What is your out of session contact with your therapist?

We have read many threads on here regarding the different levels and methods of contacting therapists outside of session and we are allowed to do that and am curious how often and in what ways others do. It is very difficult to get an idea of frequency and methods in the various threads and would love to see it organized in some way so my brain can understand where we fall in the 'average'.

Would love if you would vote between email, text, personally calling, message with office, or none at all.

I put a category for only scheduling also, but my interest is more in contact allowed for support between sessions.

Also, I went back to see if I could add one more section to the poll but it doesn't look like you can edit the polls. If you want to, can you leave a message here about your therapist's return contact policy.

Does he/she get back to you within an hour or so; that day, next day or discuss whatever you sent in the next session?

Thanks, sure wish I could have added that last part onto the poll. It would have been nice to see everything in a nice bundle

I call or write or email on occasion - I used to write regular letters more than anything. I never wanted the woman to respond but more just to let her know how she failed. I don't text much with anyone but I have texted once or twice.

I can email her whenever I need to it has been about once a week or so.

I actually need to clarify this with my therapist on Friday. He doesn't allow between-session contact except for scheduling (though I've snuck in a "Hi I need an emergency session bc xyz happened" line in my email to ask for a session (and he did respond with empathy to the information as in "omg I'm so sorry - I can see you tomorrow at x time" -- but there was zero discussion beyond that))... but, last session, I said something about someone calling a therapist as like a last-resort in an emergency, and he nodded and was like "oh, yeah, when safety was at stake"... so, now I'm not sure if that would be allowed for me if, like, I needed to be hospitalized or what...

My last therapist allowed as much between-session contact as I wanted, and it eventually became us texting every day, multiple times a day. It has led to nothing but PAIN for me... we are now trying to be "friends," and I literally just scraped myself off the floor from a 30-minute melt-down panic attack over him. yet again. And it has been MONTHS since he has been my therapist.

Never again.
I am very glad to not have between-session contact. I feel safer because of the boundary.

I can call her voice mail any time I feel the need for contact and she will call back within 24 hours. She is awesome about responding and will even call back on evenings and weekends. Usually we talk for 15-30 minutes, depending on what's going on. When things are really rough for me, I might talk to her once a day for a 3-4 days, but it's more typical for me to go weeks or months between calls. She doesn't charge for this and has yet to set a limit on it because I mostly self-regulate as much as possible.

Email is just for scheduling/billing issues and the occasional very quick practical thing (one of us reminding the other about something, etc.).

The second one I saw used to encourage me to call - I tried it twice and found it not useful at all. Writing was much more useful for me. Getting a response was not all that useful.

i am trying not to email anymore but he encourages it, i never make it more than 1x a week unless its urgent

have called his cell once but thats it, only call the office if i need to cancel

Now in private practice I can email or voicemail whenever and as often as needed. She will check voicemail daily (not sure about weekends or vacations as this is new to us). She will reply to email when she gets to it, she will not purposely not reply to an email; however, she does not monitor her email constantly. In the past, she would check it once or twice a day during the week. The weekends were hit or miss. If I sent multiple emails in before she had a time to respond, she might only respond once addressing what is appropriate from all the emails.

There have been times where I emailed several times in a day and now I am back to not emailing very often like 1-2 x month. I am trying very hard not to email her at all unless it is schedule/business related.

She too has encouraged me to email as needed.

I didn't know how to mark things in your poll, so I didn't vote.

T and I live
in different countries so we
communicate in our own ways. We text, call, skype, email often (several tikes a week.) We do not have regularly scheduled sessions. we just connect when we can based on our busy schedules.

We just clarified this last session.. I am allowed to text when I am in crisis and for me that is having intense SI. I can email as much as possible (right now once a week, but he doesn't always respond). I can call his cell phone, and leave a message if he is busy. Or I can call the office and leave a message with the receptionists, or be transferred to his voicemail.

right now, I don't feel comfortable doing anything other than email. We had a bit of a falling out two weeks ago, concerning texting so I am need build trust back up again.

My T has mentioned to me before that she has clients who just leave her VM's, but she knows that they don't want a call back, just a space to vent, for lack of a better word.

I actually have no idea what his policy about this is, or if he even has a strict boundary around this. We usually only text about schedule changes but I have texted him once to thank him which he seem to appreciate and once when I was having hard time and he did respond rather quickly which was helpful and even offered to talk later on but I wasn't comfortable using that option, I don't like to bother people. But I have a feeling he would be ok with occasional crisis call, not every day contact though. Perhaps something we should talk about just to be sure what his rules are around this.

