Here was her initial reply. Yes, it makes sense. But there was a lot more to it. And yes, she signed the Email Love, T. She also doesn't do that anymore. Here is the link to the first thread I created about this situation. Seems quite similar to yours. I would ask your T..... it was hard to do, but I needed to know.

____________
I appreciate your efforts to sort this out and understand it and make peace with it. This is complicated and difficult. Let me see if I can express my perspective to you in a way that makes sense. For you to allow yourself to be vulnerable and exposed in front of me is a huge leap of trust. It makes you feel all kinds of ancient, powerful, and painful emotions that you have repressed and contained for most of your life. My role in that is to try to make you feel safe, to offer you comfort and company in the pain, and to help you locate your inner strengths and resources so you can move forward in life. While of course there is a wish to be comforted as you were not at the time you were such a vulnerable child suffering abuse and neglect, and that would certainly feel wonderful, it is, in the long run, more useful to you now to be comforted as an adult and to find that you have the internal resources to comfort that child part of yourself. Touch is incredibly powerful. In the beginning of our work, I felt some physical contact was necessary to help you stay connected to me, to help you stay with the pain, to keep you connected to yourself. With that and various other things I also hoped to communicate to you that our relationship is neither casual nor formulary. It is my job, yes, but that does not mean it isn’t personal. But touch is a tricky thing. It can be confusing, it can foster unrealistic expectations about the nature of the relationship, it can pull toward regression rather than progression. So about a month ago I began trying to reduce it — hoping you would find that you could tolerate being on your own on the couch, so to speak, and that the hug at the end of the session was still there as a reminder of my care and support. At the end of the day, our goal is for you to need less from the outside world because you are fully on board to protect and care for yourself.

It is fully to be expected that you would feel rejected and angry about my change in behavior. Here you run up against the reality that there are boundaries in our relationship — that I am not actually embedded in your personal life, that I can’t meet needs that you have. Please understand, I know that you know all of this intellectually. I mean no disrespect by stating it plainly — it is the more emotional, the more regressed part of you that I’m talking to (we ALL have those). The challenge is to understand all of that, feel the disappointment, and not throw the rest away. You have worked very hard for 10 months now. You have taken huge risks, have made huge strides, have thrown yourself fully into this process.

Timing is part of the issue. I can only time things by feel. You are drawing a connection between your sharing more details of your abuse and this change, but there is no connection in my mind. I actually started easing back before that. I understand that you would make this connection because of the immense shame that you feel about these details, and your susceptibility to feeling that others would share your self loathing and disgust. Not so. Never have I admired you more than when you have talked about these things. And then gone from sharing them with me to sharing them with other people who need to know. This is magnificent. And no matter what I did or didn’t do, talking through trauma and abuse makes a person feel wretched.

I doubt I have said anything in this that you don’t know already, but I still think it is useful to lay it out. I feel privileged to work with you, I honor your struggle and your efforts, and I am very hopeful about your ability to make changes that will be reflected in your life becoming more ease less pain, more satisfaction less deprivation, more what you want it to be.

Love,
T