Text me, call me, or email me....

You summed up my experience with emailing T very well! I'm in pretty much the same situation. I've needed to learn how to reach out, ask for what I need, etc. And, yes, sometimes there have been misunderstandings through email, but I've learned a lot by working through those.

I have daily contact with my therapist and it's a lifesaver for me. I have gone back and fort on the issue, often wondering if it's too much or somehow "untherapeutic" or unethical. It boils down to this: basically, I hate rules and "black and whites" regarding therapy. Everyone has their own very different set of needs regarding outside contact. My hope is that everyone finds a therapist who can understand these needs at the level of the individual!

When I first started therapy, I never would have imagined that I needed daily contact. I didn't go in looking for a relationship. However, the daily contact is crucial to maintaining trust and continuity for me, as much as I judge myself for it. In therapy, we frequently discuss how someday I will learn to "carry her with me" but I'm not there yet and feel safer and more stable being able to reach out, even if it's just to say hello and exchange a few words. She is professional enough to handle the boundaries and I try to remember to trust that she'll tell me when enough is enough. I think right now she is very pleased that I am finally to this point, and I am very pleased that she is so accommodating and that I have been able to first recognize that I had this need, and second, be in a position to have the need met by someone I trust.

This makes a lot of sense to me. It sounds like she's 'meeting you where you are,' you've discussed this issue and negotiated it together, and it's working for you.

My question is -how is the transition made to less contact (say, once a week, or only in crisis, whatever)? It seems that if you (or anyone) has become accustomed to daily contact, whether you learn at some point to 'carry her with you' or not, you may still want the daily contact *nonetheless* because it feels good, immediate 'gratification' (responses), to whatever is going on, etc. In other words, what if the purpose behind it lessens or goes away, and yet you (anyone) still yearns for the daily contact anyway? It seems like it would be a very difficult thing to give up.

So (this is not critical, I'm really curious as to how the process would work), how will you know when it's time to change the frequency of contact and what would that change/transition look like? I also feel like it would be human nature to perhaps prolong (unconsciously, of course) the inability to carry her with you, in order to continue the daily contact.

I see how the daily contact is for a specific reason, and part of your attachment therapy. But what happens when that reason goes away, and the contact becomes an end to itself, rather than a means towards an end; a situation in which you could maybe tolerate therapy without it, but it's become such a daily ritual and part of your life and part of your therapy relationship, that it becomes too difficult and too painful to stop?

I would like to share that I am an example of therapy contact gone wrong. I used to have daily contact with my old t (phone, email, text, you name it). It was a lifesaver for me. Until I went to residential, and learned that such frequent contact was a legal boundary crossing. I ended up having to switch therapists.

According to my new t, contact is fine, but its what is said in the emails, texts, etc that can lead to unethical behavior. Because those are not confidential means of communication, any "therapy" over technology is unethical. Anything your t says has to be vague enough that no one can relate the message to the client in any way, or else it is breaching confidentiality. The client can say whatever they like, but the therapist is ethically obliged to not give any client specific response. Therefore, that sort of communication becomes sort of pointless.

However, because we live in a growing world of technology, many therapists are using technology to contact with clients. And the lines of communication and what is ethical and what isn't is becoming blurred. My advice to anyone who is using text, email, etc for whatever reason is to make sure that firm boundaries are established. I wouldn't want anyone to have to lose their t like I did.

I think that's part of why they only show you a small part of themselves - it makes it easier for us to outgrow them, to outgrow the need for them. I am at this point with my t. I haven't wanted to say too much about it, because other people here are missing their ts who are on vacation, but after a good 7 years, im like, take my t, please! I believe I do still need his help in making changes in my life, because up til now, all I've been doing is the prep work - kinda like getting stuff ready for a stir-fry. My first stir-fry. Then I'll wanna keep making stir-fry. So to speak.

I guess my only thought is that I'm grateful that we talk about this a lot in therapy because by keeping it out in the open, it will never become a ritual for me. In the end, she is a professional providing a service and I am an adult, not a child. I know this logically but in this somewhat difficult emotional time for me, I am learning (slowly!) that it's okay to lean in when someone is offering. However, I recognize that this type of situation may not work or be in the best interest of others, for sure.

