Back in the day before attachment theory I don't think it was so much like this. But Freud didn't think that "character", now personality, disorders were treatable, so a lot of the time they weren't diagnosed either. So now therapists may get to the buried early trauma but then not know what to do about it!

I think the role playing is really sick, too. And then there's the part that I, unknowingly (because it was partly unconscious), participated in it. Yuck. If the process was explained ahead of time then I think it would help. I wouldn't feel so, what -- taken? But I guess therapists don't know how to explain it, which was another point you made. Because obviously in my case and in yours it didn't work through to the "end", in therapy at least.