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Lrad123
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Default May 27, 2019 at 08:29 PM
  #1
I have an issue with emails. Clearly they must symbolize something bigger that I haven’t figured out yet because they’ve taken on a life of their own. My T welcomes emails and reads them, but won’t respond. He used to respond, but stopped last fall and I was really hurt when that happened. I’m emailing less than before, maybe once every two weeks at most, but it often leaves me feeling vulnerable and wishing I hadn’t emailed. I apparently don’t have the self restraint to stop sending this emails, yet I almost always wish I had not sent them. I can’t think of any other scenario in my life where I’m this impulsive unless maybe it involves chocolate (mostly kidding, but it’s the same concept in that it feels great in the moment, but I often regret it afterwards). Anyway, I’m thinking of asking my T to stop reading my emails in attempt to try to extinguish this behavior. It may give me a sense of control to be the one making that decision, and I suppose it will also make things easier for my T because he’ll have less emails to read. I do tend to express my inner world more freely through emails, but my understanding is that this isn’t ideal and I should take the leap towards just sharing in session and maybe just journaling out of session. Thoughts?
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Default May 27, 2019 at 08:33 PM
  #2
Maybe you could try writing the emails when you feel like it, but not sending them and printing them to take in to session. Sounds like there are times when you need to write down your thoughts.
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Default May 27, 2019 at 08:36 PM
  #3
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Originally Posted by downandlonely View Post
Maybe you could try writing the emails when you feel like it, but not sending them and printing them to take in to session. Sounds like there are times when you need to write down your thoughts.
I journal on my phone and it’s just so easy to copy and paste into an email. And then before I know it, I’ve pressed the send button. He hasn’t said he wants me to stop, but I want to. And as long as I know he’s out there willing to read my emails, it’s hard for me to stop. So I thought if I just asked him not to read them, there might be less incentive for me to send them.
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Default May 27, 2019 at 08:40 PM
  #4
For me, being in control would be not sending them rather than trying to control what the therapist does with them once sent.

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Default May 27, 2019 at 08:49 PM
  #5
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For me, being in control would be not sending them rather than trying to control what the therapist does with them once sent.
Apparently I don’t have that control. I think I do, but when I least expect it I send off a crazy email and regret it later. So, given that that’s my situation, I’m thinking the next best thing might be to tell him not to read them, that I don’t need or want his review of my emails. I’m hoping that will prompt me not to send them at all.
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Default May 27, 2019 at 09:13 PM
  #6
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Apparently I don’t have that control. I think I do, but when I least expect it I send off a crazy email and regret it later. So, given that that’s my situation, I’m thinking the next best thing might be to tell him not to read them, that I don’t need or want his review of my emails. I’m hoping that will prompt me not to send them at all.
Maybe a better approach would be to tell your therapist: “I don’t think emailing is helpful to me, and I would really like your help to stop.” If you truly don’t want to email him anymore, perhaps an accountability partner might help?

I’m sure you and your therapist could analyze the email situation ad neaseum, but it might be empowering to gain control over this one aspect of your therapy. It sounds like everything around emailing him is torturous.
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Default May 27, 2019 at 10:13 PM
  #7
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I have an issue with emails. Clearly they must symbolize something bigger that I haven’t figured out yet. . . I’m emailing less than before, maybe once every two weeks at most, but it often leaves me feeling vulnerable and wishing I hadn’t emailed. I apparently don’t have the self restraint to stop sending this emails, yet I almost always wish I had not sent them. . .
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Apparently I don’t have that control. I think I do, but when I least expect it I send off a crazy email and regret it later. . . .
Seems to me that the long-term thorough solution, and one which may have additional benefits, is to get at why you feel so vulnerable after sending them, as well as why you have the impulses and send them in the first place. Seems like a longing or neediness of some sort? For contact? Reassurance? Something else?

As someone else said on another thread, you can't know what you don't know. . .that sucks, for sure. Do you think it would help to ask your T if he knew of anything that could help you speed up the process of figuring out what is going with you with this issue?

Additionally, to me, with very distinct parts as I found out late in my therapies, thinking you have control about something and then finding out that you don't, that the thing seemingly has a life and a will of its own -- well, that could be very interesting, possibly exciting to investigate? Sounds interesting to me, anyway.
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Default May 27, 2019 at 10:25 PM
  #8
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I journal on my phone and it’s just so easy to copy and paste into an email. And then before I know it, I’ve pressed the send button. He hasn’t said he wants me to stop, but I want to. And as long as I know he’s out there willing to read my emails, it’s hard for me to stop. So I thought if I just asked him not to read them, there might be less incentive for me to send them.
Stop journaling on your phone. Buy yourself a notebook and write by hand. That will slow down that easy/impulsive access.

I think you asking him not to read is just putting the responsibility on him, and you'll still wonder if maybe, just maybe, he read it anyway. I don't think that will really fix anything. YOU need to be the one to make the change if this is a change you want to make.

It's great that you are emailing less frequently. That shows you are making the progress you wanted to make along these lines.
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Default May 28, 2019 at 04:53 AM
  #9
I wonder if you want him to rescue you, in more ways than one. I agree with the advice to stop sending the emails. I don't buy that you lack the control to do so.
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Default May 28, 2019 at 05:29 AM
  #10
I think its more important for you to take care of your own part in this than telling the therapist its his job not to read them.

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Default May 28, 2019 at 11:16 AM
  #11
Is it not just that you develop a feeling of 'being rejected', when he ignores you, which in fact makes you email him in the hope of getting a response (and thus feeling less rejected)? You email since you hope he will respond as it would confirm for you that he cares and/or thinks about you and you would feel less 'rejected', in other words?

