Quote:
Originally Posted by Yearning0723
Well, she likes to, so it's not like she's giving me this huge gift that I should be ridiculously grateful for...but yeah, it's not like that with my other professors and I don't expect it to be. My point is just that it's not a boundary thing; it's a "do I have time to read your emails/do I want to read your emails?" thing, and if she said not to email anymore, it would not be a huge deal.
And I bet she has a lot of experience with laying down actual, real boundaries in actual, real situations. She teaches a course to people in prison and since she's often the only outside contact they get, they cling to her. So she spends about two hours teaching her course and then six hours sitting with them and talking to them. She doesn't mind it.
|
I have a similar experience. My therapist is semi-retired. She has occasional other clients, but I am certainly her most time-consuming, consistent one.
She's simply at a different stage in her life than the therapists we might be most used to, the ones who are perhaps well established, or in a group practice that guarantees a fairly full client load, and are perhaps also balancing busy family lives and personal projects, such as research or career advancement.
There's nothing inherently better about that type of super-busy inflexible therapist. Also, some of those super-busy folks still feel such passion for their vocation that they do consistently respond to email and take calls, and I appreciate that they need to balance their passion with practical limits, not to mention feel-out what level of interaction best suits individual clients.
It is worth cherishing wise women who have passed through their full-time career lives and come to a point where they can take on clients to mentor or mother, to work with closely, to cherish. I am ever so grateful to be on this journey with my therapist. I loved being teacher's pet, and I love this too. It helps balance out my past experiences too and is extremely affirming. (Of course, I don't always appreciate it, and it's often challenging, but...
)