With all due respect, I don't think that's the situation at all. I don't think she cares about whether her clients "care about" her although she probably does care whether her clients find her "compassionate" or "attuned" or "effective". Her clients don't exist to meet her emotional need to be cared about. That's all I meant by "she doesn't care if I care about her". A mother, conversely, does care very much whether her child loves her as much as she loves her child. I don't think I'm using T as a mother figure or projecting that onto her at all; I know this because of several past relationships with Ts didn't work for me because there was too much maternal transference going on there and I knew it. I recognize the signs and they aren't happening here, or at least not nearly to the extent of being harmful.

And re. Her caring signals, that's sort of the issue, because I was receiving what I thought were a LOT of caring signals, but her telling me explicitly that she doesn't care about me individually but cares about all of her clients as a collective is what makes me go back and question whether I was interpreting those "caring signals" correctly or not. I mean, either she does care about me but is refusing to state that upfront, which feels dishonest, or she doesn't care about me and I was just reading "caring" when I should have read "her doing her job".

I felt like she did care a lot and probably still does in her own way; my issue isn't that I don't think she cares. My issue was just that I was feeling like she was withholding from me the reassurance that I needed in that moment when I said, "Those gestures felt like caring gestures," and her response was, "I care about all my clients." But those are her boundaries and she has the right to set them where she feels comfortable; it's my job to respect that.