emailing therapist

Hi,
I have been confused about this for a while and only currently realised that I have less and less control over my habits.
It started about 2 years ago when i asked my t if I can email her. I still remember how difficult it was to compose the first message. Two years later and I email her on daily basis. It almost feels like the emails are seperate to therapy as there are many current topics to discuss when we actually meet that the content of the emails gets left behind. She doesnt reply which we established at the very beginning. I asked several times if its ok that I write and asked her to tell me if this needs to stop. Up until a very recent point she always assured me that its fine and that she reads all of it.
Recently something has changed and when i asked again she didn't give me a clear answer. Only when she was a bit reserved about the idea of emailing did I realise how much I rely on it.
I do wonder how do those emails influence a t? Anyone has similar experience?

I don't have experience in this since my T doesn't have an email where I could write.

However, I feel that you might get more out of this asking a different question. It doesn't really matter too much how this influences your T. Since it's her job, if it bothers her she has to change something about it, not you. However, it might influence you a whole lot?

I remember about a year ago I had the possibility to write to one of my friends as much as I wanted to, whenever I wanted to. He'd rarely respond, but that was fine. However, I actually found that over time, the relieve I got from messaging was less and less, while I was more and more preoccupied with the things I wrote. All my thoughts would only be focused on what I wrote and what I could write and how it made me feel. But it didn't provide actual relieve and didn't help me either.

If you are not dicussing what you are emailing about, maybe they might not help a whole lot? I think an important part of therapy is to learn to sit with your emotions and to wait for a week until you can discuss whatever needs to be discussed. Of course that doesn't mean that you always have to sit with your feelings. If you're having a bad week, you should be able to talk about them earlier. But also there, I'd feel that the issues should actually be discussed. Not just writen down without any kind of resoultion. Otherwise you might as well write a diary.

If it's something that bothers you, it might also be a good idea to talk to your T about it. Maybe she has some good ideas of how to start coping with less emails, and you guys can set up good boundaries that work for both of you.

I don't know how emails influence a therapist. I've seen mine for 3 years and emailed a lot for much of that time; now, not so much. It's been a natural transition that came from me, though, not my therapist. I think that's the way it should be. It probably takes a therapist who is willing to let emailing be helpful as long as it needs to be. Maybe yours got concerned that it wasn't helpful to you, in which case it would be good to talk to her about it and let her know your views. If you feel uncomfortable with emailing, though, that's more important.

i would try to set your own boundary and not email every day, i can not fathom emailing anyone every day, it comes off very needy or clingy.

maybe make yourself a goal of every other, than 3x a week then 2 etc. i have been able to cut back drastically myself by creating my own goals

that being said, i have no idea why she is not responding but maybe she is trying to be nice and is overwhelmed by them now. no idea.

I'm guessing you didn't mean it this way, but this comes across as a bit judgmental. A decent number of people are in therapy to get in touch with their own needs, and I don't know that it's helpful to call someone needy or clingy for wanting contact with a kind, stable person. I agree that the OP should talk to their T about what's going on with email, but the conversation should probably be centered on how both people can function comfortably in the therapeutic relationship. It doesn't help to just tell somebody to not be needy.

If you think your T could possibly have an issue with you e-mailing so much (just a guess since you said she didn't give a clear answer), I'd suggest doing what ruhroh and DP_2017 suggested and cut back on your own. I used to have unlimited e-mailing/texting (but usually e-mail) with ex-T, and would usually only e-mail maybe twice a week, but often quite long (and not generally getting response--was part of deal). And eventually, that got to be too much for her, and I only found out once I asked. It was very painful to find out she'd been bothered by it and needed me to cut back--it definitely damaged our relationship. Recently, my marriage counselor, who also never put limits on it, said I'd have to start limiting outside contact, which was also extremely painful (more so than ex-T, due to my attachment/transference for him). So if you can do it on your own, I'd suggest that.

You could also try journaling, just typing up your thoughts online like you would an e-mail, but don't send it. Then you could even bring it to session either to have your therapist read or to remind you of things you want to bring up. I've done this a few times with my current T, who charges for e-mails that take longer than 15 minutes--that boundary annoyed me at first, but I'm also realizing it's helped keep me from getting into bad habits with e-mailing him (as I'd done with ex-T and MC). Instead, if I need extra support, he can offer me an extra half or full session, which I'd done a few times. It's helping me learn to sit with my thoughts and anxiety more. (I also think I'm at a place in therapy where I'm more ready to do this--two years ago, would have been much harder for me.)

