Sandbox walls

I'm confused over the approach to take to counseling. Is every relationship an exact balance of blame and dysfunction? Or does sometimes one side need more fixing than the other? If so, what should the other person say in the counseling session? Be honest or say and do what the counselor wants? I suppose I just need to worry about fixing myself.

I want to learn to be emotionally healthy. I'm not and never have been. I want to do more work with therapists at identifying my personality types, gauging the position of the sliders and bringing them into some kind of normal range. I also want to get more motivated and better at planning and life skills. I want to learn strategies for increasing my focus and disclipline. How do you unspoil someone? How do I make up for not learning ways of coping? Why was I born the way I was and how can I change despite that?

I want to improve my health, especially my energy level and ability to relax. I want to prepare myself more balanced meals and take care of myself better in other ways. I want to find someone that will really take these things seriously and will spend hours and hours talking to me and working with me. This isn't something that can even be discussed properly in 1 hour chunks, much less worked on. I need some kind of serious, intensive treatment or my whole life is going to be an endless struggle and all the things I have to offer will go unrealized.

Yet it's not enough that I go to rehab, that I see a psychiatrist, that I seek help for anger, frustration. After all, why am I frustrated? I feel I have a number of very good reasons to be. Life is lived in context, and that context must change for the better as well or I never will.

I don't want to be manipulative or self-centered or anything else. I want to find out what I'm really like, how others see me, and to fix what needs fixing so I can be a person I am happy with. I want to build better relationships. I want to know if it's me, or if it's the people I've happened to meet. Or both. Just need to know so I know what needs to be fixed.

Maybe I'm the problem and wherever I go I'm going to run into the same problems. Maybe I'm fine and just need to get away from the people who makes me feel bad. Or maybe it's some combination; I have issues and so do they. This last one is surely the case. But I want to find out the details, see things from the outside with an impartial eye, find out what's really going on.

My life is EXTREMELY stressful. I worry about death and meaning and being so flawed and unhappy and wondering how I'm going to pay my bills and how I'll eat and not wanting people to feel sorry for me but still wanting them to care about me and fearing being taken to a mental hospital or dumped out on the street and how I am going to cope with my surging and plummetting moods this whole time and jesus my stomach is killing me and why don't I have any energy and why can't I just be like everyone else?

But to expect me to be completely different, other people's idea of high-functioning, is out of the question for me. Maybe one day I'll achieve my own idea of high-functioning, but it's going to have to come from lots of work and lots of love. And even then it's not going to fit most people's mold, because I simply don't care about the things that are important to them.

I want to pick myself up by my bootstraps and "get things done" ... but I truly am phobic about some of these things, and fearful of mental breakdown as well. I feel completely blocked from doing anything that will change the protective micro-world I've built around myself. I begin to feel extremely threatened and anxious. I don't know how to get beyond this point.