I really don't feel that I have misinterpreted anything. It is hurtful that you imply that people who are not well can't do good work, and that my desire to discuss my experiences with culture in my own therapy are wrong and misguided. I feel personally attacked by the tone in your post, and you act as if my desire to have more people respond to peoples pain is some how misguided and irrelevant to this thread.

I feel very angry that T's tell their clients that it is not healthy for them to depend up on them and need them, and then when people go out into the world to try and find people who really care about a person's feelings or experiences there are so few people who really want to deal with that and they end up calling these people "needy." Therapists seem to only pathologize clients who have these kinds of needs, and make they feel ashamed of needing therapy to begin with. I believe this response to clients is an iteration of larger cultural tendency to devalue dependency and need. I responded to your post because I believe that you were perpetuating that iteration in the way that you were writing about the topic, and I wanted to point it out and discuss it.

It concerns me that people like Hazelgirl can not get a place where they can express their needs because it is so likely that they will be accused of dependency...even in their own therapy. Your original post bothers me because it makes it seem like there is some right perfect dance that people have to go through in therapy to deal with their needs in the "correct" way. Just being able to say, "I need," is so fvcking hard that I don't think that people deserve to be told "oh, don't need like that," and make sure that you "don't become dependent," and "oh, by the way, therapy is really only about figuring out what needs are there, and discussing that, but this is not the place to meet those needs."

People deserve to have their needs met in therapy, and when therapy cannot meet certain needs they deserve to have friends and family who they can turn to who are there to meet those needs. It is possible, even though you think it is not, to meet needs that are very deep and caused by profound trauma. I know because my H and I do if for one another all the time. And it is not off topic or absurd for me to say that I think that part of the issue with this whole longing problem extends outside the world of therapy, and that I wish that people in general would respond differently to peoples needs.