It's hard to learn to look inside yourself for what you want and know that it is only there, cannot be outside of you (in your therapist) because you are the only constant in your relationships with life. You have to look at what you "want" and feel and work from the inside out.

"Can you work with me" is a necessary question for a T to ask as they don't want their time wasted anymore than they want to waste yours or your money! If you don't like her, don't like the way she does things, then she probably isn't the T for you or therapy might not be what you want now, etc. But only you can answer that, no one can look inside you and figure that out for you.

My T use to remind me constantly, "all we have is words" in the relationship. That's all therapy is, words. You learn how various words make you feel, how to fit certain feelings to their words/meanings, how to put words together so another person can understand you and how to talk to yourself so you can communicate better with your inner self/voice. It's a bit like school, doesn't matter if the teacher loves or hates you, they just have to be willing and able to teach you about words and using them in relationship with yourself and others. It's hard work though learning all that. If you don't have "many" words or don't know how to use them (some of my problem), it's a slow process gradually learning them and associating them with the proper feeling and figuring out what you're feeling and expressing that in words, etc. But you have to be willing to do all that with this person.

The therapist doesn't do anything in the same sense that you will be doing. It's your life and therapy, not your therapist's. You have to reach out for it, they do not hand it to you in any sense. They can only teach you what you are willing to learn. Think about when you were in elementary school and the subjects you didn't "get" well or like (science) and that's kind of what therapy is like. You have to work to make sense of what doesn't make sense at first. But in addition, you have to try to figure out if it doesn't make sense because you have a horrible teacher who doesn't know how to get on your wavelength, doesn't know if you're a visual or audio or kinetic learner or whether it is some perceptive thing in you that is standing in your way. That's the puzzle for both you and your T; how to present what you "don't get" so you finally get it. But your T might not be good at understanding your emotional learning style (which she should be able to tell if she's good at "you" or not) or you might not be good at learning what she is trying to teach, the ways in which she is trying to teach it. There's nothing "wrong" or "bad" about that, but that's the first order of business -- can you talk to this person?