I feel I'm a few steps behind you in my concentration practice, so reading your threads has been motivational and helpful. Thanks, matey.
Hey Liam, good to hear that, and you're welcome! To me it sounds like you're a solid practitioner (from your threads).
To tell the truth, I haven't actually even begun formal Insight Practice yet, so I'm behind everyone else in that regard.

I do a lot of self-analytical journaling, and try to do so from the heightened state of awareness/calmness & perspective that meditation (Concentration Practice) brings me to.
I think it's just my intellect that really wants something solid to latch on to, generally speaking, and hence my obsession with psychotherapy. For instance, it's impossible to cure a broken heart with a pill -- but a pill might help to a certain extent. However, if the pill is beyond your budget, then you'll begin to attribute mythical curative properties to it.
Same with me and psychotherapy -- I've been in therapy before (years ago when I was covered under my father's insurance policy because I was under a certain age), and at the time it did not seem to produce lasting change in me.
What you're saying about a counseling course sounds interesting, although the "bare truth" is that I've been living paycheck-to-paycheck, and am working on finding a way to get into a pattern of actually saving up money (and when I do, there are certain "material" things related to my career that the money will first go toward).
In the meantime, however, I'd rather not be down on myself (it's a long-standing habit), so I'm trying to put together a system that incorporates meditation, Training in Morality (the essence of which, for me, is taking responsibility for my well-being, and that of others), and working on gradually shifting my overall attitude toward life from a pessimistic, "I-can-never-get-what-I-want" to "I have what I
need, but more wouldn't be bad!"