Purplemoon, I did reach a phase with my first counselor where we were not making any progress. It wasn't that we weren't getting along or that I was falling apart, but that I was just not making progress. I asked her if she thought it was useful for me to still keep seeing her, and her response was rather lukewarm: "you can keep seeing me as long as you want." I think if she had said instead something like "I know I can help you make more progress if you keep coming to see me", I would have been more encouraged. I felt like she wasn't offering me any hope that I would make progress with her. So I quit going to see her rather suddenly.

A couple of months later I started with a new T, and we have made rapid, rapid progress. I feel like he was an icebreaker that broke up the polar ice for me and allowed me to begin my passage again. With my current T, we definitely have many sessions that are like "team building" rather than working on my problems. But these end up being valuable in and of themselves, even though it may not seem so on the surface. They help me build trust in my T, strengthen the therapeutic relationship, and lay the groundwork for even more difficult sharing in the future. I look upon none of it as wasted even though I may not seem to be making progress on the presenting problem.

purplemoon, you said you wrote a lot of e-mails to your T. The stuff in your e-mails is the sort of stuff that could go in your journal. Maybe just imagine your journal is your T, and begin each journal entry with "Dear T."

I sometimes have long conversations with my T in my journal. My journal is probably the most important document on my computer.