How Many Email Your T?

I e-mailed T tonight. I miss him. I know he's gone until Monday so I won't hear from him until then, but at least I know I've done my half of the reaching out...now I just have to wait for him to reach back.

Most of my e-mails are about connection, actually. It helps me A LOT to be able to stay connected to T.

She does not - for any reason. Probably just as well - I might be tempted to abuse the privilege.

When I was seeing my former T, I asked her if I could email her and she said "no". I was envious of those who could email their Ts. So, when I started with my current T, I asked her at my first session. She said if it helped me to "unload", it was fine, but she didn't want to "do therapy via email."

At first she answered all of my emails, which I tried to limit to about 2 per week. I loved that! But, one week I got upset by her response because she didn't answer the way I wanted her to, and didn't answer everything, so I emailed her again. It was about 4 emails, one after another, and I was hurt/angry about them.

So, she decided that she would only respond once per week, no matter how many emails I send her. I usually write only 1 or 2, sometimes 3, and most often right after my session. I express myself better in writing than speaking, and it helps me to get it all out even if my T only answers once. What she emails is always comforting and positive, and shows me how much she cares about me.

I've only emailed my T a couple times. They were both about scheduling, but after I cancelled three sessions in a row, one of them turned into a discussion where he thought I was upset with him because I might have thought he wasn't fully engaged in one of the sessions.

I assured him that wasn't the case, but in the back of my mind, I think he might have been right. I think there was one session where he looked to me like he wasn't into it. But I have a hard time reading faces and body language sometimes, and he's had to remind me of that on occasion.

After 4 years my T decided email would be ok. I had asked about it a couple of times and she declined, so when she told me out of the blue that I could email, I was surprised and asked why she changed her mind. She said that when she first considered it, it sounded like it might be too cumbersome and would require more time than she had available.

We don't email back and forth, though.
I email and generally she emails back just to say that we can talk about it in session, pretty similar to how she handles phone calls. She has always offered phone contact including her cell. The last email response I received from her was:
I can see how hard it is to say these things and you do write so clearly. I hope we can talk about these thoughts and feelings in the next session.
So that's how it goes for us.

My T does allow emails to a certain extent.

I have her email address as this is how I first contacted her about starting therapy with her.

In the space of a year and a half I have probably only emailed her about 3-5 times. Once or twice she didnt reply at all and when she does it is only a few lines.

I dont think she would want me to be emailing her each week really as I think she is worried about boundary crossing as am I .

I am able to text her but again its not a common form of communication between us, although its handy to be able to do even for just askinga simple question or resheduling something!

xxxx

not yet, but i do not think she does.

Yes I worry about that too and there are some things I would not want to put in writing - past stuff I feel OK about, but I am very cautious about writing anything that may be actually happening at the moment, even SI stuff as I think it could put both of us in a difficult position.

I just started sending emails to T one day and it's been fine with him. I've used it to change apt times, start communication about challenging stuff and to check in. For me it's a nice tool to have as a way to tell him something without having a full conversation about it. Despite it's benifits and that T is very responsive I've seen how written communication can be problamatic and it's not something I like to do every week.

Confidentiality is more on my mind now as I have recently learned that he doesn't always open his postage mail and that I need to mark it "personal and confidential" to make comlete certain it's kept private. Also yeah some things just don't need to be in writing and thats why I'm not even crazy about his notetaking but yet I ramble...