You give this advice A LOT, and I don't know that it's always helpful or applicable. People have different needs, and every therapy relationship is different, with different feelings and preferences on both sides. Sometimes it's fine to need help or reassurance and to reach out to safe people. In those cases, setting up arbitrary goals around reducing the number of times per week or month that a person asks their therapist for help would be really counterproductive.

I also want to push back against the idea that there is a timeline for learning to trust or feeling more secure and that anybody who can't get there fast enough is "stuck." Growth happens at different rates based on all kinds of things, and often people will circle back to earlier states of uncertainty as they go deeper in their therapy work and open themselves up to new states of vulnerability.

You have mentioned that what happens between you and your T is more friend-like than anything. Those of us who have therapy relationships with different, more therapeutic boundaries might be having completely different experiences, which I would hope you could keep in mind. I'm glad what you're doing with your T works for you, but it doesn't mean that it would work for everybody.