Extra T session yesterday. Went back and sat down. T (in a concerned voice): "Are you OK?" Me: "I don't know..." T: "Were you thinking about more stuff with H and the anniversary last night or something like that?" Me: "No, I figured you'd suspect why I wanted to meet again." T: "No." Me: "It was something from yesterday's session." T: "Why don't you talk me through what you're feeling?"

Me (starting to cry): "It's the yellow email thing." T: "Oh." Me: "I thought I was OK with it yesterday. I kept telling myself 'It's OK, he said it's OK, it's only yellow.' But I just kept thinking about it. And then I started to write you an email to clarify something about it, then I just kept thinking, 'This is going to push me to orange. I don't want to go to orange.'" T (compassionately): "Wow, LT." Me: "Because then if I get to orange, I'm only one step away from red, and..." T said something about how my brain goes down a negative path quickly.

Me: "It's like...I don't know, I feel like a kid who's been bad. Like I'm too needy. It's OK to have a certain level of need, but then...if I go beyond that...it's not OK." T: "But it is OK to email. It just could eventually involve charging you." Me: "I can understand that on the adult level, like intellectually." T: "But the intellectual part doesn't control our feelings." Me: "Yeah.

Me: "I feel like...this is going to sound...pathetic or something. But it's felt lately like you've been more...I don't know, like caring or compassionate with me. Like with some of your email responses. But now the talk about charging me, it's making that all sort of confused in my head. Like I had been picturing you typing a reply while feeling caring, and now it's like I'm imagining you sitting there thinking, "OK, this reply is moving you into yellow now..." T: "That's not what I'm thinking. I don't keep some sort of track of where clients are in emailing." Me: "OK, I think I just had this image of a chart, where most all the clients are in green and then I'm there in yellow." T: "No, and honestly yesterday was the first time I even referred to it as color coded. It just seemed easy to compare it to the threat level thing." (referencing the Bush post-9/11 terrorist threat level). Me: "Yeah, and that probably wasn't the best comparison to make..." T: "Good point! It just popped into my head."

Me: "I think part of it too is that it feels like the email boundary is kind of unilateral and subjective." T: "Aren't boundaries unilateral by nature?" Me: "I guess. It's more the subjective part, where there's no clear way for me to know what is too much. Like I've sent about one email a week for the past 4 weeks. I guess that's too much?" T: "Well, it's sort of moving in that direction, but still OK, which is why I said yellow." Me: "But it's hard for me to know what's OK. I mean, like if you said, 'you can send me 500 words a week.' OK, that's actually quite a lot. More like, say, I don't know, 200 words, 150 words?" T: "What do you think would be fair?" Me: "I don't know." T: "I haven't really discussed this policy in such detail before." Me: "I think I just like to know what the limits are."

T: "Well, I think of email as part of my job. I'm essentially on call, like 18 hours a day, 7 days a week." Me: "So, like, some of it is sort of built into the session fee?" T: "Yes, in a sense. Because I choose to allow email and don't charge when it takes less than 15 minutes." Me: "Well...I mean, I see you twice a week. So, I'm paying you twice what a weekly client would pay. So...if email is built in...shouldn't that mean I get a bit more email time?" T: "Hmm...that's an interesting point. I hadn't considered that."

I talked about my fears of getting to the red level again. How it didn't seem fair to me that he'd then charge me for all emails going forward. T: "What do you mean?" Me: "I thought you said once a client moved past a threshold, they'd get charged for any emails going forward, even short ones. And it doesn't seem fair if you'd charge me $45 for a couple sentences." T: "No. I guess I wasn't clear. Remember how the other week we used the metaphor of pouring water in the sink and it overflowing?" Me: "Yeah." T: "It's like that. Say you sent me, I don't know, 5 emails in 1 week, and together they took me a certain amount of time, and the sink would be overflowing. I'd charge you for those, the sink would be drained, and you'd be back to green again." Me: "I would? I thought you'd just keep charging me from then on out." T: "No, that wouldn't be fair." Me: "Yeah, that's what I thought, too...OK I feel better knowing that."

