I have had so many of the same thoughts! Therapy has benefitted me greatly over the years and I have definitely grown from the experience. It has also helped me

I have had so many of the same thoughts! Therapy has benefitted me greatly over the years and I have definitely grown from the experience. It has also helped me sort out the aspects of my life that therapy can help me address, and those areas in which it offers very little. There is no substitute for a supportive, nurturing environment of peers, lovers, elders, children, activity partners, business partners, etc. - take what you will from that list in which you personally find sustenance. Therapy is designed in part to help navigate those relationships, but an hour a week of talking individually to a specialist is woefully inadequate to repair any of them. The best it can do is give you coping tools and rudimentary communication skills. Increasing we are isolated and one or more of those key relationships is missing or badly dysfunctional and any support system that was once there in which those relationships could be mended is now gone. Let’s not forget however that those support systems had (and still have) toxic attributes. They favored men, and put women and minorities in a subservient role. They tied you to family that may be abusive, or a dogmatic belief system. Kick that social structure out from under people, and what do you have left? An ever-changing and often overwhelming tapestry of less substantial and more poorly-defined relationships. Isolation as a replacement for conflict resolution. Therapy has not really caught up, nor is it even designed to address any of this.