For one, I cannot answer certain questions in the frame which my therapist imposes because I intellectually reject the assumptions that underlie them.
Examples? Just curious.
For another, I do not fully agree with the psychological establishment on what constitutes "healthy", adaptive, rational behaviour and would not like myself to adhere to even the closest variation on mental normality. There are areas of myself which I do not wish to display as "up for fixing", and do not allow interference other than my own in those areas. I consider myself rational enough to debug myself, if and only if I decide an intervention is warranted. Otherwise, I like and accept myself as I am, I consider most of my traits, broadly speaking, as part of my ideal self, and would like to preserve most aspects about myself.
Total armchair-psychologist kibitzing. This reads to me like someone who feels judged, or been repeatedly told that there's something wrong with them that they should fix, or for some other reason is in an emotionally defensive position. My guess is if you felt less judged or more respected, following the shrink's suggestions would feel more like giving some new habits a test drive than like ritually sacrificing parts of your identity.
If I can recover on my own and with the aid of antidepressants, without having to waste time on therapy for it, I'd gladly do it, but I have the lingering doubt that the shrink may be right after all and I might need to get my head checked.
I don't know enough about psychotherapy efficacy statistics to say, but heuristically I tend to assume that experts are better at judging these things than non-experts.
A possibility to consider: there may be behavior changes that would have a highly positive impact to your future life (avoiding arguing habits which exacerbate relational strife, to make up an example), but that aren't terribly relevant to getting out of this depressive slump. Have you tried the usual anti-depressive suspects (exercise and socializing)? When you feel better / at the beginning your next relationship, it might be worth revisiting some of the things which went wrong in the past to try to avoid them.
This comment should be read as informal musings for the purpose of collecting outside views.
Examples? Just curious.
For instance, she asked me to list the positive and negative traits of the significant masculine and feminine models in my childhood, in order for her to tell me what kind of relationship I am subconsciously looking for. Problem is, 1) I don't remember people in my early life as strongly representative of their gender, because back then I didn't have a strong idea of gender, I just divided people into kids and adults rather than male and female; 2) just because some people might have been my parents or caretakers or elementary tea...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.