I think it is very difficult for one person to know another's intentions, motivations, or what they are thinking or feeling. All you can know is really your own, and at least for me, I'm not always very clear. Especially because a lot of us operate with these things in the background or subconscious. I've been surprised by myself when I examine my own intentions to discover underneath what I thought I was doing was something else.

But to state the obvious, therapy is a relationship, where one person's actions influences the other person. And part of what T's do is respond to us. So I hear your story as you were open and honest with your T on this voice mail, and his response to your distress seems really normal to me, to express caring and concern in response to your distress. This seems like straight up healthy relationship stuff to me. And of course when you are skating on the surface and not expressing much distress or uncomfortableness yourself, he doesn't respond with care or concern. I do think therapists are bored by people who don't open and share themselves in therapy. But why wouldn't this also be a normal response to you? I think truth begets truth. You put your truth out there, and T responds with his truth. This is the opposite of manipulation. I think manipulation would be to respond with defensiveness and/or anger to your distress, a message of silencing.

I think rather than going to a place where you think he is manipulating you (and of course, it's worthwhile asking yourself if you feel other people in your life manipulate you), why not examine how you impact him (or others, of course). This has been a useful inquiry for me, to ask when I do X, how do other people respond? And sometimes the answer about how other people respond is not about what I put out there, so it's useful to be able to understand when the response you get is about the other person. But sometimes the answer is that you impact other people, in a positive way. That people respond with care and concern when you are honest about the pain you experience-- that is essentially the message I have learned over the years. When I pretend I'm fine and bore others with my fineness, I get mostly a ho-hum kind of thing. But when I am myself and real and open and share myself with others in my life, I get back the same; assuming I'm doing it in a way that other people can hear. Then it can become learning about how to say things in a way that makes it about me rather than about the other person; as truth that attacks other person is unlikely to be met with much enthusiasm.

I think you are tapping into something that is quite big and profound about how you relate to others. In my experience, it is worthwhile to check out assumptions and beliefs about what another person is doing. If you have a T who basically has his stuff together, I think the answer is that you are getting in return what you put out there. That seems like a good thing. Don't make it into something it's not.