I know this has been brought up before...but I just want to ask again... is it unreasonable for me to want T's phone to NOT be involved in my sessions? Every session, my T's cell phone is on a table right next to her. MOST sessions, I hear at least one notification tone. Often enough, when a notification goes off, she eventually checks it. Usually just peering in that direction nonchalantly. She doesn't usually respond, but she does often check the text. It drives me NUTS! So you can guess, whenever her phone dings, I get a bit of a negative feeling. I've brought it up to her before. Yesterday's session, I just walked in, hadn't even sat down yet, and her phone dinged. She said something like "I just have to write my daughter back quick" or something like that... during the session, it dinged several times. Once, not right at the beginning, she said if her daughter calls, she will need to answer it.

It's not about this one particular day. It's the fact that that phone poses a threat during most of my sessions, I never know when it's going to go off, or when she'll have to respond to a text after she reads it. I can understand emergency circumstances occasionally. But her daughter is almost 18 years old and understands, I'm sure, that her mom is in sessions, and knows those sessions go till 10 minutes to the hour, so her best bet is to contact her then.

Is it unreasonable for me to WANT my T's phone to be on silent during my sessions? I not only put mine on silent, but I put it on airplane mode so NOTHING goes through. I get 50 minutes of my T's time on session days, and shouldn't I be able to have that 50 minutes, when she gets paid like $175 for it? It's not just about the phone dinging. It's about my belief that she may have other things on her mind than me during that 50 minutes. Is that selfish? I have spoken to my other T about it, who says it's not right, and that I should ask her to silence her phone during sessions. Really, should I NEED to ask? My T has been a psychologist for like 25 years, you'd think she would know better. Any other T I've ever seen never had their phone anywhere in sight during sessions. I only heard one of theirs go off once, and she was very apologetic for that, and just silenced it, without reading the text. She forgot to silence it during our session.

Anyway, my T ended up accusing me of there being a shift in our session that occurred when she checked her phone, and she considered it a "small thing," and I got horribly upset. Cried my eyes out the rest of the session, and the whole way home. T knows I'm extremely sensitive and vulnerable right now, and think she could have been a bit more understanding.

Am I being childish for feeling I need to compete with a stinking cell phone during my sessions???

ETA... during the session I got quiet, so she then started yawning, and then grabbed her nail file and started filing her nails during my session. At the end, she picked up her laptop, and started typing away on it. That was my cue to leave.