Well, Star... I can see where you're frustrated and even maybe angry at the whole T process. It's not exactly a comfortable or nurturing experience in the beginning; or it wasn't for me. I clammed up, ran away a few times and seriously wondered if it was worth the agony I was going through. It's just a wild guess on my part, but your T might be trying to explore where your anger-buttons are... find out what they are because it just might provide enough "textbook"-kind of info for her to decide where to go from there... and start making some more productive (and practical, useful) suggestions. Finding those buttons, isn't the end-result of therapy... it's what I used to call the "gold nuggets of treasure" that helps a person untangle the incomprehensible "big picture" of themselves. Maybe. It's a possibility, anyway... some Ts work that way.
I can relate to a couple of things you said; I went through something like this in T, too. There was a really hilarious moment for me (in retrospect - I was deadly serious at the time and about to have a nuclear meltdown) when I was in the midst of a tirade about not ever being listened to; that no one ever HEARD me or cared about what I thought was important... and she said, Really? Is that so? and just looked at me.
And I finally "got it" (hard-headed as I am). She was listening me; she cared; she let me say anything I wanted... any way I could get it out of my head, which as you've probably figured out from my writing was a whole lotta words that took forever to "spit out" what I was really trying to SAY.
She often asked me what I wanted. And I really couldn't say - because no one ever bothered to care about what I wanted and I didn't dare want anything personally, for fear of Nmom. I felt like a non-person because I couldn't come up with a list. Who doesn't want something, you know? And why didn't I know what I wanted? SIGH... I still don't walk around with a list of things "I want" in my head. I didn't even know how to find out what I wanted - sheesh! At that time, the "quit smoking" want was pretty high on my list (because my MD said I should - and well, everyone knows this, right?) and I had 1 more thing - live near the water. That was all I knew for sure. I expected that she would give me a whole list of ways to quit smoking... a fool-proof explanation and plan... and more than once, I confronted her with all the other stuff we talked about - and what I'd said my goal was, in coming to therapy - help me quit smoking and why weren't we doing that? I even quit therapy for year and tried to quit smoking on my own.
THAT was a true failure, in that I simply made myself totally miserable. I went back, because I couldn't function at all, like that - I was in pieces that I didn't recognize and didn't know how they fit together.
My point, Star... is that sometimes to "fix" what's wrong... it's necessary to disassemble "us" and examine each piece in detail. And I don't think it's possible to do this by one's self. It's like we're too close to picture, to see exactly what the composition is - what the picture's about... to find that one thing that "just doesn't work" in the picture. Therapy is all about understanding how each individual piece of "us" works to create the "big picture".
Hang in there! If you're already at this point, then you're making pretty fast progress. It took me a year or more, to get where you are now. It might be confusing and yucky for awhile longer... but really, it DOES get better and when you start on that track, progress even speeds up.
