Just keeping talking it through. It sounds like your therapist is aware this is an issue for you, so I don't think it will surprise her that you still need to process this. These kinds of relationship bumps can take time to get beyond. Ultimately, it will come down to you being able to decide to move past it. That would look like forgiveness to me, but that word is very loaded to many people so I'm hesitant to use it but I'm going to share what that means to me.

Some years back, my husband and I went through a really rough patch. I honestly wasn't sure I could get past things that were said and the pain it had caused me. It was so bad that it felt emotionally abusive and I had thoughts of leaving him. But ultimately, I valued my long-term relationship with my husband more than the wounds, and I made that decision to forgive so that I could emotionally return to the relationship having left those incidents and that pain behind us. I knew that emotionally rehashing events and words that were in the past, that could not be changed, and that were no longer an issue in our current relationship (things had changed and much improved) was serving no purpose other than to keep me stuck in my own anger and resentment. I didn't want to stay stuck in those horrible feelings; I wanted to move past that and allow our relationship to move forward; the only way for me to do that was to forgive. It wasn't about forgetting (obviously I haven't). It wasn't about saying what he said and did was all right (it wasn't and he knows that). It wasn't about letting him off the hook (he took responsibility and apologized AND - most importantly - never repeated or continued that kind of behavior). It was about leaving that set of events in the past so that we could move forward; it was about letting go of my own pain about the past so I could appreciate the joy and love of our relationship in our present. If I couldn't do that, I would have had to abandon that relationship.

Sometimes we DO have to leave a relationship. The pain is too deep and the ability to find a new baseline for the changed relationship just isn't there. It may not even be a possibility. In those cases, we may need to leave that relationship and move on to a different one. Please, please, don't read my story as a "you just need to forgive and forget about it" post; it isn't. Only you know what you need to do to move forward, and that may mean you need to leave . . . and that is okay if that is what you need to do. I only share my story because you sound like you value your relationship with your therapist and seem to want to find a way to regroup and move past that incident. Mine is a story of having found a way to do that.

Whatever happens. I hope you find some personal peace with your situation. Life and relationships are hard.