I emailed my therapist every day for a long time - it was like a daily practice, and I found the ritual aspect of it very helpful. It helped me get through an extraordinarily difficult time in my life. I was very specific about telling my therapist I didn't need a reply. I don't need to do it as much now so I just do it a few times a week. But this is totally my choice.

I don't think it's needy or clingy, but even if it were, I don't think that matters in therapy. I think it's important to do things that are helpful for oneself.

Just to clarify: I was suggesting that not emailing come from the person, not as a self imposed restriction, but as a natural result of feeling better or more stable--in other words, when it's right for them to do, not something forced by self will or imposed by the therapist.

When i first started seeing current t, i would drive straight to the library to use their computer to email him, once a week. I dont know if he read them or not, i told him he didnt need to, but i needed to write them. It was cathartic. I was mostly writing family history, but really i remember just writing until i felt emotionally depleted.

I don't have the option of emailing my T. What I do instead is write in a blog I maintain on another support forum. Since your T doesn't respond and you don't talk about what you wrote in sessions, I wonder if this could work for you, too. I don't like to just journal privately as much because... I don't know, it just doesn't really provide much relief. I like the idea of sharing it with someone - and a blog allows me to do that. Sometimes I print out and share posts with my T, too.

nope i didn't mean it that way but i was told early on that i can't email excessively, i need to not be too dependent which i thought of as needy. i would email 2x a week at first and beat myself up about that being too much... and it was not but i am just personally saying, for me it would be exhausting, i don't think needy or clingy is bad all the time, its just not something i like or want to come off as so i try not to. if someone emailed me daily, i would be very annoyed but then again some therapists are probably better able to handle it. however i know mine would not, he told me straight up we would discuss it if it was too much and that would be if it was more than 3x a week.... so i never went that far. if you are fine with it and they are thats ok

all i am saying is its possible its being seen as needy or clingy now and they are just unsure of how to tell you kindly. idk. I'm not a therapist... and again its not always bad, we are supposed to need our therapists to a degree... i just was saying, to try to cut back and make yourself a personal goal for it.

Also another suggestion, if you want to try and cut back on emails, write things down. i have done it and its a great help, either in note form or just in a journal and when you go in, you can read it there. i highly recommend trying this

You're kind of just making it worse, DP...


In any case, I've definitely emailed/texted my previous T every day (sometimes more than once a day) for a long time. With my new T, he says to email as much as I want - he literally doesn't want me to hold back - but, he is not obligated to read or respond. Still, he usually does, and we've exchanged multiple emails over the course of a day or two. I can also text or call whenever I need, but I do pay for any conversation resulting from that. So, OP, you are not alone and, in fact, there are plenty of us who have had even more contact. So, please know that.

My outside contact absolutely influences my T - in that he reads it, it impacts him emotionally, and he responds. We don't always speak about it at length in person; in fact, we usually don't. I say things in email that I can't seem to bring myself to say out loud. But, that doesn't mean it's forgotten or glossed over.

I would encourage you to bring up how you interpreted her change in response. It sounds like it would be a really productive topic of conversation.

plenty of very valid insight. thanks! i do ask myslef what do those emails do for me and there are several reasons why i continue this way:

1. for once the point of them is for things to be discussed in therapy without the lengthy explanation of details and without being caught up in emotions. one of the big issues for me is that the therapy sessions are set for a particular time of the week /day and often the distractions of the day get in the way and prevent me from staying focused and discussing what i wanted in the first place. so in theory the email is there to set the ground for what I want to talk about. my T hardly ever mentions those topics and lately the two (sessions and emails) seem to go seperate ways. i do often stress in the emails that this or that is something i would like to discuss but for some reason a few days later it doesn't seem as relevant.

2. unlike you friend who rarely responded this is someone i have a conversation with each week so its my not an endless stream of thoughts without any reaction.

3. i used do journal but without the external reader i got myself to caught up at illogical whereas if there is someone who reads it i try to stay more focused.

4.it has become a relief mechanism which is why i am here asking what other people's thoughts are.

