I think it is very difficult to tell in an email whether someone is speaking from her heart or not, and it is also difficult to "show" people frustration and pain in writing.

You feel that you communicated these things, and IF she didn't hear you, that doesn't mean that you did something wrong. Nor does it have to mean that she did something wrong in failing to hear you.

And do you leave room for the possibility of her email being lost, or her mistakenly moving it to another mailbox or accidentally deleting it. I get TONS of email, and I have a very organized system of moving emails into folders and creating hierarchies for responding, and then I sometimes have a whole string of emails from various listserves and what not that I don't have time to read, so I delete them. Sometimes in the midst of all of this I miss stuff. People who know me and know that I always respond to emails will send me a second email after a few days and ask if something happened.

I will also resend emails to people if they haven't responded after a few days, if they are typically people who don't blow me off. Lots of busy people take days or more than a week to respond.

I think that as the client who wants a response to email, you may need to occasionally resend an email to your T and ask for it.

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Originally Posted by sittingatwatersedge then when i next see you, my inclination is to not mention the fact that I emailed you, or even that I had that frustration or pain.

And I think this is your responsibility, not your T's. You need to bring things to the session that cause you pain and/or that you want to talk about it. Your T can't do it for you, your T would never want to impose an agenda on you, that is just not how T's work unless you have worked out something different.

If you want help in understanding your reaction and/or changing it, the only way that is going to happen is if you put it out there in front of your T. And probably not in an email, but in actual session.

The only exception to having an agenda item that my T raised was when I had called him one day and I didn't get a call back; it was time sensitive because I was having a scary medical procedure. I called him back the next day and found out that the receptionist had never given him the message. The next session he raised it as an issue and wanted me to know that the temp person was the one who made the mistake and that he had talked to her about it.

But you could ask your T, I would think, if she would be willing to raises issues that you flag in your email as things you want her to raise? I don't know if this would solve the current cupcake problem, but perhaps the lesson of this interaction or not with your T is to discuss the email contact issue. Maybe one thing for you to consider is to stop emailing and just reserve your issues for session. Perhaps that would encourage you to talk more freely during sessions. I found this was true for me when I stopped writing in a journal consistently and giving it to my T to read after sessions.