Oh, it's OK! (I'll definitely say something if it gets to be too much.) Part of what really bothered me about the change in outside contact (even though he says he's not taking it away, just limiting it more) is that he KNOWS that's a particularly vulnerable area for me. He knows how I reacted when ex-T made that change. He also knows that one of my great fears (about everyone, not just him) is that something I've been doing has been bothering somone for a long time but they haven't said something (though he claimed this only bothered him that past week...) He knows because this is a topic that's come up numerous times in marriage counseling, mostly regarding H (and some stuff going back to my parents).

Something I told T last week is that it's especially painful because MC knows what my weaknesses and triggers are, and yet he institutes that anyway, at the end of a contentious phone call, no less--if anything, he should have waited until session, and ideally done it in a moment when I wasn't already upset. I told him (MC) that it sort of felt like he was bothered by my expressing anger at him in the phone call, so he was almost like, "Oh, I know what will hurt LT back--I'll limit outside contact!" Of course he said it wasn't like that, how he'd been thinking it before the call and wouldn't do something like that...but I don't think he considered how it could feel on my end.

And yeah, I was also unsure how to deal with his saying last week how we should keep seeing him so that I could see he wasn't abandoning or rejecting me, to see what a relationship like that was like. It almost felt like, "Well, if you don't stay, then you'll lose your chance to heal from this." Almost like he's my savior or something... He wasn't putting that much pressure on yesterday, but did say he hoped to keep working with us but wasn't sure if we wanted to keep working with him. (Ex-T, meanwhile, when I announced I'd made an appointment with a different T who I was going to try seeing at least temporarily, she wished me well, said she'd miss working with me, but didn't seem to be pressuring me to stay at all.)

To go back to your first comment--the fact that it's in subtler ways also seems to give him more deniability. Like he can say, "Oh, I allowed that 45-minute call in the past about transference because it was about the process of dealing with it, but what you wanted to talk to me about now was more content, so that's not OK." (Even though he's definitely talked to me about content before...) And that's not a hypothetical example--He did actually talk to me for 45 minutes at one point earlier this year, which struck me as kind of odd, because a paid 45-minute individual session isn't OK, but an unpaid 45-minute phone call is...