I’ve had good and bad experiences with CBT with different therapists, but overall very good experiences and it is what ultimately led me to get as far in my recovery as I have (as well as DBT, a specific subset of CBT). It really did change my life, but only once I was able to accept the skills, be willing and not willful, and understand what the skills are for/how to use CBT.
CBT/DBT are useful when you realize the skills are not there to fix your problems, they are there to help you get through your very difficult moments of distress, and not necessarily make you feel better, but keep you from doing anything unhealthy in that moment/engaging in your target behaviors/further decompensating. That doesn’t mean you avoid those issues, you just work on those in the therapy room (if your CBT T is good), and tackle things as they come up, rather than pulling up everything from childhood, you just deal with what’s relevant at the time, process it, and move on. It’s hard to actually utilize CBT skills, sometimes, especially because you don’t always want to when you’re not in a good place, but that’s why it’s essential to practice your skills when you’re feeling healthy, so that they’re there for you and are strong when you are not feeling so strong. CBT is very solutions-focused, which can be really annoying and make it feel like T is not empathetic because they focus on the solution rather than the problem, but a good T will find a balance and validate how you’re feeling, but then work with you on how you can get past that.
I wish you the absolute best of luck with it and really hope you have some success.