I personally think that there are two kinds of loneliness - existential and perceived.

Existential loneliness, to me, is the kind of loneliness in all of us; the, we are born alone and die alone, type thing.

Perceived loneliness is another animal entirely.

I'm going out on a limb here and positing the idea that your therapist likely "gets" the aloneless you are feeling, at least on some level. I suspect that her responses are trying to gauge how responsive you are to filling that hole, at least in part with therapy.

I remember a while back in my therapy feeling the same way that you do right now. Totally utterly alone, walking the hard road by myself.

It's hard to say what happened, but a gradual, then evident sea change in my thinking and feeling occurred. I realized that my therapist was on this road with me. No he could not fill up all that emptiness, but he could walk next to me on the road.

It's like I shifted from "me" to "we" in my recovery.

Yes, I had to walk this road, but I had a fellow traveler.

I don't know exactly what changed in me. Perhaps a lessening of fear of letting someone be that close to me, or perhaps I lost the notion that, like everything else (in my mind) I had to do this alone (I don't), or perhaps I just slowly, like a feral cat, began to accept and tolerate another person in that close proximity - "okay he's not going away, going to have to readjust what I think about things here".

I suspect it's a combination of those things.

Bottom line I guess, is right now you feel the way you feel and that's okay. I think if you stick it out in therapy, it will likely change.

I've also found that once I let one person walk with me, a whole bunch of others have shown up as well.

Crazy how that works....