I am a huge fan of healing, growth and personal transformation. And good therapy is a major productive source of it.
Sadly, really good therapists seem rare in my book. Read a book called “Focusing” by Gendlin.
It’s quite common for those of us who fit in easily with the educational and economic system, and lead relatively stable & functional lives to presume that we don’t have much baggage or issues. And that may be true as far as getting through life and appearing “normal”. But it’s absolutely not true at the levels required to adequately serve other wounded people.
So my primary criticism of the psychiatric field is that many practitioners don’t do their own work adequately enough to be great therapists to their clients. They rely on their book smarts, degree’s and rational knowledge, but haven’t taken the time & effort required to remember their own childhood from an EXPERIENTIAL (felt-sense) perspective. They may abstractly recognize the idea of homeostasis preservation from something they’ve read, but I have doubts that many are exploring it in their own practice.
Far too many work with cognition, and not nearly enough with experiencing. It was the experiential work (Hakomi & SE) that had the greatest impact in my life.