a lot of support from them, but there still things I want to discuss with my therapist in addition to or instead of my friends. Maybe this would be different if I hadn't had the traumatic experiences I've had, because daily life is full of symbolic reminders of what happened to me so many years ago.

I believe that it's okay for people to go to therapy for whatever purpose they choose. It's one of many things one can do to feel better and have support for the slings and arrows that come up in life. For me therapy is like a touchstone that helps me figure out how I can have more of what I want in my life. At this point, I don't feel like I need to work on trauma or the symptoms that are part of it. Just like regular massage is no longer about fixing the golfers elbow I got from gardening this summer. It still okay to use the service to just feel good. Therapy works some of the same way for me. It feels good to talk about the changes I'm making in my life and why with someone who has no investment in the specifics of what I do. Sometimes my family gets anxious when I talk about wanting to move when our youngest is in college, and my spouse worries as I think about making changes in my career, but my therapist doesn't. For me, therapy is a lot cheaper than massage, and tai chi is cheaper than both.

I haven't experienced much of the negative side effects therapy, although my therapist has pissed me off from time to time, missed the point, her family and some other way. I've never experienced the problematic transference or attachment. I do think that I experience a biochemical response in therapy, and feeling good as the result of feeling understood or because I've been able to articulate it in a way that can be understood, that's a bonus of therapy. I think the therapy has re-wired my trauma response into something different because of the bio chemistry changes that occurred during therapy. I think any time you talk about a traumatic experience in a setting where the original biochemistry response is activated, those pathways change. My experience has been that these pathways change further, they are no longer the groove they once were, and I talk about therapy. I can see now that my relationship to my past is different, I am more at peace. Therapy helped a lot, and so did the bodywork, but I feel I continue to improve as time goes on. I don't see any reason to end therapy and I'm thinking about going back to once per week.