There have been several times I have emailed T and he hasn't responded. A couple of times this caused me much angst. I felt ignored, rejected, etc. There has been only one time I shared anything substantive in an email, and this was one he did not respond to. I felt this was his way of telling me not to share stuff in an email, to just keep it brief and to logistics ("I need to reschedule"). However, on the whole, T does answer my emails quickly and sometimes will email me several times in one day. These are usually brief and to the point and he responds quickly and cutely (he loves to use smileys).

Tonight in session, I discovered why T sometimes ignores my emails. Drum roll.... It is because he hasn't read them. We were on his computer together looking at stuff today (sitting side by side on his couch), and he asked me something we had discussed last session. I said I emailed you about that, like I said I would. (I had emailed him some information and he had not responded.) He said he never got that email. So he asked what day I sent it, I told him, and he looked back in his mail and found it. He said he just realized he may be missing a lot of emails. When he goes home for the night, he checks his email one last time, then when he comes in the morning, he starts with emails that say "today" and doesn't check among "yesterday" emails for ones that came during the night. So he never gets nighttime emails. He said this explains a lot. I said well don't the emails change color after you've read them so you can see at a glance if you've opened them or not? No, they don't. He showed me his email box and his system is set up so it has a dot by the email if it is unread and once he opens it, the dot disappears. I pointed this out to him and he had never noticed this before. I showed him all the emails he had that he hadn't read yet that still had dots by them. You can imagine T is doing this: . OK, my T is not a real techie guy, that's for sure.

I feel so much better now to know I haven't been ignored. My T is very transparent, and if I had been thinking clearly and not feeling so rejected and like I was being taught a lesson, I would have realized this is not his style at all to ignore me and hope that communicates some sort of intent. He is much more direct than that. What was I thinking? And we never got this straight before because whenever he would "ignore" an email, I would not mention it to him in the next session, because I felt his ignoring my message told me all I needed to know.

When am I ever going to learn?