It's not that therapists have the solutions to your problems. What they have is a set of tools for helping you look at your problems in different ways, and experience in applying those tools.
It's really easy to be skeptical of that. You have, after all, been working on your own problems for a long time, and you know the domain better (yourself) than they possibly could. What can they contribute?
And the answer is that they're not you, and can therefore often see what's obvious to everybody except you. You know those friends of yours who can't figure out what's wrong even though everybody else already knows, but can't figure out how to convince them? Well, it's like that? That happens to everybody, including you. And unlike your friends circle, they're paid to be objective about it, to solve the problems rather than remain your friend.
This isn't a panacea. Finding a therapist is like dating -- you need somebody who clicks with you. It can take several tries to find one who works. It's not cheap -- it's covered under many insurance plans, but sadly conventional wisdom is that the best ones are those who can avoid working under insurance.
And that makes it kind of a catch-22: you have to trust the process for it to work, but it's not trustworthy. You have to be willing to step outside your preconceptions, which sounds noble in the abstract but is really aggravating in practice, since it feels wrong and feels like it's getting worse instead of better. Which it could be -- all of those various defaults and defensive mechanisms you've got, they came about for reasons.
Still, I'd say not to dimiss the notion. If you've dismissed it as clearly unable to help, I'd say you're wrong. Which isn't the same as saying that it can help.
The best I can say, as it relates to the article, is that if you're willing to go to therapy and take on the trust involved, that alone does make you more likely to succeed at dating, because you're at least trying to think about it. Or at least, you're demonstrating that you always were that person all along.
I hope that answers your curiosity, or at least helps point it in the direction of an answer.