Some T's live in an alternate reality where they don't think that e-mail is "real communication." I think they teach them in school that all communication is better if it is face-to-face and so the T's think that the clients implicitly think the same way. Or, they hope to enforce this way of looking at the world via example.

Nevermind that most of us clients don't live in the alternate-reality-therapy-world of feelings and families of origins and daily intimate conversations. No, the rest of us work and live in the worlds of law and business and media and education and government and tech.

And in many of our worlds, it is not OK to take that long to reply to an email. I, too, have clients in my work, though they are not nearly of the nature as T's clients. My profession is totally different. My clients would be upset if I ignored them for a day or two, I try to get back to them within a few hours and if it takes me longer than a day, I apologize or give a reason.

And I don't work in a profession where my clients get attached to me as if I were a parental figure - nor do I encourage that.

So if you're a T and you decided to be That Person in a person's life, the crutch who is going to help someone heal, and the crutch who is supposed to be there while a normally competent adult regresses to an earlier, more child-like state and dependency, well then you darn-well better learn the norms of e-mail etiquette in our society.

Otherwise, the clients are going to jump to all manner of wrong-headed conclusions (T doesn't like me, T is avoiding me, I must've said something to piss T off) and then said clients are going to beat themselves up over their wild reactions to a simple non-returned e-mail.

I'm speaking from experience here. If my tax accountant took three days to get back to me, and it were tax season, I'd understand. Any other time, I'd probably follow up to say, "Did you receive this message?" And I'd expect an apology for his delay. But that's all. I wouldn't lose sleep over it. I wouldn't worry that my charitable giving was not to the accountant's liking or that my interest income in fiscal 2012 pissed him off.

If T takes three days to reply?? Or, heaven forbid, doesn't reply to the email at all thinking, "Oh I'll just see PeeJay next week." ? ... All hell breaks loose in my brain!

E-mail and therapists is a huge problem. I think even the therapists haven't figured out what they want to do about it. They just want to live in a world where technology doesn't get in the way and I think they pine for the old days when everything was done by phone and all the scheduling was handled by a secretary.