Therapy, in my experience, is a lot of pain. But my sense of it is that I was in a lot of pain anyway, and the only ways I knew to block that from consciousness were destructive to my life in other ways--so not a sustainable choice.

What makes it bearable is not being alone in it. A sense that it could be shared and that I had someone else who was able and willing to protect me from the damage and force of such pain. That the million fragments would be difficult to bear, but that I would come back together from it (remember that visualization?) The vulnerability for me wasn't about my attachment to my T--I just never even thought about that, partly because I didn't struggle much with attachment issues anyway, but also partly because I didn't at that time connect my survival to him personally, but rather to what he would do. I had absolute faith in his ability and stability in the process.

I think some of your feeling that there's no real point to vulnerability stems from your T's handling of the therapy frame. Your work with her before was all about being with her as a person for support, rather than being held securely by the frame of the therapy. She seems to be trying to create that frame more now. When it's there, and your T is secure in it, that security extends to you as a client. That the process can both contain the overwhelming pain and keep you safe in the face of it. The consistency and the experience of feeling the emotions that feel like they will swallow you, within a specified time and space, and that then life does go on, knowing that the pain will again be revisited--that what feels limitless in fact has limits, is protective. I don't think you've been allowed to experience that because your contact was so engulfing, yet inconsistent.

I know you have horses. I used to a long time ago. A trainer I worked with modeled some wonderful advice for me. When my horse (who was never abused and was well-trained) would shy at something, my first instinct was to rake a time out and settle him. My trainer showed me that by doing so, I was communicating to my horse, "Yes, that was a very scary thing and we need to pay lots of attention to that in the future to stay safe." What he showed me to do was to ignore the shyness, and to firmly with no fuss correct the course and make the request (whatever I had asked the horse to do) again. That my horse would take security from my communicating "nothing to see here, move on." He was right. It was like a therapy frame for the horse.