I think the type of caring I need and expect from a therapist is different from the type of caring I need and expect from another professional like a doctor, dentist, or even accountant or lawyer.

I expect my lawyer to care about my legal well-being. This is very far from caring about me in a personal way, even though my legal well-being affects me personally, of course.

I have a dentist who I feel cares about me personally, like all his patients. He’s just that kind of person. But the only thing we share caring about is my teeth and mouth. Last time I went he had to redo a filling that had broken down and when he was refilling it he was surprised that I could feel what he was doing. It indicated to him that there had been more decay, and drilling, close to the root. He said the sensitivity should go away in a couple of days and when I asked what was the worst that could happen, he said that I would need a root canal. I went home and after the novacaine completely wore off I was really feeling some pain in the tooth. It was a Friday and I called his office to see what I should do if I had problems over the weekend. He called me back himself and said to call his office if I had increasing pain and he would come into the office, no problem and do the root canal because that is what would stop the pain.

It was Labor Day weekend and on Tuesday his office called back to make sure I was doing OK. I felt personally cared about, but even better than that, professionally cared about, too.

With a therapist what I expect for us to share caring about is much more of “me”. My psychological well-being. And how you can separate out a therapist caring about my psychological well-being professionally and not giving a s**t about me as a person – it just doesn’t compute to me. Perhaps that’s because of my childhood experience and that even if I go to a T not expecting them to care, the environment and the “mirroring” and “empathy” they are trained to provide give rise to the long-suppressed feelings and longings to be cared about which – I didn’t get. Big deal, I developed defenses to get along in a world where I didn’t get the kind of caring that I wanted (and perhaps needed?). But having that longing elicited and then – slam – the T doesn’t give a s**t just as the people in my early life didn’t . . .Well, I went into therapy in a defended, but potentially vulnerable, psychological state and the therapists that I have had have been unable to “help” me put something back together once that defended state is broken down and the T’s have hurt me again, and again, and again.

Perhaps my expectation or wish that therapists would truly care about me as a person, like a friend or family member in an ideal friendship or family, is unreasonable, unrealistic. I didn’t go into the last few therapies with that conscious expectation and I defended as much as possible against that expectation. But I did expect to be “understood” as a person, which did not happen. So I wonder if it’s possible really to understand somebody, in ways that are different from you, if you don’t care about them?