Aww- I loved your post's vulnerability and open heart. It's really moving to cry that way with a therapist. It is like being touched and moved by a fellow human's care for you, if you haven't received enough of that when you deserved to in the past.

Your T comes to her profession and to her time with you through a particular path too- there's a reason(s) from her past she sits with you in the present, experiencing your emotion.

I've pondered and explored the relationship between limits / the frame of therapy/ boundaries and the feelings that emerge within therapy. I've cried, fought, fell in love, been disillusioned, idealized, been idealized, been afraid, let down, and defensive, been attacked, wooed, held, companioed,been loved, am loved, do love- basically a big tangle of feelings- in therapy. This is four years into my first therapy for severe CSA, something I disowned with vast defenses all my life in order to be a high achiever and therefore "safe". Though I rarely cry "irl", I have steadily cried through 3/4th of my 2 session a week. My T says he welcomes my tears, and, here and there, he has shed a few too.

These relationships are co created by both people, both the moments of grace and the moments of catastrophe . The bond, though asymmetrical, is something both people need in different ways. Whatever you feel toward your therapist, she will make use of it if she is good, metabolize it and give it back to you, take it in to herself if she needs it.

Some T's have training to seem unaffected or to mirror the client . However, I have learned that when they touch us they are touched, and the discovery process is two way in a theraputic alliance that is meaty and meaningful .