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Originally Posted by ElectricManatee
My T basically allows however much outside contact I need. I can send an email or leave a voicemail, and she almost always responds with 24 hours, unless I tell her that I don't need a response. My T says that she trusts me to self-regulate when I can and she knows that I use other coping strategies too, so she hasn't felt a need to impose any limits around outside contact with me. I think maybe it is relevant too that the contact usually helps me calm down rather than escalating the problem or creating new problems (i.e., it is rare that I am upset by her response).
My T says that she wants to be there for me when I feel like I need her, and she wants for me to learn that it's safe to reach out to people for help. I reach out semi-regularly and always appreciate being able to do it, but I still feel a lot of fear and anxiety around contacting her. She genuinely doesn't seem to mind spending the extra (unpaid) time on me, but maybe I feel like I'm not worth it. A lot of the things I am in therapy for center around being able to feel like I belong and that it's okay for me to take up space in the world, so I can see the link to how my T finds outside contact therapeutically important. I just feel uncomfortable about it.
I think my anxiety is compounded by reading posts here about people who emphasize self-reliance and try to avoid contacting their therapists at all costs or people who have therapists who arbitrarily shift boundaries. I am wondering if there are people out there who have had mostly positive experiences with outside contact. Did your feelings about reaching out change over time? Does your T encourage you to contact them? In what circumstances? How/why does it help? Do you think of outside contact as a central part of therapy or just a nice little bonus?
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My former T allowed a lot of outside contact, usually through emails but I could text her and request a phone call--usually 10 or 15 minutes, just a check in that would help ground me or help me get back on track if I was in crisis mode. I think it was very helpful to me. I had a lot of trouble talking about hard stuff in therapy. Not that I didn't want to open up but just voicing the words was very difficult. So I could "talk" on email and then we would talk about it in session. It helped me tell her a lot about my life and my past experiences. My former T always encouraged me to contact her if I needed to and seemed to trust me that I knew when I needed to and when I could get by until the next session. Sometimes it would be several short emails in a day and then nothing the rest of the week, or sometimes it would be a long email once and then nothing, or a few quick emails on several days of the week. She never once said I was contacting her too much. I think at first it was central to my therapy because I just wasn't opening up enough in session but as time went by and I was able to talk more about most things, it was a nice bonus, especially helpful with SH feelings/thoughts/actions.