Hi LT, I'm usually a lurker, but I appreciate this board so much and have gained a lot of insight by reading about others' experiences with psychotherapy.

Anyway, I just wanted to log on to say that I do not believe you are over-reacting at all. It seems to me that you are very psychologically minded and that you have a great awareness of your own mental health struggles (in terms of how they manifest and impact your daily life). Furthermore, it seems that you work hard to increase your self-awareness and incorporate that knowledge/understanding into your other relationships so as to be a more attuned parent, spouse, friend, etc. I mean, you really DO the work of therapy...despite a somewhat clueless (although I'm sure very well-meaning) therapist.

In conclusion, I truly hope your T will slow down and use these golden opportunities within your therapeutic relationship to explore YOUR inner world and YOUR relational patterns/reenactments rather than continue to "explain-blame-gaslight" and then carry on as though none of it is useful to the therapy itself.

Sadly, your biggest takeaway from these sorts of interactions with your T often seems to be that you need to find a way to change your own behavior in order to "protect" the relationship. Yikes- that is exactly what happens in many real world relationships (and most likely what you experienced in childhood from your parents)...it should not be happening in therapy.

Kudos for you for working so hard (in and out of therapy) to understand these patterns for yourself.