Critterlady, you nailed it! This is a huge contradiction that therapists propagate without realizing what they're actually saying.

When I was trying to extricate myself from an abusive therapist recently, I would tell him why I was uncomfortable in our sessions. Instead of just listening, or saying he understood, or didn't understand, or whatever - he just ARGUED with me. Like all the frickin' time. And that was his big argument, and he brandished it like it was the frickin' Koh-i-noor diamond:

"You don't trust me because you don't trust ANYONE," he'd say. "You NEED to learn how to TRUST PEOPLE. You're behaving wth me as you do with all the OTHER PEOPLE out there. How are you going to GET ANY BETTER if you're running away from what you're DOING IN HERE WITH ME?"

He would just never, ever accept any responsibility for the fact that he was a hostile, defensive slapnugget who blamed me exclusively for our terrible relationship.

So - yeah! That's right. The therapeutic relationship is a thing unto itself. It only very faintly echoes what we do with other people out there in the real world. It's different, it's weird. With my T, I'm not really practicing my social skills on him, the way I'd practice scales on a piano in preparation for the actual performance. The therapist is someone unlike anyone I've ever seen before - not my father, not my mother, not my co-worker, not my sibling, not the cashier at Safeway, and he's not like anyone I've ever encountered. So the relationship is never going to be a blueprint for what happens "out there."

Just wanted to repeat that I think you have a brilliant point, Critter