Your comment is spot on. The support of a teacher and a group are essential to go along with the practice. They are called The Three Jewels for a reason.

There's a book I've read recently, "Sanity and Sainthood", that talks about meditation and psychotherapy. The idea is something like, imagine your mind is you sitting next to a pile of stuff that stinks, meditation builds the skill of tolerating the smell, psychotherapy removes directly some of the things that smell. Both of those can lead you to being fine in your mind.

As a concrete example, Shinzen Young says that he wouldn't trade a day of his life now, after lots of meditation, for a year before he started meditating, but also he didn't manage to deal with his procrastination through meditation and used psychotherapy here.

Another example of "not everything has to be dealt on during meditation", regular exercise, eating well, acting in a more honest/moral way (whatever those mean to you) all help meditation.