I've come to know that therapy is more about revisiting our core issues than resolving them. When I hit the wall with workaholism in 2011, I embarked on a two-year therapy journey to figure out how I had ended up so addicted to work that I had decimated my mental, physical, and spiritual health and nearly destroyed my marriage and family life.
After just a couple of sessions, my therapist posed the question "Why do you think that your value as a person is based on how much you work or produce?" I didn't have an answer until after I'd spent two years and a fair bit of money working with that therapist. Fast-forward to the present: imagine my surprise when I recently read an old journal entry of mine from 1991 and discovered that, a full twenty years before that therapist, I had written about something that she had helped me figure out, which was that I found my self-worth "only in what I do, and not who I am." Remarkable that I hadn't made much progress over twenty years.
But I'm doing better now and have learned that sometimes we don't see what we need to understand until we're ready to understand it. Therapy is a little bit of déjà vu and a lot of hard work.