Yeah picking out the right therapist and the right approach - in theory this sounds great but I would like for therapists to start with checking if the person really even needs therapy or if it's external circumstances being the primary issue.

And if that's the case then that's what has to be changed, not the person. That's what actions need to be taken for. I mean I don't even like this idea of changing a person or fixing them or learning better coping approaches and skills and whatnot. I think accepting yourself as you are, is where you got to start from, and then focus on the problem and not on yourself. Ironically enough, the other important thing here is accepting yourself will also mean that then you can work on whatever you've accepted, NOT until then. And even then, it will not be about changing yourself. It will still have to be a focus on the problem and the desired goal, and not on yourself or your mind.

That's what's worked for me. Also focusing on myself and trying to manage my own mind never really worked for me. That's just navel gazing to be very honest. The only thing that did work was just making sense of what the hell was going on inside and outside of me and then just being MYSELF, not trying to fix or change myself or anything, and then just using my normal common sense and taking action is what worked. Plus very, very gradual learning about new things as far as psychoeducation. That's the other thing that's helped. 99% of the ideas from therapists and in self-help resources never fit me, were like a square peg for a round hole, and so on.... So this is why I've had to do things using my observations and my common sense.

Here's why that was the case. It's much like, there can literally be a million ideas (no understatement!!) for what's going on for someone, and if a few of those one million ideas actually fit the person and his/her situation, both internal and external situation, then already great. But how long will it take to pick out those very few matching ideas out of one million of them....? Any other ideas will just be the proverbial square peg. Consequently, we can safely forget about the psychobabble. So again that's why simply accepting myself as is and doing common sense based observation and general psychoeducation is what worked best for me. The psychoeducation was not directly applied to myself due to limitations explained below, I just learned some general understanding of how some things may work psychologically, plus adding my own observations for myself & common sense.

Maybe one day applied psychology will get far enough to be able to match the approach to the individual in an efficient and effective way.....until then the problem is as above. And academic psychology has the same issues.... They do a few studies about one thing about the mind/psyche and then they decide that's how it always works. And in reality, that's *not* how it always works. They picked up a very small segment of something and they think that the small segment is the whole thing. And nope it's just not that way. Same for applied psychology, they pick up a very small segment and don't realise that it won't cover a lot of situations, all the different contexts and people. Research and applied psychology both have a looooooong way to go before they discover more than the few small segments.

It's of course all very fascinating, there being so many things about the mind and the psyche, so many understandings, but we always need to keep in mind that there is a lot more there than what we've already thought of, those million ideas and insights. Likewise we absolutely have to keep in mind that formal psychology too only has a few of those small segments picked up so far and some very general understanding that lacks much of the specifics, details for many of the individual people.