Is your T willing to say "I care about you"?

I thought about this some more. Over the summer I had a bit of a tif with my therapist. I sent him several emails accusing him of not caring. When he wrote back he said it was a shame that I felt he didn't care because he did. My therapist truly does care.

Yes, he has. I personally don't see the harm in saying I care about you.

Yes, my t has often said “I care about you.” But, I have felt the opposite of care from her.
When she first said it it frightened me because I though ugh oh, now there is an expectation from my t. No thanks had ever said that to me before so in a way it was really nice to hear but I’m another way it was really scary.
It’s hard to describe but it wasn’t like how I imagined it would feel.

This sounds like a red flag to me...

My T has never said she cares about me and I can't imagine her doing so whether she actually feels care about me or not. She is interested in helping me learn to care for myself though.
She holds strong boundaries in therapy. A couple times she has started to say something that may imply caring but stopped herself halfway through a sentence. I am glad she did because her expressing personal feelings about me would change things I think.. like maybe I would say or do certain things in order to elicit caring words or behaviors from her again. I just get the feeling I would be driven to manipulate it somehow, or become dependent or fixated on it.
So I prefer the relationship to have 0 input about her feelings. It allows me to focus on the work I need to do and the changes I need to make without needing to "extract" anything from her.

I am glad your T responded to you in that way. Although it may not be what you want. If he said he cared about you, I imagine you could become very anxious about "losing" that caring.

I don't recall my T ever saying "I care" about something, but we don't usually converse in a way that would lend itself to a statement like that. I believe that if I asked her directly if she cared about me, she would say yes.

My T says "I care", but only maybe twice has she said "I care about you". I wish she would say it more, but I do know she cares. She's proven it through her actions. It was actually really hard at first to believe she cared about me since she rarely says it. But after years have passed, I can recognize it on my own.

My T has said that my SUI scares him but he has never said that he cares about me. I doubt he ever would. He has very strong boundaries and specializes in trauma, borderline, and dissociative disorders. He makes it clear that his job is to make sure I improve my life and work through trauma and DID. He does not allow much chit chat and literally starts to fall asleep unless I am talking about how things impact my feelings.

If I ever asked him to say he cares, his response would be to ask me why I feel the need to hear it. He would ask me to sit with those feelings. He is gentle and kind, and repeatedly validates my childhood trauma but he would never get into a conversation about how he feels or cares about me.

Maybe it would be better to ask your T why you feel the need for constant reassurance and approval, and ask him to help you deal with those feelings rather than trying to convince him to prove that he cares and approves of you. Therapy is about helping you to work through your issues that cause discomfort. It shouldn't be about how he feels about you. I kow it is difficult but just focusing on getting what you want from anyone does not help you grow or change. Learning to tolerate uncomfortable feelings is painful, hard work but it does get easier.

lol. same with my T...