I think that possibly your T was talking about the therapeutic relationship in regards to attachment to the T. David Wallin in his excellent study "Attachment in Psychotherapy" explains how important the relationship between client and T are for growth and healing.

All of us have attachment patterns that stem from our earliest caregivers. If we did not experience secure attachment with them, we suffer from anxious or avoidant behavior patterns. Attaching to our therapists gives us the opportunity to 'earn' secure attachment.

Some excerpts:

"Therapy is transformative through relationship. The patient's attachment relationship to the therapist is foundational and primary. It supplies the secure base that is the sine qua non for exploration, development and change. This sense of a secure base arises from the attuned therapist's effectiveness in helping the patient to tolerate, modulate, and communicate difficult feelings. By virtue of the felt security generated through such affect-regulating interactions, the therapeutic relationship can provide a context for accessing disavowed or dissociated experiences within the patient that have not - and perhaps cannot- be put into words.

"The relationship is also a context within which the therapist and the patient, having made room for these experiences, can attempt to make sense of them. Accessing, articulating, and reflecting upon dissociated and unverbalized feelings, thoughts, and impulses strengthens the patient's 'narrative competence' and help to shift in a more reflective direction the patient's stance toward experience. Overall, the relational/emotional/reflective process at the heart of an attachment-focused therapy facilitates the integration of disowned experience, thus fostering in the patient a more coherent and secure sense of self.

"Very much as the original attachment relationship(s) allowed the child to develop, it is ultimately the new relationship of attachment with the therapist that allows the patient to change. Such a relationship provides a secure base that enables the patient to take the risk of feeling what he is not supposed to feel and knowing what he is not supposed to know.

"The therapist's role here is to help the patient both to deconstruct the attachment patterns of the past and to construct new ones in the present.

"The patterns played out in our first attachments are reflected subsequently not only in the ways we relate to others, but also in our habits of feeling and thinking.

"Correspondingly, the patient's relationship with the therapist has the potential to generate fresh patterns of affect regulation and thought, as well as attachment.

"Put differently, the therapeutic relationship is a developmental crucible within which the patient's relation to his own experience of internal and external reality can be fundamentally transformed."