A (very) critical "review" of CBT: individual psychotherapy

Now, to say at least something nice about the CBT-program which I did: The psychotherapists were nice, kind and, I think, understanding. However, in the time I was there I had four different therapists and that’s not because I didn’t get along with one or the other, but because they have contracts which suck as well: Their contract ran out, so they switched to a different position. 

Therefore I obviously couldn’t really discuss anything with them in depth, due to the time constraints. However, that wasn’t too bad, because I wouldn’t have known what to discuss anyways. I told them about the struggle with my PhD, but I feel like twitter is the better place to discuss that, because the details are of course difficult to understand for people who don’t work in research.

So, it was nice that they were sympathetic and at least pretended to understand how I was feeling, but I’m not sure that did anything to help me with depression, though I do think it possibly made staying at the hospital (which is not the nicest place to be) a bit easier. But then, on the other hand, they try to figure out why you are depressed, i.e. which live events made you depressed. Maybe I’m just not good at arriving at hypotheses (regarding that) in which I feel some sense of certainty (though of course you fundamentally can’t know), but I don’t know why this happened to me. My working environment might be a candidate (for a cause) but I really don’t know, I liked my work and I liked what I was doing (mostly), I feel it would be unfair to blame that entirely. 

But then, psychologist come up with their own hypothesis, like maybe your parents avoided and ignored you as a child. Of course they state it as a hypothesis, not a fact. They barely know you, let only your parents, so how could they? But still, a hypothesis that is spoken out is something you think about, is it true, is it not true, how can I know whether it’s true or not, I only have my memories and not the ones of other children and no one did an experiment on my family (well, I hope ;)) to figure out if I was treated worse than other children. So how could I possibly know? And, I dunno, but I think this can be the side-effect of psychotherapy: That you search for a cause, because there has to be one (hasn’t there?) and start to reinterpret (normal or maybe not so normal) events in the light of that hypothesis. (Depression certainly can help with that…). And I just don’t know if much is gained with that; if I’d think of my parents as bad parents (I don’t!) how would that help me (other than avoiding the awkward moments when I’ve to explain that I don’t know how it happened)?