Hi LTF,
Good to hear from you again! Everything you're talking about feeling sounds really understandable to me because I have felt much of the same things.
And you've made the incredible step forward of realizing that what you think you want from your T (to have her be your mother) probably wouldn't be what your really need. When we have attachment issues, it often means that we are looking to obtain that which we didn't get from our parents when we should have.
Therapy, and actually, I would agree, the relationship, heals us in two ways. the first is that having a more experienced attachment figure that we can depend on allows us to learn to regulate our emotions, identify our needs, and learn how to get them met. But there is also the very painful loss of having to recognize that some of what we needed, to feel loved, to feel special, to be understood without having to explain ourselves (our attachment figure is supposed to be attuned so they can teach us to understand what it is we're feeling) can no longer be obtained because we're no longer children. Those losses need to be acknowledged and grieved. Doing that (and I think I'm still working on the grieving part) is the most difficult and painful thing I've ever had to do. But my therapist has provided me a safe understanding place in which to face my grief and helps to "contain" those feelings so I can tolerate them.
I had a breakthrough at one point about these issues that might help you, you can find it here:
Update on Transference The way I got to that breakthrough was by going back time and again and talking to my T about my feelings about him. Because in our relationship is where all of my beliefs and relational patterns played out. It was how I could see what needed changing. Our T gives us a unique opportunity to do this because its all about our needs.
And you're correct about the relationship being the important part. There's a lot of research that the most important indicator of therapy being successful is not the type of therapy or education of the therapist or any of those types of factors. It's how good the relationship is, how attuned the client feels like the therapist is. That is because so much of what we need to learn is right brain knowlege that is learned implicitly, it's not about our cognitive understanding. And we can only learn it by being in relationship with someone who can already do what we need to learn. I know I keep pushing the book really hard (seriously, the authors should be paying me a commision) but I would really recommend General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis et al. It does a great job of explaining these concepts and why the relationship IS the therapy.
Below is an excerpt from the book that allowed me to feel a lot more comfortable with how dependent I was feeling. My T ended up reading the book after I talked about it and it has remained very important to our work together. I hope this helps.
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The first part of emotional healing is being limbically known--having someone with a keen ear catch your melodic essence. A child with emotionally hazy parents finds trying to know himself like wandering around a museum in the dark: almost anything could exist within its walls. He cannot ever be sure of what he senses. For adults, a precise seer's light can still split the night, illuminate treasures long thought lost, and dissolve many fearsome figures in to shadows and dust. Those who succeed in revealing themselves to another find the dimness receding from their own visions of self. Like people awakening from a dream, they slough off the accumulated, ill-fitting trappings of unsuitable lives. Then the mutual fund manager may become a sculptor, or vice versa; some friendships lapse into diliapidated irrelevance as new ones deepen; the city dweller moves to the country, where he feels finally at home. As limbic clarity emerges, a life takes form.
Limbic Regulation
Balance Through Relatedness
Certain bodily rhythms fall into synchrony with the ebb and flow of day and night. These rhythms are termed circadian, from the Latin for "about a day." A more fitting appellation is circumlucent, because they revolve around light as surely as Earth. Human physiology finds a hub not only in light, but also in the harmonizing activity of nearby limbic brains, Our neural architecture places relationships at the crux of our lives, where, blazing and warm, they have the power to stabilize. When people are hurting and out of balance, they turn to regulating affiliations; groups, clubs, pets, marriages, friendships, masseuses, chiropractors, the Internet. All carry at least the potential for emotional connection. Together, those bonds do more good than all the psychotherapists on the planet.
Some therapists recoil from the pivotal power of relatedness. They have been told to deliver insight--a job description evocative of estate planning or financial consulting, the calm dispensation of tidy data packets from the other side of an imposing desk. A therapist who fears dependence will tell his patient, sometimes openly, that the urge to rely is pathologic. In doing so he denigrates a cardinal tool. A parent who rejects a child's desire to depend raises a fragile person. Those children, grown to adulthood, are frequently among those who come for help. Shall we tell them again that no one can find an arm to lean on, that each alone must work to ease a private sorrow? Then we shall repeat an experiment already conducted; many know its result only too well. If patient and therapist are to proceed together down a curative path, they must allow limbic regulation and its companion moon, dependence, to make their revolutionary magic.
Many therapists believe that reliance fosters a detrimental dependency. Instead, they say, patients should be directed to "do it for themselves" -- as if they possess everything but the wit to throw that switch and get on with their lives. But people do not learn emotional modulation as they do geometry or the names of state capitals. They absorb the skill from living in the presence of an adept external modulator, and they learn it implicitly. Knowledge leaps the gap from one mind to the other, but the learner does not experience the transferred information as an explicit strategy. Instead, a spontaneous capacity germinates and becomes a natural part of the self, like knowing how to ride a bike or tie one's shoes. The effortful beginnings fade and disappear from memory.
People who need regulation often leave therapy sessions feeling calmer, stronger, safer, more able to handle the world. Often they don't know why. Nothing obviously helpful happened--telling a stranger about your pain sounds nothing like a certain recipe for relief. And the feeling inevitably dwindles, sometimes within minutes, taking the warmth and security with it. But the longer a patient depends, the more his stability swells, expanding infinitesimally with every session as length is added to a woven cloth with each pass of the shuttle, each contraction of the loom. And after he weaves enough of it, the day comes when the patient will unfurl his independence like a pair of spread wings. Free at last, he catches a wind and rides into other lands.
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AG
Welcome to the forums! Love your username. I can understand how you got confused. That whole quote is actually from the