Quote:
Originally Posted by blur
your T is so expensive. $50 for one email exchange over a few days. wowza! it feels like your T is kind of taking advantage of you here especially with emailing you and starting the email exchange. i'd think that would be up to you as the client to initiate. like sweepy said i'd not answer if you don't want to get caught in another email fee. you could go ahead and tell her that next session or add it onto another of your emails that you need to be the one to initiate the emails.
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If you saw my emails you might feel differently, haha. I'm a prolific writer. One of those three day email sessions probably runs about... 3,000 words on my part and three replies from her. Often, there have been more replies. So.... she's definitely earning less than her $100 per hour rate on those. It is a good deal, and I am glad to pay for emails because they are convenient, less than live session time, and because I find writing versus speaking so helpful sometimes.
I have almost always initiated the email sessions, 99% of the time, and so being in such a pattern, I guess she was concerned not to hear from me. I had the option, like Sweepy mentioned, to just say "I'm fine, just watching my budget," or "I'm fine, just taking a little break from therapy." and not get into a session. That's probably what I'd have to try and do if it occurred again, it's just... she and I have such a habit, that when I interact with her, I do seem to automatically go into spill everything mode.
The amount she charges is not unreasonable... $100/h for live sessions, when she's certainly worth twice that based on her credentials/experience and similarly fair for emails... I'm just really struggling w/keeping the cost down and needing more structure: for her to follow the plan she laid out to manage session time and to ask me if she wants to raise the email fee, not just do it.
But yeah, I think she's poor at limits the more I think about it, and seeing as I'm also poor at limits, which is probably more understandable since I'm the client... it is an issue atm. However, she's not a complete failure at them: she acknowledged her failure to keep the time on Monday, and definitely encouraged me a few times to end the session, she just wasn't as firm as I need her to be: but if she hadn't mentioned ending a few times, I probably would've gone another 30 minutes, so it did help. And she's been consistent about letting me say a quick hello and then politely letting me off the line, so I'm just checking in for a minute instead of starting an hour+ chat like I used to, so... that part has seemed better. I'm just awfully frustrated, not just at her but at absolutely everything in my life at the moment. Well, not just frustrated I guess, to be honest, but scared. I'm scared of it all going wrong.
I had a dream of her last night, actually, that finally instead of being 3,000 miles away, she was close and invited me to have a session in person, sigh. I was so happy to meet her in the dream.
As it is... I think I'll take a few days off. I don't know: I might cancel my Friday session. I've already spent that money on extra fees this week, so....