I saw my first therapist when I was 14. Over the intervening 22 years I have seen maybe a dozen more. Every time I have ever interacted with a therapist in my life, I wasn't really there. I finally figured out I haven't been in charge this whole time.
OCD has been in charge like the Dungeon Master rolling for my initiative, using my spell slots, providing my dialogue to the main characters. He plays with a six set expansion pack for the rulebook. The ones with the really nitty gritty rules.
Every time I thought I was pretty mentally healthy, that my anxiety was just kind of garden variety worrying about fires starting in your house on a daily basis (ya know, just kid stuff), that I was depressed but it made sense because I was broke and that was a pretty good reason to be depressed... that was OCD talking with MY LIPS, using me like a ventriloquist dummy.
I really thought I was fine. I really thought I wasn't "that" mentally ill. But I have been living with this always lurking just out of the corner of my eye. I didn't even know that I wasn't really piloting myself. I wasn't aware of the Dungeon Master, because how could an NPC be aware?
It feels like I'm in control of my own mind for the first time almost ever. And I am delighted to see that all the parts of me, all my personality... that was all really me. But it's like taking off chains. It's like having been watching my life through a foot of glass - and not clear glass, but the opaque scratchy kind where you can't really make anything out, but you recognize the shape of things anyway. I've been seeing through these eyes and breathing through this nose and eating with this mouth. But I wasn't the one taking any of those breaths. I feel like I've been asleep, or away, and I left a robot to run things while I was gone. But then I was away for so long that the robot went kind of haywire and redecorated the place and by the time I got back, neither of us could remember what makes a robot different anyway... and doesn't it look fine in here?