I'm glad you feel better. I don't mean this to be negative and I hope it doesn't come off that way-- I want to tell you what has worked for me in first my marriage and then with other people. T "taught" me this but he didn't do so directly.

I gave up trying to get people to pick up on what I was feeling, as unless I was pretty extreme (e.g. burst into tears or said something very hostile), most people including my H and T and those who'd known me for years and years had no idea I was upset about X. And as I got better managing my emotions (so they weren't so "hot" in the moment and more accepting of other people rather than demanding they respond precisely as I wanted), people could figure me out less and less.

So I began to rely on articulating, as precisely as I could, what was going on with me, trying to avoid finger-pointing. I would sometimes say, and T was the safest person to say this to, that I interpreted something he said as X or Y. What I got back was the real story about what he meant or why he did X, and I began to see that my interpretations were off a lot of time. So I started asking others more about what they meant when they said something that I interpreted in a particular (negative) way.

I think your T is encouraging you to check out your beliefs about him, and he's making it safe for you to do so. It's okay if you need to feel cared about before you can say the thing that upset you. I think you did a great job with this.

Many people have the illusion that they can read other people when there is no evidence to suggest this is true or not. So we go off on our interpretations that lead us mostly down dark roads and hurt our feelings. For me it has been useful to separate out what someone said or did and my interpretation of it. The clearest example of this was not long before my spouse was diagnosed with a fatal illness. I said I wanted to take a leave of absence from one of my two jobs and explore whether I could grow my business full time. I thought he replied that he thought that wouldn't work out and would turn the financial burden of our family too much to his earnings. He seemed angry and stressed about the possibility. I was shocked because he was incredibly supportive of my career and what I wanted. Later I ask him about what I thought he was saying and it turned out that he was stressed about finishing a project deadline that day and he thought the conversation was taking too long, but he thought he said that would be great for me, and that the short term financial hit would probably be made up by my greater earnings later on. It left me with an appreciation for the beauty of being wrong but being able to communicate further to check out exactly how wrong I was. Maybe I'm unusual, but I think I'm more likely to take things that are positive or neutral and see them as negative compared to the other way around.