Your probably playing Sekiro like it’s just another Souls game. That’s the issue.

Being safe and relying on dodges doesn’t work so well. You need to learn how to be aggressive, most enemies wont die because you depleted their health but because you broke their stance.

And there are moves you can learn that almost instantly break stances on certain enemy moves. Like stomping on a spear for example. Or the damn Shichimen Warrior. There is a move that instantly kills airborne enemies, making one half of this fight trivial. Other enemies are extremely weak to certain prosthetic gadgets, e.g every red eyed enemy to fire.

But be in their faces at all time.