Thank you everyone for responding, very interesting for me to see the results. I suppose I wasn't very clear with my questions was I - I acted from my own assumptions which were about T's attitude to out of session contact, so that 'yes' just meant that you do/could/would have oos contact, regardless of whether you acted on it or not. And the sometimes, depending bit was more to do with T's 'permission' ie that normally T would not 'allow' contact but in some cases would make an exception.

(Quotes around words because I totally resent Ts being in a position to 'permit' or 'allow' things - just my thing!)

I'm surprised at how many peoples' Ts do offer or even encourage out of session contact - I used to think that was an exceptional thing, seems not. I have a good T, but no way does he offer anything outside of the one hour a week therapy session. His thinking, which I understand, is that he is 100% there for me in the session and that effectively anything goes while we're together, but the payback is that he keeps his life outside of the session as exclusively his with no crossover.

I wish I did have extra contact though, regardless of the potential and obvious pitfalls (for me that is, not saying these obvious things exist in others' therapy.)