> I think this idea can apply to "speaking with someone" as well. Again, I'm not saying that if there is a crises people shouldn't seek help. Just that speaking to someone, as far as I can tell, ought to have a purpose other than "I just need to talk." What does that mean, to "need" to talk? What are you looking to get out of the conversation? Do you need advice because you don't know what to do? Do you feel alone and isolated and need evidence that you are not?

I think you nearly lead yourself to the answer here - it can and should have a goal of learning and self improvement.

Personally, what I thought was most helpful about therapy was getting a "second opinion" on the things that I think and the way I think about them. While I used to think of myself as a highly rational, evidence based, logical etc etc person, I discovered over time via a helpful outsider that in fact I was subject to biases and disordered thinking in the same way that most people are, all the while thinking that I was being perfectly reasonable. Especially when it came to things that I had bad experiences with in the past, that I was afraid of and / or was trying to avoid unpleasantness around.

I found that I could rationalize (meaning: reverse engineer seemingly reasonable reasons for) my worry about things that hadn't yet happened and were unlikely to happen, often involving complicated lines of reasoning which hid various fallacies. I figured out why I was worried about those things in the first place (which funnily enough wasn't clear to me at the time), and how experiences bias thought and perception of likelihood. All this involved eating a lot of humble pie, and resulted in a greater understanding of people around me and why they behave they way they do too.

The second most helpful thing was learning to cope. There's probably stuff that's out of your control (e.g. stuff that happened in the past that's still affecting you, or just plain old facts of life) that you can't change. It's not that therapy magically fixes your problems per se, but perhaps you're making it worse for yourself: e.g. shame, embarrassment, self-blame, over-worry. At the risk of sounding woo-woo, Buddhists talk about the "second arrow" which is the unnecessary suffering you inflict upon yourself on top of the suffering that you already have to live through - that rings true for me.

Like any skill, you practice and learn through failure how to apply these things. I still worry occasionally, but I can now much more easily take a step back, evaluate, separate out what I can do and can't do about it, formulate a plan, ask for help, etc instead of turning into a nervous wreck who cannot do a thing. I now mostly worry the correct amount, which is the small amount that pushes me to do something productive about it :-)

I imagine this all sounds very abstruse if you don't have this problem and already worry the correct amount, but I'm writing this so that others in a similar situation and have an inkling that something's off (e.g. "why am I always so angry"), but haven't yet discovered what's going on can benefit. If anyone has questions about this, feel free to reply and we can chat privately.