Emailing T even though she doesn't like me to email her

I'd not email a T if he told me he's not OK with it but I see it's a moo point now, you did it anyway. For what it's worth, I don't think it's too much of a boundary crossing- she might decide not to read it after all and thereby sticking to her boundary.
I'm surprised though that you don't expect this to be the topic of your next session. Like seriously you think she'll read it and not want to process/respond to it?

Only my opinion, but the way to deal with family stuff is to not give them an in, if at all possible. Get on with YOUR life. If you're thinking about your brother, you'll be in a better position to help him out or take care of him later on if you are yourself in a better place. But i dont think you can get there and negotiate with your family now at the same time. Kinda like, they had their chance and they blew it. I had ts tell me straight out that it was useless to work with me if i kept seeing my family. I dont know why they kept seeing me anyway. I felt like i had no choice after my nephew was born - i couldnt abandon him to those crazy people. Wrong decision. Your t keeps filling your bucket and your family keeps emptying it.

I learned the hard way that life with my mother in it always > life without my mother in it. I had two years of that and it was hell. My solution is just not to let her get to me; have a better support system and be very boundaried with her when she's not being respectful of me.

Working on it...

Geez, maybe I just wanted to email her so she WOULD be upset and how we would deal with that and whether she's going to stick it out and support me the way I need her to. Ugh, that was incredibly immature...

No it wasn't. Your choice to civilly email her and explain what is going on was well thought out and supported by many people around you. You have no reason to be ashamed.

Yeah, but I also just purposefully did something I was told explicitly not to do and I know it's going to aggravate her, so it feels like maybe a little tiny part of me is also just trying to test her to see how she'll respond...

You're not a 3 year old who has to obey everything you're told. You're an adult. You can choose not to do what she says, and it's not the end of the world.

She will probably be upset at me. But I guess if she is, then I have my answer...but I'm not sure I'm ready to hear it.

If you did something your T explicitly told you she was uncomfortable with, she wouldn't get upset at you, HazelGirl?

Hmm...there's very little I can think of that would be things she wouldn't want me to do. Umm...I guess she wouldn't like it if I threatened her life? But that's a little different than an email. Seriously, I have no restrictions or rules.

I once texted her just to say hi and asked if that was okay (thinking that if anything was not okay, it was this)...but she was okay with even that. It makes me a little uncomfortable when I don't have rules, but it's good for me because I would get so tied up in them I wouldn't be able to be myself. I would turn into a rule-following robot. And I think she knows this, and so doesn't give me any restrictions.

Although! She doesn't want me to email her. But that has nothing to do with contact. She just doesn't regularly check her emails and wants to make sure she gets messages from me in a timely manner.

Once again, your T sounds really special, HazelGirl. You lucked out with her.

But the thing is, I feel like I lucked out with mine too, considering how much progress I've made so quickly. It's just this damn boundary thing that I'm having trouble with. So I'm trying to give her the chance to work through it with me before I just ditch her, but ugh, it's so frustrating! I don't want to upset her or make her uncomfortable, and I know I would be upset/uncomfortable if I told someone explicitly (ex. a student I volunteer with) not to email me and they did anyway (although I would never tell them not to email me). But also, therapy is about me, not about her, and I'm trying to do what I feel I need to do in the most mature way possible. I'm really, really trying.

And I do think you are doing your best. Hugs to you because you are genuinely trying. I do agree that she has some great aspects, but this boundary thing is a real serious flaw. It is a difficult situation, and the decisions are tough.

If this therapeutic relationship is going to work, I need to be able to make mistakes and not have her get upset at me for them. So that's my answer.

But I genuinely like her and feel good about our sessions most of the time. She's clever, she "gets" me in a way that other people don't and she sees things that other people don't see (as a good T should) and she knows how to reach me in a cognitive way, which is what I respond to. She's super perceptive and she notices when I'm nervous about something but trying not to show it or trivializing or using humor to cover things up and she is really, really validating of my experiences.

Like yesterday I was telling her about the Minnie Mouse incident and the look on her face was just so upset for me even though she doesn't usually get upset like that and she was just like, "Oh, R, you got blamed for everything. I'm so sorry that happened to you." And when I told her about getting upset at my parents in the car, I was scared she might be disappointed in me for getting so angry and not using my "I feel x because I need y" statements. But she was so supportive and understanding. She was like, "Considering all the stuff you were dealing with mentor-figure and all the stuff in your head, of course you were going to react that way! Frankly I'm surprised your reaction wasn't even worse, all things being considered."

And with the Minnie situation, she wanted me to do her favorite exercise in which grown-up me gets to talk to little-kid me and give her what she needed in that situation. She wanted me to do that in front of her but I told her I was feeling really self-conscious about it and asked if I could do it on my own at home and tell her how it went, and she said of course. It just felt really, really good.

And now I feel like maybe I ruined that. I know I didn't; it's just my old stuff coming back, but ugh...

You're right. You need to be able to make mistakes without her view and perception of you being damaged. If you can't in your relationship with her, then you can't be her client. She may be wonderful sometimes (and it definitely sounds like she is), but these attitudes about her boundaries could (and may already) undermine the therapeutic alliance.

So then I am testing her, to see if I can screw up and have things be okay afterwards. I'm giving her the chance to reassure me that things are okay and to change her behavior re. her boundaries. I hope she can do that. I'm scared that with my tacit ultimatum, I'm just going to end up being disappointed.

You might be, but she might also be able to change things. I seriously doubt, based on her track record, that things will change, unfortunately. But for your sake, I hope they do.

The boundaries themselves I think I could learn to live with (I really think I could) if she didn't get so damn defensive about them!

I was actually okay with her saying no to an extra session but maybe to a phone check in if I needed it; that was pretty reasonable. I just had an issue with the way she said it, which felt really reproachful to me. Hence, the email.

Right. I totally understand that. It's really not fair or right of her to behave in that way.

And she told me she would have to check her schedule today and she would call/email me to tell me when we could do the phone check in, and I'm starting to worry that she hasn't done that yet because she got my email and is trying to figure out how to respond...ugh...

Maybe. But you have to be okay with that. Confrontation of any sort is uncomfortable, and probably brings up issues from the past. If she's smart, she will thank you for speaking up and work to figure out how to make things better for both of you.

I hope so. Thanks, HazelGirl. Your ideas are always incredibly valuable to me.

You're welcome. I enjoy helping people.

If she doesn't call/email before Friday even though she said she would just re. scheduling, it's going to freak me out. I hate what I do to myself sometimes...

This is something that you need to be able to get used to. I used to freak out all the time, that I went too far and now my T is angry at me. Over time, I began to feel that less and less, and now it's not bad at all. I know the situation is different, but you will be able to survive. Promise

I mean, I'm okay; I'm not hysterical or anything...but she told me she would contact me about a phone check in, and she always keeps her word in a timely manner when she says she'll do stuff like that. I mean, I would be okay if she didn't get back to me about it, just disappointed, and in my case it probably would be because I breached a boundary...

Hang in there.