> GAD (generalized anxiety disorder) and it plays very little baring in how your therapy is executed.

No there's set work books that many therapist agree on, but I'm talking about situations where your GAD is now at a state that isn't obstructive in your day-to-day life. You're doing the work still yet still feel less than or unhappy. There isn't more diagnoses for just feeling unfulfilled in life, depression is too harsh a term for it since your functional(which is core to most diagnosis is how much it changes your day to day). So that's when it comes to the therapists 'talk therapy' skill and how much time and money you have to throw at it

>this is a very short-sighted view. Therapy is not about finding a diagnosis, it is about finding perspective.

Yes, however, finding the therapist that can do that for you is exponentially harder. Since they have to understand you and your situation, and that comes with time and their personal insight on it. So at that point you have to then find someone that has faced similar issues or has specialized in helping people through them. If you're a minority, finding that insight is even more costly, so you have to choose talk therapy with someone that doesn't get it but is trying or pay the premium for the person that does.

For instance, I'm trans passing as a woman that's public about being trans. It's just inherently stressful navigating business environments, since I can get a mix of sexism and/or vailed transphobia. There isn't some magical answer my therapist has for me other than mediation and working through accepting myself and the situation. That involves re-diving into the stressful situation mentally to accept it, which is just more work and stress.

Examples:
- Knowing that people are speaking down to me irl, more so than when I was an unqualified student.
- Having people completely change their responses/personality around me when they find out I'm trans
- Intense Anxiety not about day-to-day activities/interactions anymore but dealing with any authority figures in cases like crossing the border means TSA shouldn't but could force me to strip naked to prove I'm male

Therapy isn't going to help me de-stress from these, it would give me work to make those less stressful later by working through why it stresses me. For which I've been given the tools already to do so

> There are other ways to gain the "release valve" that don't involve smoking weed.

Yea, I know I'm not smoking right now, and I'm doing the others already do a 45m - 1 hour work out daily, 30 minutes mediation, I work while I eat and get 7-8 hours of sleep work 10-12 hours. It is still the most effective way to relax in 20 minutes for me, and I'm probably going back to it as a way to end my day in another month once I'm done the 3-month test abstaining from it. What else can I do in maybe the hour or two I have left in the day that is clinically shown to reduce stress...

> substituting cannabis for therapy is self-sabotage

It's not substitution it's in conjunction when I can afford it, otherwise I do the homework that I got from therapy. Which like I mentioned before is more work and stress, which isn't relaxing at all. Weed helps me keep up with the work and not let it add to work stress too, I have been noticing I'm falling behind on my homework in that sense.