I used to think it was a con, too. During my psychiatric residency, therapy was defined by patience and silence. I was taught to listen quietly, encourage patients to vent, and maybe prescribe an antidepressant. We didn't set measurable goals, and we certainly didn't expect recovery anytime soon. Progress was supposed to take months, or years. And it did! But now that I've been in practice with TEAM CBT for many decades, my experience is the opposite.
There are all kinds of things we could murmur to our brains to soothe the fear of being judged. You could point out that almost nobody is looking at you; mostly people are too wrapped up in themselves. You could point out that you already know you're competent from how you rise to occasions at work; there probably isn't much to mock about you. You can pat and soothe your brain with evidence that the thing it's afraid of is very, very unlikely.
