I am quite a goal-oriented person in general and setting goals comes easily to me. I was not asked but did it by myself. When I started the first therapy of my life with T1 though, I was generally doing quite well and went mostly out of curiosity and to see if therapy is something that could be useful to learn more about myself and for general self-improvement. I was also interested if I could learn more about my anxiety and procrastination tendencies. I did not have much more specific envisioned as the outcome than maybe reduced anxiety and increased discipline, and I was very open to exploring anything.

With T2, I started seeing him when I was in a relapse with my addiction that I could not end for ~2 months at the time. It caused my anxiety to skyrocket and I was not dealing with my responsibilities properly due to the drinking, it all made me very desperate. I told him in my fist contact email that I was seeking therapy to hopefully 1) help me stop drinking and stay sober long-term again, 2) work on my (mostly work and other practical tasks-related) anxiety, and 3) hoped that if I got 1+2 on track, it would lead to improvement in pretty much everything that plagued me at the time. So I envisioned staying sober (100% abstinent) stably again, developing better self-care and discipline to handle my life, and expecting my anxiety to decrease as a consequence of these.

I actually achieved the goals I set with T2 but can't say it was the result of therapy in any major way and it took longer than the time I stayed with the T. I was happy to see that my idea really worked in terms of getting back on track with sobriety and dealing with practical stuff more consistently and with better discipline solving most of what I considered issues. But I don't consider it as an outcome of therapy - I was working very hard during that time to get unstuck in many ways and introduced a lot of new strategies. I guess therapy helped a bit as a reminder that I had to continue working on my discipline regularly. It definitely helped to resolve another bad habit that I did not even set as a goal at start but eventually therapy by itself became a distracting and excessive habit, si I stopped it.