Some years ago I had to go to therapy for some issues of my own and back then I was afraid that it would fundamentally change who I am in some way. In retrospect that was a foolish thought. It made me wait longer to seek help than I should and in the end I was still like my old self (but better).
I've been in therapy off and on most of my post-adolescent life. In the beginning, it felt like its only use was to have a place to vent about life to an agent who is largely external to it (i.e., my therapist doesn't know my family or my friends), but who has your back and is interested in helping you succeed. That certainly had value, but it didn't especially change how I lived.
There was a point where my attitude towards therapy changed completely, when I started really listening and paying attention to what my therapist was doing. I might describe to him an incident which made me feel some unusually bad (or good!) emotion, and the therapist would ask just the right questions (and follow-ups) to get at the root cause of why I really felt that way.
Eventually, I started to experience these internal dialogues which resemble a therapy session when I felt angry or sad or upset for some other reason. I might ask myself, "Why is this trivial argument with Person X making me so angry?", then examine my relationship with Person X, and then other recent incidents with this person, etc. etc. These internal "therapy sessions" not only help to calm me down, but also tend to point in the right direction to improve the overall relationship with Person X. I think it's been an amazing turn in how I interact with other people and helps me enjoy life.
So, in conclusion, I think that's one way to really benefit from therapy: deducing, by observation, the system or process your therapist is using to help you, and applying that same system to yourself. In other words, good therapy helps you learn to be your own therapist.
I noticed after a couple months of initially starting daily zazen practice (just 10-15 minutes every night), that I went from reacting in a way that was originally: event -> (usually 'extreme') reaction, to something more like: event -> stepping back/observing what would've originally been my reaction -> choosing to engage with it or not. After a year of practice, this new pattern of reacting basically became muscle memory and would happen _even when_ I sometimes wanted to strongly react to things (i.e. music/art/social situations with friends/etc ).
After about 4 or 5 years of consistent practice I caved into what I had even read was a common pitfall for most practitioners in thinking that I had "achieved" most of the "benefits" I could from meditation and just stopped practicing all together. It took about a year for most of these benefits to even start decaying, but after about that 2 year mark, my pattern of thought/reacting had almost entirely gone back to how it was before I had ever started practicing.
I'm thinking there has to be some happy medium where you have the ability to observe as well as engage, but I'm not sure what the original philosophies of the practice actually "advocate" for as I never really delved too deep into the literature on this.
I think this was actually one of the main reasons I stopped practicing, because I was wondering if my 'artistic side' was being 'dulled' by meditation. This is still a question I want answered and have been wondering if it may be worth doing a deeper dive into the literature/having a teacher guide me through the rest of this journey.
Yeah, I've thought about meditation myself, but I don't really see how to effectively teach it, especially in a class-room (i.e. 1-to-many) - but maybe that's just because I've learned (well, tried to) meditation by myself, by reading, not from a teacher/mentor.
One other idea that crossed my mind, but it's far from fleshed out, is to teach people the exact same techniques that therapists use (i.e. "asking the right questions" to drill deeper in the direction towards understanding yourself), but with the purpose of using them on themselves. However, I've no idea if that's simply too much to learn, or if maybe "being a good therapist" comes only with "having a lot of life experience".