sister, thanks for your insightful thoughts. That is wonderful your T lets you call him to respond "after the moment."

To me there are two parts to responding in the moment: 1) knowing what you are feeling and 2) telling your T what you are feeling. I have gotten pretty good at the telling/responding part, but I am often terrible at the knowing what I am feeling part! I need to be more self aware, to listen to myself. This problem with not knowing what I am feeling comes from childhood when I had to hide all my emotions or risk really painful repercussions if I let anything out. My T has said he has never seen anyone so self contained. He is very perceptive, though, and there have been times he can tell what I am feeling when I cannot. Like one time in couples therapy, my husband said this really, really hurtful thing to me, and I was not even aware of it. It did not hurt or bother me at all. I heard his words, but they just flowed over me like water, with nary a ripple. But I started crying for some unknown reason. My T said, "sunny, what triggered you, why are you crying?" I said, "I don't know." "Was it because your husband just said X and you felt hurt by that?" "No, that was fine. I don't know why I'm crying." T said that moment to him was like a snapshot of my marriage--all the many hurtful things slung my way and my just not even feeling them anymore, as a defense, borrowed from my childhood. (He has suggested I chose this marriage in an attempt to recreate my childhood pain and finally conquer it.)

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Maybe you are realizing how little your previous T was able to give you because your now T gives you so much! I can't believe I was in therapy for over 3 years because there is zero comparison between the two relationships.

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That's how it is for me too. My experience with the previous counselor was not really therapy, I know now. I think that's why I call her a counselor instead of a therapist. Even though she put down "Psychotherapy for X" on my insurance claim, she didn't seem to be providing psychotherapy to me.