It strikes me that in real life, it is very difficult to change anyone else and is, in my experience, extremely frustrating to try to do so, especially an intimate partner. My thing has been to work more vigorously on accepting people for who they are and not requiring them to say or do things that benefit me. I think this is different than asking a partner to meet your needs in a different way but to make such a request may come with the possibility that s/he won't give you what you want, and that is okay.


Have you explored in therapy why it is so important to you that Madame T change for you, or why you needed an apology for who she is and how she does the T thing with you? Because I don't understand how it would help anyone in therapy for the therapist to change unless somehow this helps the client to change.


I don't think that the purpose of therapy is to change the therapist or to get an apology from them about the way they do things. This seems like going to the grocery store and trying to bargain the total price with the cashier (at least in the U.S., I have been in countries where the culture is to bargain over everything).


Some therapists may change how they do things-- mine has done small things I've asked, like not to wave his hands around so vigorously and to move his chair back-- and some may apologize-- again, mine has.


And as to validation for one's feelings. I've observed that some people use validation as a substitute for agree. Invalidation, to me, is when someone fails to understand where you're coming from and/or essentially says you are insane for seeing things this way or feeling the way you do. But I think this gets tricky too because if you're talking about how the other person is, making claims about what the other person thinks or feels or how they do things, many people with a healthy sense of who they are will tell you that you're wrong. So I think validation is context specific.


To me validation doesn't require that someone agree with me. They can see it differently but acknowledge the reasonableness of where I stand. And because where you sit depends upon where you stand, people with different life experiences are going to disagree a lot. The most useful thing I learned in higher education that I sometimes forget is from a really wise professor who was very skilled at guiding class discussion so various viewpoints were represented. She often said, "reasonable people can disagree about reasonable things."