@susannah - thank you for your thoughts and validation, and yes, I do think that he (and other therapists) use their jobs to get needs met; probably him more than other t’s I’ve had in the past.

I doubt he has any conscious awareness of this at all. In his mind, he is being super attentive towards me, so that I develop an attachment to someone who will be there consistently. But it can feel OTT. For example..

My travel plans changed in the past 24 hours, and I emailed to let him know that I’d be traveling on Thursday instead of Wednesday, so no time for a phone appointment Thursday and no need to speak again before his vacation starts, I’m doing better than expected etc etc.

After sending that email, I slept in late because I’d been up most of the night... by the time I woke up six hours later, he had sent me two emails and left me a skype message about whether I’d like to speak today instead.

The first asked “Are you able to speak with me today at 10am?” Not “if you do want to speak, I have such and such time available.”

The second email, just before 10am, said, “I’m just out of a meeting and traveling back to the office, can I call you as soon as I get there?” - so, he was running late, and wouldn’t have been able to make the 10am time proposed in the first email. BUT I hadn’t even answered the first email or agreed to speak; I was still asleep through all of this.

If I was actively suicidal or some such, I could understand this level of attentiveness more, but I’m not. My email said that I was doing relatively ok, and that I didn’t anticipate needing to speak before his vacation. Plus, I have a psych appointment Friday (with his colleague) so it’s not as though I’m just out in the cold over here.

It feels like he needs to trust me a bit more to let him know if I’m NOT fine.

So I ended up speaking to him, and I voiced some of my concerns about too much therapy, how I don’t want to become dependent, etc. He talked about having “given me a safe space to fall apart,” in recent months, but also said that he heard my concerns and didn’t want me to feel as though I was being infantilized.

I read something somewhere about how with therapists, it’s like “You (the client) have a problem if I say you have a problem. I (the therapist) have a problem if I say I have a problem.” If the client points out a problem, it’s immediately assumed to be “transference.”