I'm very very very fortunate with my therapy.

I don't think therapy is a panacea though. Have friends who don't find it useful after many attempts over many years and they've found what works for them through trial and error. Some of them instinctively know what they need, some have needed a lot of time and effort.

My therapist isn't into jargon terms and only used them when I asked. I'd ask because sometimes knowing the jargon term aided in my own research / self advocacy, much like medical terms for specific health problems can help a GP visit be more productive. Any psychoeducation she did was backed by neuroscience and she explained it simply and linked it to my struggles.

As I legitimately lacked common sense due to the environments I grew up in, and worked in. Healthy "common sense" was something I needed to learn, as "common sense" in my environments were all about staying silent and tolerating mistreatment in the face of harm and violence. Today I look back and am shocked that I endured threats of rape and actual violence done to me.

My therapy didn't go deep unless necessary, and the depth was all titrated and collaborative, deeper and then back to the surface as needed.

One early goal was decreasing my self-harm, and increasing my coping skills while preserving my functioning levels. I was self-harming at work while enduring a very demanding job and a really violent family of origin.

For me, I did have to go deeper to touch underlying emotional reasoning to some extent because pure cognitive behavioural stuff didn't work on me. I would understand cognitively but had no pause between events and my big emotions and then my immediate reactions. Often my reactions was harming myself.

My self-harm served very important functions, even if it was "maladaptive". Not common sense to force "reduce your self-harming" without help building external community support and other inner resources. I had immense difficulties with rumination and self-hatred, which worsened my depression etc.

And of course lifestyle changes for better physical and mental health.

I wasn't eating enough nutritious food, wasn't resting when I could rest, wasn't sleeping well (nightmares multiple times a night, every night) and didn't know how to advocate for myself with my then-psychiatrist, didn't know I needed regular dental, regular health checks, wasn't treating severe pain adequately, did not know the importance of taking care of my medical needs. Etc.

My therapist has also backed off when I told her it's not common sense (I used harsher words) for us to do trauma processing when I only saw her once a month while I was working really long hours with a very stressful workload, plus plenty of violence in my family of origin.

I did need some very careful trauma processing as it was linked to why I stayed in my abusive situation, and why I struggled to set boundaries in the workplace, and why I never said no to more and more work, nor did I assert myself when harassed at work.

I did end up burning out severely (clinically, not talking 6 months of rest then I'm fine) and am far less functional... though for me it wasn't therapy. It was my stubborn refusal to leave that job even after half my team quit due to the sky high workload and no new hires so everyone left had to fo 3 people's work, no one could take time off, people regularly worked even when given sick leave (pre-pandemic), poor management etc. My current and former therapists kept trying to tell me my life was out of balance but I refused to listen.

If I could redo that, I would have left for a better job instead of working until my health broke down. And I would have left my abusive family sooner.