I learned to be a very assertive person a long time ago through a business relationship. I carry that over in my therapy in being assertive with him. Although at times I am scared to bring things up to him; afraid he will feel criticized or be angry at me, and because he gets really defensive. I end up doing it anyway.

I rarely, if ever, bring up these kinds of mistakes except to acknowledge them or remind him if he was supposed to do something-forgetting things about me, coming late, having the wrong time, accidentally sending me an email meant for someone else, not taking care of an administrative request, looking or answering a text in session, etc. Unless they do it all the time, that seems nit picky to me. If not returning an email hurt me, we'd talk about my feelings about it but not frame it as his making a mistake, if that makes sense. Like in your case, I'd tell him I wanted to address the driving phobia, but he forgot last time, so could we do it this time.

The kind of mistakes I bring up are clinically related-mismanaging transference, pushing me too hard when I was clinically depressed/had no ego strength/many recent losses, mismanagement of boundaries, incongruent self disclosure, etc. As those things have harmed me, while the above have not/do not. These are his responsibility-I should not have to bring these up to him. If I tell him, for example, I feel suicidal every day and have been missing work and am afraid of losing my job because of it, he should make the clinical adjustments without me having to point out how his mistakes are harming me.

I think the way therapists do their schedules these days causes unnecessary errors. The 45-50 minute session was initially designed to give a therapist 10-15 minutes to reflect before and after clients. Now the time is used to cram as many clients into their schedule they can as they often have back to back appointments.

I do think therapists should be using that 10-15 minutes of time to reflect and review sessions of each client regardless of how they schedule. My last therapist did it at the end of each day by writing down some notes on paper. I think problems can be prevented if they do this.

As a side note, I wonder also-since many no longer use the 45-50 therapy hour as it was designed, should they be doing 1 hour sessions now? Hmm.