5. itt never bothered me that i may appear needy or clingy so that's not an issue. i think i would like more to be actually discussed and for her to have a bit more insight into what i write instead of me repeating the same thing if we do talk about it.

Thanks

It's your t's job to be clear and honest in answering your questions so you're not left to wonder and worry like you are. Maybe a good question to ask yourself is, "how does sending these emails influence me and my well-being now?" Do they still serve a purpose that supports you? Or has it now become more of a dependency/addiction/habit? I don't know...I'm only posing questions. It just kind of sounds like you both are in need of a bit of change.

Thanks for all the insight! I am surprised by the spectrum of answers: some of you saying that you email daily to others saying that you don't ever do that.
The emails did do a lot of good as I feel that the therapy has been transformed by them at first. It was a calmer, more composed way to express what I feel or even to answer the questions we were discussing in sessions. I already mentioned it before but I find it very difficult to put my thoughts together in the one designated hour so I felt furstrated when I was leaving sessions at first because they conversation didn't go in the direction I wanted it too. Talking about the content of the emails was not easy as a lot of the times those were things I coulndn't say out loud. Over the course of 2.5 years I've learned to speak about what I write.
At some point I lost the heatlhy balance and have only recently started using it as stress relief or a place to vent.

I have the ability to email as often as I want and my T will reply to my emails when she has a chance. We often do talk about my emails, except maybe the ones where I just say I am missing her, is she there - type of deal.

I also journal - I write to my T in my journal and give her my journal to read between sessions. Maybe if you talk to her about your emails, you could suggest seeing if you could move to this method. It woulds still allow you to write to your T every day while cutting back on the overall emails. It kind of depends on what you are getting out of the emailing and if she really is still ok with it. Since it's been going on for 2 yrs, it might be one of those situations where she didn't think it would keep up as long as it has and she doesn't want to change a boundary since she initially said it was ok.

I took can find comfort in the habit/ritual of emailing my T so I have to be careful to not allow my frequency to move into that... oh is x time of day, time for me to email my T just because I have for the last x number of days in a row. If you feel that you are just emailing her because it is a habit, you could see how you felt if you just skipped one day, or delayed for several hours or what not. These are just possible ideas if you decide you think you might be ready from a support perspective to cut back and you are only continuing because of the habit formation.

I agree. Don't understand why your posts are being criticized here. Emailing daily IS needy. That's simply a description of a behaviour. Personally I think for some people having outside contact is a bad idea. I know it works for some and that's great. But some clients (and I include myself: I was like that at some point) tend to rely too heavily on emails/texts/phone calls from their therapist and instead of it being helpful the client becomes dependent and emailing/texting becomes an addiction (it was certainly like that for me). And then the therapist becomes overwhelmed and decides that outside contact is too much and boom! the client gets hurt. I do agree that setting up some goals not to email every day is a good idea.

I would honestly look at what really drives the email habit, either together with the T or alone or both. I had a bad one for many years: not only with Ts (that was just the end of it) but with different people in my life. I did not email Ts daily, it was a more erratic pattern. For a while, I avoided a deeper discussion about it because I wanted to keep it and feared that dissecting it openly would put an end to the Ts interest in emailing with me. But by the time I got into therapy, I knew my reasons/mechanism pretty well... I still wanted to transfer my habit to yet another person (first T) and then one more (second T). It was a serious addiction for me, ongoing by that time for several years, and I knew very well how it started in the past (with an ex-BF). Very much like how most addictions work: I hated the urges, the compulsion, it caused harm, but the momentary satisfaction and the overall drive to stay in the cycle could override my honest evaluation and attempts to beat it for a long time. It had nothing to do with craving attention, care, old needs not being met etc for me and, as those are the most typical interpretations, my first T grossly misinterpreted my habit (he misinterpreted me in many other ways as well, due to trying to apply standards dogmas). He handled the emailing horribly: in the beginning he said it's better not to do it but was not firm about it, then got enmeshed in it and said it was okay even when I complained about how disturbing my habit was for me, he said something along the lines of "email is okay, it is embedded in your fee and it is to provide some nurture you did not receive from your mother". He wrote that directly, I could not believe my eyes, it sounded so ridiculous to me, and so off, knowing myself. Anyway, then after a while I guess he got overwhelmed and started to criticize me about the emails and putting, again, all sorts of wrong interpretations on it, telling me not to email but responding each time. It was serious hypocrisy on his part and a very messy, dishonest way of managing it. Maybe he was just seriously clueless.