Wow. i am really surprised by all the negative reactions to contact.

i think it depends on the client and the situation. it might be the way to reach a client who is alone.. it might be a way to build trust in a client who is really untrusting. it might be a way to get a client to attach, who can not do so for whatever reasons. it might be a way to show a client that "T cares," or that client can "count on T."

there are some clients whose independence or severe lack of trust or fear of people, because they could never depend on anyone, would prevent them from every reaching out to T. so there is NO thought of contacting a T, even if client had no-one or were going to do something harmful.

the opposite seems true on PC, where people want to contact their Ts alot, but i dont think its one size fits all.... i think the T needs to be able to assess the situation and be client-specific.

obviously if a T is beginning and cant make an accurate assessment and client abuses the contact, T needs to make a boundary, but that is what "relationships" are about.

I think that every client is different. I can email whenever I want to, but she doesn't always reply immediately. I have been in therapy for many years and have only just started having her call me on a certain day at a specified time that suits us both. It is only a 5 min call and not therapy based, more just general chit chat to "maintain the connection". I have found this to be really helpful.

The 'reply' for some reason didn't capture everything you wrote, so I'm not just referring to the above, to all of it --wanted to say that you explain this very well and it makes a lot of sense. I really like how this is something that is done and reevaluated together, as a team, if you will, it's out in the open, etc. It sounds like a really good relationship.

One question came up when reading this: How will you know if/when you've become able to carry her with you *while* you're still having daily contact? What comes to mind is, would you have to do a kind of 'experiment' at some point (say, no contact for a day, then 2 days, etc.) to see how you do, to see if you have, in fact, gained that ability to carry her with you (I think you're talking about object constancy)? Would you sort of taper things down to see how you do? Initially, of course, it would probably be very difficult, but once over that initial major change, maybe you'd see that you can tolerate therapy without it?

If it were done in this manner, how would you know (or your therapist) that it's 'time' to give it a shot? Maybe if you were showing signs of object constancy in other ways, indicating that you're ready?

This is a really interesting topic. Often times on the board, there's a lot of back and forth (and I usually offer my 2 cents) on (frequent) contact vs not. But I'm really interested in having a sense of how the process towards less contact would look like, would work, in what ways it is a means towards an end, how to reach that end, and why. Thanks for your input, PumpkinEater.

Reducing my amount of contact hasn't really been a goal for me, because my T doesn't mind it and I have no other pressing reason to reduce the amount. I do know that I "need" less now than I did in the past, even if I don't actually USE less. I also use it for different purposes.

In the beginning, I used email a lot for asking if T was still there, or whether she was fed up with me yet. I almost never have to ask those things any more. I also sometimes used it for saying stuff I couldn't bring up in session, but now I can say almost anything to her face.

I used to ask for a call back from T only when I was in crisis mode, and it would take me 3 tries or more of hanging up before I could leave her a message. These days, if I have a reason to want a call back from her (and I no longer feel like I have to be in totally dire straits to do that), I call and leave a message in one try. The last time I asked for a call back was because our session ended badly before I was going on vacation, and I just wanted to smooth things over with her before I was gone for several weeks.

When I started, my mental idea of T was very unstable. For several months I couldn't picture her in in my head at ALL between sessions. I also kept thinking she was about to get fed up with me or start acting cold or something. Now I have a good mental image of her, and her personality in my imagination pretty much always stays the same.

Another thing that has changed about my emails is that I write them much faster now. I used to obsess a lot over what I wrote, and apologize a lot but now I pretty much just write them in one go and send them. I used to worry about whether something was "important" enough to write about but I don't any more. If I feel like I need to vent about something, I will fire off a quick email of a few lines and say I don't need a response, and I feel better right away because I feel less alone in it, even without a response. I expect that later on I will feel less alone in stuff even without having to email about it.

Ultramar, I really appreciate your thoughtful questions. I have not had the opportunity to fully dissect this issue in such as way as I have been able to to with you. Sure, my therapist and I talk about it all the time but these are some really thought provoking questions you have thrown out, so thank you for the opportunity to delve in a little deeper to an issue that I, too, find very fascinating and a little scary!

I can contact my T, but he doesn't get into 'doing therapy' by text or email. Texts are for scheduling, mainly. I sometimes send him stuff by email and it's helpful to be able to do that.