I don't think I'd last very long with a therapist who made the distinction between "real" work and...what, exactly? Fake work? Isn't it up to the client to decide what sort of work is helpful? Or are we in some sort of competition for spiritual enlightenment in which everything ugly and difficult about us must be cut away and exposed to the light, the more blood and tears the better?

I find myself particularly prickly that she'd have this attitude around CSA. If my therapist had ever gone after this subject with any level of aggression, It would have destroyed the relationship. Because interest like that looks far too much like voyeuristic attunement to me, and the command to "trust" the therapist with this toxic material looks far too much like the command to "trust" the abuser who created that material in the first place.

You are not there to entertain the therapist with intense material or satisfy their need to witness extreme emotional experiences. If the most helpful and healing thing for you is to sit for fifty minutes in companionable silence as you color a ****ing dolphin, then the therapist's job is to sit there in companionable silence as you color a ****ing dolphin. That the therapist might find this boring says nothing about the needs of the client and everything about the needs of the therapist.