Peaches,

I feel your pain. Two very similar things happened to me, and they were two of the biggest ruptures I've experienced in therapy so far. To answer your last question, no, you are not making a big deal out of nothing -- the clinical response works well for some people, but not for others. I have attachment issues as well, and the clinical response is very bad for me too.

So let me blather on a bit about my experience, and maybe some of it will ring true for you:

First, saying I love you. I don't use the word "love" very much. I was terrified to use it in therapy to describe anything at all. The part of me still wounded from childhood wants nobody to know anything about what I am attached to, because the result was often either shaming or deprivation. I tell my T that I hoard good feelings and memories to myself so that no one can harm them.

So when I finally told him I loved him, and he reacted as if I had told him I love cheesecake, it was not good. Not good at all. And like you, I didn't expect him to say anything back about his personal feelings about me, nor did I think they mattered in the context of what I myself wanted to say.

What I found was that what really upset me is that he didn't seem to recognize just how big it was that I had said those words. I have never told anyone I loved them without hearing it from them first. Around 8 or 9 years old I stopped hugging my parents and telling them I loved them, at all. T had made me want to change that, to give attachment and vulnerability a try, and this was the biggest thing I could have possibly done in that direction. So I found that what really hurt was that it seemed that T either didn't know me anywhere near as well as I thought, which was disturbing, or that he didn't care, which was more disturbing. I felt like I had been doing the right thing all along, hoarding my good feelings, so why the hell had I wasted 4 years in therapy? If it made no difference whether I said "I love you" or not, then what was the point?

I felt that if he did not see my saying "I love yoU" to someone without them saying it first or even expecting to hear it back, as the most important thing I could possibly have done, then therapy with him was not going to work. Therapy that I had invested a lot of love into. And that was devastating.

As for the cold e-mail, I got a very similar e-mail ("It's up to you whether you want to come in or not"), but at a time when I was quite suicidal and really not able to think straight about whether to come in at all. At the time I needed someone to say, "You're so serious about killing yourself that you've been updating the beneficiaries of your savings accounts, and you're NOT SURE if you should come in?? Get your *** in here!"

The thing that makes me most upset in periods of serious detachment is that it seems like I can do whatever and no one will care. Everything feels like it's up to me, and to an extent it is. But it's also a lonely way to live, to not rely on anybody for anything. I err on the side of taking on too MUCH responsibility, so by the time I actually ask someone for help I NEED help. It hurt that T did not see that -- that I wouldn't be so indecisive if something wasn't really, really wrong. And it hurt that he did not see that my reaching out to him at all was a big deal, and instead zeroed in on my implying that I needed him to make a decision for me.

It used to make me angry, actually, when people would say that "you shouldn't kill yourself, it's not fair to those that love you." Oh really? I'm not supposed to look for support when I'm depressed, because it's up to me to get better, and I'm not supposed to look for support when I feel like starving myself, because it's up to me to improve my body image, but all of a sudden when I make a decision that life just isn't my cup of tea, it's not up to me?

I could continue about this, but I don't want to jack your thread! In the end, these things were resolved by my therapist and me agreeing that the more distant clinical approach wasn't going to help me. I mean, it just felt like my childhood all over again, and was yielding the same conclusions. I found out later that his training group had pressured him to be more distant with me, to stick closer to dogma, not long before I took the leap and said, "I love you." And he apologized for betraying my needs in that way.

so your T is probably doing what she thinks is right for you, but that doesn't mean it is. It took me telling my therapist, "Look, the cool clinical approach might work well for you and other patients, and that's fine. I get the theory and everything. But it doesn't work for me, and I intend to start looking for a therapist who takes a different approach." You may need to find a new therapist, but see if you can express your needs clearly to this one and find a new way of doing things.

Sorry this is such a novel -- I hope it's helpful.

Edited to add: The clinical response does work for some things, I should say. It helped me to be less silent. But it does not work in times of vulnerability and rare periods of attempted attachment.