LT—if this therapist has otherwise been helpful, why leave over his not saying “I care about you?” I think it would be useful to see that people can care and can be an important part of your life without following a certain script. Yes, someone saying I care about you would be a good short-term reassurance, but long-term reasurance comes from something different.

Here’s another question as a follow-up to Xynesthesia’s—if he now says I care about you, will that mean anything since you basically had to ask him to say it?

I can’t shake the feeling that, while you understand where MC went wrong—too much reassurance, too many broken boundaries until he snapped—you keep trying to get this guy to be more like MC. More reassuring, more communication outside session, more statements like I care about you. But you know how badly that ended up with MC. Please don’t hurt yourself again like that. Try to catch your patterns and interrupt them.

As for seeking a therapist who works with attachment, I dunno—Info works with attachment and her description of what she does sounds a lot like what this guy does: firm boundaries in an adult, caring environment, not creating codependency the way MC did.

Maybe there are other reasons to leave, though, in which case go for it.