Ideally you want to find someone offering cognitive behaviour therapy. You want an experienced practitioner. One to one face to face settings are better, but some people like group meetings or find telephone consults convenient.

For a mild problem you would be doing between 8 to 14 sessions of about an hour each.

The aim would be to indentify a problem. Then identify the "hot thought", the emotion it creates, how strongly you feel that emotion, and then the evidence you have for it.

You don't push that thought away, the therapist doesn't try to correct it. You sit with it for a few moments. You learn to identify the physical changes your body goes through (increased heart rate, sweaty palms, faster breathing, tense neck etc). Then you think of different evidence. You think about that new evidence, and say if it affects how strongly you feel the original hot thought.

It's an iterative process! This is just a very quick description - it's a bit more involved than that.

You're right - movies are terrible portrayals of mental health treatment. Like CSI does computers level of bad.