Having twice gone through a cognitive therapy series, I can say that it helped me to understand a lot about myself. The more important thing that it did for me, and I cannot claim it works the same for everyone else, is that it allowed me to understand enough things from my past to be able to forgive my father and myself. Mostly, forgive his and my human foibles. Once you understand the WHY of something, that forgiveness comes easier.
I learned that my father didn't know how to be a dad because he never knew his own father. That's a longer story than I care to start at the moment, but most of my conflicts from my father came as baggage from his mother, my paternal grandmother, who was borderline coo-coo. And not in a good way. In modern USA, she would have failed the safety checks performed by Child Protective Services. Let's leave it there.
One of my uncles told me the truth about what happened during their childhood after granddad had to leave New Orleans to find work and send back money to help care for grandma and the three kids. Once I learned the truth, my therapist and I were able to bring about a change in understanding, and with understanding comes a type of closure. So cognitive therapy let me find the square holes for those proverbial square pegs that never quite fit.
