Having thought about it some, I have been concluded that there’s only so far one can get when operating within that narrative. There’s only so much they can help with until you yourself can see that the “I” is it itself a machine generating the narrative, but also something else and more than just that narrative that is constantly running in our brains. It is something that can be observed. The observer is the observed as Krishnamurti would say.
As long time meditator, I find that there is nothing that is hidden from ourselves if we look. Meditation is one of the few ways to begin to access the whole and step outside of the narrative loop. You can also try psychedelics, but that’s riskier. A good trip might save you a decade of therapy. A bad one might genuinely imbalance your brains machinery. In some sense, the time is wasted. However, if you genuinely spend this time learning to observe yourself, this is very much a way of being that is not wasted in my opinion.
A therapist is generally going to work with you inside of a particular framework and way of stepping towards a particular way of operating. It sort of like the long or hard way of solving a math problem before you learned underlying theory of whatever problem you were working on.