Out of session contact - My opinion

Having such strict rules about out of office contact seems like a defensive move: already telling the client up front what you won't do for them rather than pointing out what you can do to help. Its never been a major ssue for me, but when I needed to reach out to him, I was glad I could. Being so black and white about it just seems like it would put a dark cloud over the relationship from the start

I think I can pinpoint a little bit about what bothers me about how some Ts approach out of session contact.

In my case, particularly email.

I had a T tell me that we couldn't email because "email is not secure." So this was supposedly all for my benefit? What if I don't care about it being secure? Also, it insulted my intelligence. In the US, private emails to a therapist would connote a reasonable expectation of privacy, and thus if my privacy WERE violated, I'd have grounds for a lawsuit.

So the T should've been honest and said, "I don't want to deal with emails." Or some other tactful way of putting it.

A T who has a blanket policy is also being intellectually lazy in a way. This T is not willing to make case-by-case decisions, or have the hard conversation with a client who might need it. Instead, T falls back on a "policy," of his or her own making, and doesn't take ownership for the reasons behind the policy.

If you are a therapist, you should accept that you will be someone's crutch for a time. Not everyone's, but you will be at times. If you don't want to be someone's crutch for a time, then why even become a therapist? Get another profession.

My current T said the following to me, and I loved her honesty. "I don't get work email on my phone. Partly because of Hippa laws and partly because it's just really convenient for me to say that I don't get work email on my phone."

Great! Fan-freakin-tastic! We all agree that there just might be times when a therapist does not want to hear from a client.

Another T said, honestly, "I'm a terrible writer." I liked that too.

But enforcing a strict no-contact policy for the supposed benefit of the client feels like an insult to the client.

I think therapy is the only profession where the people in its employ get to justify laziness by saying that they are "enforcing boundaries."

Especially because, as the client, WE ARE THE BOSSES. It's a relationship, and there's a power differential that the T has. But there's also an intangible benefit to being a recurring revenue stream to the therapist.

And if it is important to you to have some "out of session contact" (why is it even CALLED that anyway?), then the Ts who are the best at handling this should have the most thriving practices.

I'm trying to imagine anyone in another profession telling his boss, "Your needs are too big. I need to enforce boundaries for your own good." Really funny!

I guess this goes back to just finding the right T for you. Like any other business they have different ways of doing things. If I don't like their "business" is operated then I take my money elsewhere. T has encouraged me to email here when needed. If she is leaving the area (visiting family, attending conferences, etc) she will tell me she will be out of town but she will have her laptop if I need to contact her. The last time she went out of state she told me that Saturday she would be busy but would check her email whenever she could....My daughter is graduating high school this year. She has applied to quite a few colleges but has yet to hear from 4 of them...T told me whenever we hear anything from those schools she expects an email update.

Thanks for this thread. I have enjoyed reading the many post.

As for boundaries, sometimes I think it is just some disgruntled PC Poster that saw the word "boundaries" in a nondescript, long forgotten psych journal only found deep in the bowels of some medical library (easier done on the Internet these days) to haunt the crap out of people that come to these forums — and now is a Psych Central construct.

The above paragraph is just me master bating my mind in amusement.

Mmmm. How can a T either have boundaries or no boundaries? I can see T's and anyone else having different boundaries, but no boundaries? Of course, I'm not an acadamian.

Haha, that made me laugh out loud!!