This seems accurate (perceptively so) and articulated well, from my reading of your therapy session posts. I think having strong emotional reactions to people's words and actions in real life or in therapy is common for people in therapy; and those emotional reactions can be the thing we struggle with.

I don't get the sense that you have trouble expressing your emotional reactions, either in session or afterwards in emails, especially because it seems like one of the things you and he do really well together is moving the conversation forward with a close connection between the emails and the next sessions. And the ability to articulate how you feel as precisely as you do definitely brings the emotionality into the cognitive (or more accurately, I think, the reflective place, with perhaps just enough space from the strong feelings to be able to examine and observe things). I think this is one of the things your T has helped you to do, to get some distance from the painful feelings as a way to manage them.

In my experience in therapy, having a strong emotional reaction to whatever it is given me a chance to practice this distancing thing. It's not a numbing reaction and not a "don't pay attention to your feelings" thing for me, but a step back to examine where they come from and what I'd like to do with them. To me, feelings aren't necessarily where it's at but they are important to "lean into" them, they are great information, but often the stronger they are, the more they are about something else as opposed to whatever seemed to trip off the emotionality in the first place. I like emotions and I like feeling them, it's what makes me feel most like myself. In the past, because I felt things so strongly, I usually suppressed them or their severity. And I acted on my emotions or reacted to them much more often than I do know. The key for me has been balancing staying true to my real emotional self and focusing on how to move forward from that place of hurt into a somewhat thoughtful response (or not) to a person or a situation.

I've also learned, from my history where the what happened was not so much the issue as the how it happened, that some of my emotional reaction are "lies." Just because I'm feeling it (for example, betrayed by someone) doesn't necessarily mean I have been in fact betrayed. When I was a kid, I couldn't acknowledge the truth of what happened or how I felt about it, so I had to twist myself for survival (I mean emotional survival, my life was not in danger) that x was y or whatever it actually was, it wasn't. Having a T for the past years who has helped me reflect or be thoughtful about what I'm feeling and what the thing itself actually is has helped me better understand my past and get a handle on what I want for my future. I'm not sure if this is a "cognitive" approach in the CBT sense because it doesn't focus on behavior like not catastrophizing or whatever. It's not really technique but more an approach that goes beyond just the expression of feelings. For me, that's never been close to enough to get me to where I needed to be.