The thing is that probing always occurred with the baseline assumption that I really did know and needed to be encouraged to actually say it. When the truth was I actually, genuinely, 100% didn't know. Not just that I didn't know, but that to me it was like being asked "why don't you just try breathing water instead of air, you might find out that you actually have gills?" I didn't even understand why someone would suggest things like the therapist was suggesting - it was just so obviously off from anything I'd experienced that I couldn't even explain why it was off. (For a more useful example, imagine a therapist suggesting that you resolve a relationship problem by calling your mother an ugly troll and flipping her off. I imagine most people would have a hard time coming up with an answer past "because it's rude," especially if under stress.)
That's really a key for me. I had absolutely no idea for all of this that there was anything abnormal about my family at home or about the cultural environment I'd grown up with. As far as I was aware I just was feeling anxious and panicking at random times for reasons that were completely mysterious to me. When I directly asked therapists why I felt that way it was brushed off as something I had to figure out and open up to the therapist about. I wouldn't be able to put any of it together without getting that key bit of information that something was actually very off about my own upbringing. I'd been over the question endlessly and had no answer. But I think therapists were still digging based on the impression that I had a fundamentally normal background and with a little encouragement they could get me to open up and tell them the answer. So the digging was very much digging based on the idea that I really did know.
I'm also realizing that this was basically constantly triggering trauma reactions in therapy. Except, again, I don't think those were ever really caught. I tend to kind of shut down more than anything in situations like that, and then react very strongly later. It's not voluntary and without knowing what to look for I probably wouldn't even know that the shut down reaction is abnormal. (It's a reaction that makes sense if you're aware that I'm used to environments where showing the "wrong" emotions was strongly punished.) I apparently can be at the point where I haven't eaten or slept for 3 days from stress and still have therapists telling me that I'm only mildly anxious, even in the face of me trying to convince them that there's an actual problem. I think that was ultimately responsible for ending a lot of times, when the symptoms from uncontrolled reactions to the triggers were more than I could handle. But that all that was brushed off as "therapy is hard" and I was encouraged to work through it - again, looking back I think that the therapists were thinking I was blowing things out of proportion when I was actually understating them.