I have been seeing my t for 5 months now and left a message asking for her to call me if she could for the first time last week. It wasn't an emergency but it was important for me to get her support after something very triggering happened. She called me back right away and we talked for about 15 minutes. It was really helpful but I don't plan to call her unless absolutely necessary on rare occasion. She doesn't do email except for scheduling due to confidentiality concerns. Texting is not something I am interested in but I doubt t allows it anyway.

In case of emergency i can:
- call receptionist and ask her to ask T to call back
- email t (but i dont have his email lol)
- text him in VK

But I've never contact him between sessions and i doubt i can.

T encourages me to contact her whenever I want. I haven't done so a lot lately. At one time I usually emailed her a few times a week, but not anymore because it doesn't really help. I've called her maybe 5 times since I've started seeing her (I've been seeing her since December 2014). Texting I usually do when I want to share something and I don't feel it "merits" an email, once to ask her to call me back, and once to ask for a phone appointment.

By the way, I don't like it when T replies in-depth to my emails. I prefer to do therapy in session, not by email.

I can email her as much as I want, but the goal is only once a week. Texting is only for scheduling. Phone calls are only for crisis.

I clicked all email options in the poll because that's how I have interacted with both of my therapists, and the frequency can be all over the place, depending on whether I see them regularly for sessions at a time, my own issues, momentary interests, our relationships - many things. Right now I don't see them for sessions and just had a big fall-out with one via email so most likely I won't contact him for a while, if ever. With the other T, it's a much more consistent, calmer, more rational keeping in touch, I write him something that occupies my mind about once a month, then we usually have a few back and forth emails, and then a break again. I plan to go back to having a bunch of regular sessions with him sometime later, to dig into a specific area that interests me, and I imagine then we will have more intense communication between meetings again. For a long time in the beginning, I worried a lot about the emails because it felt obsessive, but I had learned that I was acting out a negative, indeed obsessional pattern back then. Not so much now, so I feel comfortable with it for the most part.

I only text when something has immediate urgency, such as changing or canceling an appointment, and I get no response to email. No phone calls except full, scheduled sessions via phone with one T here and there.

before 2016 we texted daily. he would reply to some emails. talked on the phone rarely but it did happen in crisis times. but the texting was frequent, and daily on both sides (him texting me, me texting him) sometimes not even about therapy related things

however after last year he does not respond to 99% of my contact- email, text, and phone call voicemails. so i am on my own now

This is a topic that I've been thinking about - what is typical vs too much? If I reach out when I'm really depressed or anxious mid week, will I become too much and she'll dump me?

Here's the long story:
I had a t (2 t's ago) with whom I became too attached. Ultimately I called in an extreme crisis as a last-ditch effort for help, and she just said, "see you next week." So I took action that left me in the ICU. The t then dropped me like a hot potato while I was in the hospital - not very professional. Then 1 t ago I tried not to contact but at our last planned session she said I did contact a lot.

With current t I've been very careful. She says I can email, text or call as needed but I don't trust that. Currently, between our separate vacations, it has been 5 weeks since I've seen my current t, and she encouraged me to email; I agreed to email 1x week. The last couple of weeks she has been emailing me to just ask how I am doing; and she said that I could be emailing her more than 1x a week.

But I am so afraid of becoming too dependent upon her and becoming too much. I became too much for the first t and it almost cost me everything. I think my reluctance to contact current t in mini-crisis has two negatives: (1) she has no way to know how bad my mood gets so it is harder for her to see a major crash coming, and (2) it prevents me from trusting her too much.

Thanks for the space to express this.

I've gathered that I'm on the far end of the spectrum in regards to outside contact. RoboT initiates our out of session contact, and 99% of the time it's in regards to scheduling. We've never discussed out of session contact, primarily because I don't want to contact him. I've never felt the need to reach out to any T outside of session, and I guess a part of me looks at the idea of it as weakness.

What happened in 2016 that things changed so much if you don't mind me asking?

JDNA, I'm sorry to be nosy and don't reply if you'd rather not: I'm just wondering why your T changed the contact and stopped replying?

The whole thing of contact is very difficult. I wonder if Ts don't realise how awful it can be for us, because we make a huge effort to trust them - well anyway I'm speaking about myself - and then if they don't reply, or they're not consistent, it's a huge blow. I'm experiencing this in a minor way at the moment (contacted T in a crisis and didn't get a proper reply)

I used to email every now and then, honestly I never would again. When I filed a complaint against ex T she used any email where I mentioned I thought I was a bad or unworthy person to "prove" that I admitted those thing about myself which I guess somehow proved I had definitely mistreated her and deserved therapy to end without further notice.

It was gross and felt violating. I will never give anyone that weapon against me again.

T said he thinks it was too confusing for me as I would get upset if he did not reply and I would frequently text hjm

And for the record I do think it's better that we don't text often