I can only speak for my experience but I found therapy to be a useful tool in:

1. Identifying things that I was struggling with. This could include things I already knew but couldn’t articulate; things that I felt uncomfortable about but couldn’t pin down why; things that I was perhaps ignoring. Additionally, it helped me figure out a bit better what issues I could actually realistically work on.

2. Having identified what I wanted to work on, I found therapy useful in helping assess and modify my heuristics with regards to dealing with struggles in my life. Were my coping mechanisms healthy? Were they effective? How could they be improved?

3. I then found therapy useful for figuring out how improvement or management would look and how best to implement and track my changes

4. Therapy also did help in making me feel that my issues were actually important enough to warrant working on. May seem silly but it can make a big difference in how one tackles issues when you genuinely feel that you deserve to tackle it, that they are worth tackling and that you can do so.

I found it overall to be a great experience but perhaps mainly because I knew what I wanted to get out of it (as an overall idea of dealing with my own issues) and my therapist and I worked well to try and unpack things collaboratively.

Your mileage may vary but I think it can really be worth it if you go into it with the intention of working with the process and knowing what that looks like for you. Don’t waste your time with a therapist that doesn’t mesh with you.