This is what I am mostly referencing:

I went on to say, "I feel like a child again with my mother. I made a single solitary mistake (the email), and I get blamed again for things I've done in my past. It reminds me of my mother, overreacting and scolding me. I made one mistake and your behavior causes me to react thinking it's not safe to make a mistake or I'm going to make you angry. I don't like you being angry at me."

She reacted defensively/irately, "I'm not angry at you. I don't feel anything regarding your email. Your email doesn't hurt me. Clients can't hurt me."

That shut me down. I started crying. I was probably silent for 3-5 minutes. I managed to look around the room once while I was crying and T was looking up at the ceiling. Her face looked irritated. Her neck was still broken out in splotches.

For me, anytime I feel like a child again, it's a big clue that I'm bringing something into the room that isn't there. I would also frame this interaction as partly about taking communication at face value, which I think you reference specifically in your last post (I couldn't find it in this one, at the least). It was in describing your T's reaction to your last email, that she didn't take what you said at face value.

This interaction would have been painful for me to experience because it seems like there is no win/win; it's only lose/lose. Either she is angry because of my mistake, and my perceptions are accurate, or my perceptions are inaccurate, and for whatever reason, I'm seeing things that aren't there.

One thing I'm pretty sure this isn't is gaslighting. Gaslighting is intentional crazy making by trying to get someone to doubt their perceptions of reality. Whatever was going on, I would have a hard time believing that your T was intentionally messing with you. There is absolutely no therapeutic value in this and I believe that she was being honest, maybe too honest, in what she said. Doesn't make her "right", of course. But I also have a hard time imagining that she would lie to you about what she was or wasn't feeling, and I also have a hard time imagining that she couldn't tell if she was angry.

So what would it mean if she really wasn't angry, and you were misinterpreting the multiple signals you identify as being associated with anger? One thing I know is that some women, when they get hot flashes, get blotchy and rashy-looking, faces flush, veins pop out, eyes bulge and look glassy. And sometimes when the hot flashes hit, they immobilize them and they can't talk or move until they subside. This could look like they are ignoring whatever or whoever is around them.

I have learned so much in the past year about accepting what people say at face value, especially with my T. I am always commenting on what I'm reading in his facial expressions or his words, and if I can do it in the moment, I learn about how distorted my ideas about what he's thinking and feeling are. It was years ago, and outside T, but a woman who served as a mentor to me on my first professional job helped me understand just how much I can distort what I perceive directed at me by other people. Actually, she didn't really help me understand directly, it was indirectly as I one day had an interaction with her that made me completely revisit the pattern of recent interactions. I had become convinced that she was coercing/pressuring me in a certain direction, until one day she said and did something that made me realize that she was encouraging me, in reality, to just follow my own path. It was like the pieces of the picture I was looking at broke apart and reformed into something completely different. I was stunned at how cleverly I could distort single interactions to conform to what I believed.

One session in T not that long ago, T was telling a story and I attached some emotional response he had to it. I was too chicken to say it outloud then, but I raised it the next session. As I asked him to confirm or disconfirm whether I was "right", I realized that being able to accurate read others was really important to me. It was a survival skill from childhood, and if I could read my abuser accurately, I might be able to avoid the ****storm that might follow or at least be able to prepare for it arriving. To be wrong about reading others felt devastating to me.

Since then, I've come to accept (in a general way, not completely or perfectly) that I can be wrong in reading other people. It is also such a relief to operate based on what people do and say, rather than my perceptions of this. And I've learned to check in with people and be more gentle and open to people telling me what they are thinking and feeling, and their perceptions of whatever interaction we might have had. It is such a truism that 2 people can be present for the same interaction and see it completely differently. I worry less about being right about my perceptions and more about just trying to see if there is anything useful in what the other person shared with me.

It's my sense that something important happened in this last session. Feeling confusion and distress and generally out of sorts doesn't have to mean that something bad happened. It might be a useful exercise for you to isolate the messages that she was giving you sans your emotional responses to them, and see if there is something there to work with. Otherwise, I think processing this session in your next one will be really eye-opening, I think. But it may require you to accept what she has to say at face value, as you expect her to do of your communications, and perhaps come to peace with this is one of those times where people just see things differently.

Finally, I'm going to recommend that you stop sending your T emails. Clearly there is something that she sees as a pattern in these emails and it doesn't sound like she knows how to respond therapeutically. I think your sessions will have better boundaries if you contain them to the spoken words in sessions. Or call her if you feel you need to communicate between sessions.

Peace and comfort directed your way, though.