I asked the question and am so curious about everybody's responses because one of my Ts does text with me. We've been doing it for quite some time now. We text about four days per week. It is always according to whichever days my T can do it, so it changes week to week based on her schedule. It is always at whatever time is convenient for her, so she always initiates the text on the days we do it. She also always dictates how many back-and-forth texts there are - when she indicates she wants to stop, I always say thank you and bye. It has worked well as a source of support for me, especially as I'm in the middle of an unfortunately ongoing difficult situation, almost crisis, with my soon to be ex-H. I'm fully functional and stable, but it's been a hard time and I've been grateful for the support. It's all been at her discretion, and I know she's totally OK with it.

The only issue I'm having is the financial piece. She charges me for it by amount of time at her regular session rate. We don't even text that much, I don't think, but it winds up being extremely expensive. We've talked about it and she does not feel comfortable agreeing instead to a fixed rate for texting per month. So I have agreed to continue doing it this way because I don't want to lose the support, but I really can't afford to continue doing it anymore and I have this lousy feeling that I'm being taken advantage of. I'm ashamed of how much I pay. When I bring up the financial concerns, which she is well aware of, she says we can always just text less and have less contact and then it will be less expensive. I understand that of course and I guess it is fair, but it just really upsets me and hurts me that that's her response.

Anyway, it never even occurred to me that other therapists don't charge for texting. I am blown away by this. My other T (not marriage counselor but my individual T) doesn't text but we do email occasionally but she doesn't charge for that.