"Maybe I'm just stubborn, but I felt like she wasn't getting that I feel this way. Even if maybe logically I'm not as useless/stupid/a failure as I think I am, I feel like I am, and I felt like she was trying to use to tough love/logic to reverse my thoughts, but it wasn't working. I guess I just wanted her to listen to me instead of pulling out her CBT stuff."

My T has used CBT/REBT approaches with me a great deal of the time. I quoted what you said above because you said you "feel" these things about yourself. Your T is trying to get you to see that those really aren't feelings; those are beliefs about yourself. They are your thinking, not your feeling. That was an important distinction for me because he taught me that I acquired those thought/beliefs about myself many, many years ago, and they were mistaken beliefs that I bought hook, line, and sinker about myself based on how the dangerous and abusive people around me treated me, what they told me about myself, and what I believed I had done to justify the treatment I received.

Realizing and acknowledging that my beliefs about myself and other people in those regards were mistaken and being able to pinpoint how those beliefs developed allowed me to rethink them. It took time, LOTS of time, but I have been able to restructure my thinking into more reality-based, present-time ideas that are so much healthier. I had to let go of those old beliefs that I truly, truly thought were accurate and be willing to learn the truth about myself (which was really that I'm a pretty decent person--strangely it was frightening to admit that or see that about myself).

CBT gets touted as a short-term therapy and very surface-level for only dealing with present day issues, but that has by no means been my experience. My T would say that is a textbook definition/description of CBT done very lock-step and structured, but it has not been the reality in complicated cases of abuse and shame and PTSD. It can take a very long time to explore where that old mistaken thinking came from and learn to restructure your own thinking. But once you can get your thinking to line up with reality, the pay-off is that your emotions/feelings are no longer based on mistaken ideas about yourself and the world around you, but about a clearer concept of who you are and what you have experienced in your life.

Be patient with yourself as you work through this. Rome wasn't built in a day as the old saying goes. My T has a book that he kept pushing me to read. In fact, he didn't even ask me to read the whole book, but two or three chapters in the middle of it. The title is The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook. I don't really have anxiety or phobia issues, so I was resistant to picking it up, but I finally did. In the middle of that book are two chapters about mistaken beliefs and cognitive distortions (I don't have the book in front of me right now to tell you exactly the chapters or titles, but they are pretty easy to find). You don't need to read the whole book at all. What this book does so well in those two chapters is has you explore what your mistaken beliefs are AND where do they come from. It is a quick, concise, non-convoluted overview of those CBT/REBT-type concepts that finally validated where my thinking had come from. I finally sat down and really worked at these chapters kind of over and over again and really journalled deeply about those beliefs and my history in regards to them. And over time, it started making some sense to me and my thinking slowly, very slowly, started to restructure about my past and myself.