So when I started seeing my second T, I was upfront and asked what his views were on emails and told him I had this annoying, disruptive habit. I think he understood and did not interpret it, he more tried to work with the content of the emails in sessions... which felt nice in the moment, but was another mistake (a hard one not to make, I never blamed him for it). Because focusing on and discussing the content of my elaborate messages distracted us from what should have been the real focus, so it was either honestly missing the big picture or dismissing it on purpose to keep me going, or maybe fear of getting into conflicts as otherwise we had a very pleasant connection... I really don't know. He did handle the actual emails well though. Rarely responded in depth, usually just a sentence or two, and he never told me it should be done in session. Sometimes he did not respond at all. I really liked this (the part of me that wanted to recover), because it did not reinforce my habit as much, so my urges became less and less. Then we discussed it in session as well, I told him how I had a bad tendency to use virtual communication as distraction from what I really needed to do, and it just increased my anxiety in turn due to things not being done/addressed. Long story short, I managed to get a good grip on my drive for the emails and eventually lost the obsession for the most part, and now I don't have a desire to maintain anything like that although I do get the urges sometimes. But then recognize it immediately for what it is and try to stop the cycle before it really begins. I also like to tell people I newly meet upfront that I had this issue, just for them to be aware and not misinterpret it as excessive interest or the wrong kind of interest, clinginess (although I don't recall anyone ever seeing me clingy, probably because everything else in my personality/behavior contradicts that heavily). It is mostly remnants of an older addiction now that I am very clear about and aware of even when I am having an urge or am still acting out a bit momentarily. I am not in therapy now, but if I ever started again, I definitely would not want to emails with the T - for me it would be a huge step backwards. I would tell them at start that I want no emails between sessions and if I break my word, please do not respond unless it's a scheduling issue, because starting that again would likely take my mental health backwards and I am predisposed.

Just wanted to share my story around emails as an example that it is not always a desire for care and closeness - for me, it was more the opposite, a distraction from looking for normal, caring, balanced relationships and doing fun things in my local reality. If anyone else relates to my story, my suggestion would be that using a T in this way can be a good entree into a deeper investigation and recovery, but only if they are aware as well and do not get involved and start feeding the habit. For me it took some pretty hard effort to break it (it really was similar to my other addiction, just less destructive) and in that the T can assist very little directly - coping with the urges is something one can only do alone as an inside job really. It also took a long time, was not linear at all, and I need to keep an eye on what and when triggers me to "relapse" now. What truly helps though is having meaningful, rich, interesting interactions with people in the 3D world, and a variety, not just one source. That is an effective way to meet a need and prevent getting into distractions and addictive patterns, but it has to be maintained and that takes constant effort as I have a strong tendency to isolate and to retreat into my mind/fantasy worlds.

Xynesthasia: thanks for sharing your experience. you are right. i do have a tendency to send emails instead of engage with '3D world' but basically limited the emails to the only. in the past i always used to have someone i would write to but not as excessively and one-sidedly.

When I was working with an attachment therapist I was conflicted about emails. In my whole life I had only sent a handful of emails. She got over 1600 in 18 months. From the first time I emailed her and apologized (I was just wanting to get things away from me). She said, "I do not mind emails, send away. I cannot promise to read and/or respond to all of them. If you need a response you have to let me know some how." I never did request responses, but she responded to 2/3 of them.

My ex therapist welcomed the flood of emails, even if they were about wanting to be dead. Every email she got after the death wish ones let her know I was still fighting to hang onto life. Emails were an important part of our work together.

My therapist now likes me to keep her posted on how I'm navigating certain challenges in my work and personal life. Her responses are much shorter and always contain words of encouragement. Sometimes I'll send 4 or 5 a day, other days and weeks she gets nothing.

They were both okay with it. Never, did I get a sense that emails were too much for them.

I think it's up to your T to set boundaries if she thinks they are necessary. I wouldn't really make that your problem.

If writing relieves you, it might be a tool for you, no matter what your T does with these emails. I'd tell you stay focused on you, not your T. How do these emails influence you? Do they help? Or do they cause more trouble because you worry about T?