Me: "Because I kept thinking, when I was in crisis 3 years ago, about how much support I got from ex-MC and T over like a 4-day period. And if that had been you, then after that you'd have been like, 'Well, OK, here's a bill for the email and I'm now going to charge you from here on out.' When I was still feeling really awful." T: "No." Me: "I guess I also keep thinking, if I'd only been seeing you during that time, you couldn't have given me that support. Because you don't do phone calls unless a client is out of town. So I couldn't have talked to you on a Saturday. Maybe you could have had me in for a session if you were there that Sunday, but I'd have had to lie to H to say why I was going." T: "I could do phone calls in that situation. I prefer to see people in person, but in that case, I could have done a call. I mean, I'd have charged you for that time." Me: "No, I understand that. I just thought I wouldn't have been able to get support from you, OK."

We talked about why he charged for longer or more frequent emails. He said it's his way of avoiding resenting clients for taking up his time. Because if he's getting paid for his time, then he's not going to be resentful. How it actually surprises him that most T's don't charge for outside contact at all. I said how part of why it's hard for me is that I'm used to it always being free from ex-T and ex-MC. But then they often didn't reply or would take a few days. Me: "And I appreciate that you always reply." T: "And I try to always do so within 24 hours."

I said I thought all of this was tied into the authority figure thing we discussed yesterday. Me: "How do I stop putting you in the role of an authority figure? Because you say I have all the power, in that I can leave, but I feel you have a lot of power, too, like the email stuff, you can just decide when to charge me." T (in another poor choice of metaphors): "You have the nuclear option in being able to just leave. But I guess I have some smaller guns, too." Me: "Yeah, and technically you could terminate me, too." T: "Not ethically." Me: "Yeah, but you hear about it happening all the time. Or T's taking something away, like email. Or someone on the forum whose T still lets her email but he won't respond." T: "That doesn't seem right to me. I feel that if I offer something in the beginning, like replying to emails, then I should continue to do that." Me: "I appreciate that. Or if it was a case where you didn't think email was helpful to me, we'd discuss it and come up with a solution together instead of you deciding on it." T: "Yes."

Somewhere earlier in the session, I'd mentioned it being my birthday, and T immediately said, "Right, happy birthday!" Me: "Thanks, but I thought therapists had some rule against saying that." T: "I don't." Me: "OK, just ex-T never did until the last year I was seeing her, even though I'd be like 'on my birthday tomorrow, I'm doing x. Ex-MC said it a few times, which meant something." T: "I don't think there's a rule."

Something about PC came up and some of the feedback I'd gotten on here, both about myself and about him. T: "I get the sense many people on there think I'm an @$$hole." Me: "Yeah, some do seem to have that impression. And I suppose you do have your moments...You do have some fans though!" T said he's said before how there's the spectrum of T's with the more warm, fuzzy ones on one side, and then the more detached, sort of behaviorists on the other side. And he's closer to the latter side, so he wonders if that's why some people react that way. He said how there are so many different ways to do therapy and clients want different things from their T's, and much of it is just about finding the right match. T: "I mean, I can do warm and fuzzy stuff when I have to...OK that came out kind of wrong, I don't mind doing that." Me: "You do have the occasional warm or fuzzy moment."

We had a couple minutes left. T asked if I wanted to do a wrapup up the conversation. I said how it helped hearing his explanation of the email and having a better understanding of his policy. T: "I think this today was an important conversation for us to have." Me: "Yeah, I think so, too."

Confirmed Monday and Thursday. Joked around a bit about my dinner plans for that evening. Paid, shook hands as he said "Happy Birthday! Enjoy!" (ok, there "enjoy" made sense!) Me: "Thanks!" T: "See you Monday." Me: "See you then." Felt good about the session, glad we'd discussed things more and he'd clarified. I guess I could have gotten the same basic information from an email, but it's different in person.