Not saying his lack of response should be interpreted as rejection of course. But I do recognize myself somewhat in your tendencies.
I also tend to think it is a very normal response to feel rejected when someone doesn't respond to your correspondence. In fact, responding to communication is a normal part of healthy human interaction. Plenty of literature about psychology describes how ignoring someone results in feelings of rejection. I'm not sure why these therapists try to tell their clients any different, when they are upset they are ignored. And why they make it as if the client has a problem if they feel rejected when their correspondence is met with silence. (Probably since it is more convenient for them?)

Either way, Laura, perhaps you experience the pain of what feels like a relationship that is onesided? If he were to respond to you regularly, showing interest in what you had written: do you think you would feel less inclined to email him at all? Or do you think it may actually lead to an increase in emails?
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Default May 28, 2019 at 11:52 AM
  #12
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I also tend to think it is a very normal response to feel rejected when someone doesn't respond to your correspondence. In fact, responding to communication is a normal part of healthy human interaction. Plenty of literature about psychology describes how ignoring someone results in feelings of rejection. I'm not sure why these therapists try to tell their clients any different, when they are upset they are ignored. And why they make it as if the client has a problem if they feel rejected when their correspondence is met with silence. (Probably since it is more convenient for them?)
I agree that it is normal, even reasonable, to feel rejected when someone doesn't respond to communication. I don't necessarily agree that it is the same as being "ignored," especially when we are talking about email and particularly when someone has actually said they will not reply. Feeling ignored and being ignored are two different things.

I also think it can be helpful to develop a sense that the way others respond to us will not necessarily just be about us, and our worthiness, but about the person who may not have time or inclination to respond. I think good therapy challenges one's assumptions about meaning in the world. People can like and love you deeply but still not want to reply to your emails. Perhaps it is better to develop a robust sense of what it means to be ignored or not ignored, and to develop better coping when people don't respond as you would like them to. I don't believe that healthy communication requires anyone to reply to an email, or anything else. In the past several weeks I've discovered the freedom of blocking three people from my cell phone. All three of them wanted me to do different things for them that I didn't want to do, and I didn't want to have to get into a discussion about what I wasn't willing to do and why. In or out of therapy, nobody owes anyone a response to any kind of communication. In therapy, you are not entitled to it just because you pay for time in a session. The sort of entitlement that therapy clients have should be examined in session.

So I think not receiving an email reply is a problem for the client to deal with, and not an argument that a T should reply to emails, especially when the client has not raised any discussion about whether email correspondence would be permissible (and because T's charge by the hour, whether it should be paid for). I think if a client desires email communication, s/he should ask about the parameters of that communication, not just assume and expect things without checking them out with the other person.
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Default May 28, 2019 at 12:14 PM
  #13
This desire for an email response seems unique to my T. I really can’t think of another person in my life who’d have this effect on me. Also, it’s not that I want a response every time or even most of the time. I think I’d like him to use his judgement about when a response might be useful or helpful in some way. I realize that would be complicated and making the decision to not respond at all simplifies things.

In any case, I’m not asking him to respond. I’m actively trying to stop the emailing. I can stop most of the time, but not all of the time. The solution I’ve come up with is for him to agree not to read what I send. Knowing that he’ll read what I send seems to unleash some entitled, crazy-ish, high maintenance version of myself at random times and I’d like to stop that behavior. I’m typically much more in control, so I don’t like this and am frustrated by it. I’m aware that it’s not appropriate.
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Default May 28, 2019 at 12:26 PM
  #14
I agree with the people saying that it isn't control asking the therapist to change, and it is a transfer of responsibility. I understand that it's hard. I have wanted to ask the therapist to do something similar - to block my number since I sometimes feel like I can't stop myself from firing off a text. However, I know on some level that this wouldn't actually help me. In fact, I think it likely that I would lose the incentive to stop the behavior if the therapist blocked me. I know that doesn't make much sense on a logical level since there doesn't appear to be a purpose in sending texts that will never be read. Yet I suspect that the illusion of communication would be enough that I would continue the behavior, and probably escalate it. I think I might also feel resentful or even angry at the therapist for not knowing what I said in my texts even though I asked her to block me.

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Default May 28, 2019 at 01:21 PM
  #15
Hi Lrad123, I think there's been a lot of good advice on this thread and I'm not sure I can add more to it, but my two cents is this. If you ask the T to stop reading your emails but you are still able to send the emails, how do you know he will not actually read them? It seems like it would be better to work on just not sending them in the first place, which it sounds like you are doing. In my experience, former T encouraged emails, current T doesn't do emails and confessed that she usually has no idea where her phone is, so no texting either. Everything has to go through the receptionist. Both had their positive and negative qualities about them, but it is nice not to have the anxiety over whether or not T will email me back. Of course I still get that with former T when I email her. It's a difficult situation to go from emailing to not emailing and I think it's brave of you to try to tackle it. HUGS Kit

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Default May 29, 2019 at 09:08 AM
  #16
Thank you all for your responses. I see my therapist later today and will likely talk about all of this a little bit. I like the idea that someone said about just telling him that I don’t think emailing him is helpful to me and I’d like his help stopping.

I’ve also been thinking about the content of emails. I’ve been emailing him much less over the past couple of months. Sometimes I just send a brief thank you because I think it’s good to acknowledge when a session was helpful to me and I don’t often notice this until after I’ve left. In my job, it feels good when people thank me and I assume it’s the same for anyone else including a therapist.

The more vulnerable emails, though, are ones where I complain or disagree with him about something and then I feel bad about it afterwards even though it was satisfying to hit the send button. These are the ones that are harder to bear without a response. So maybe there’s something there. I don’t know. When I’ve talked briefly in the past about no longer emailing he looks perplexed as if to assure me that he’s not asking me to stop. But this time I’d like to stop.
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Default May 29, 2019 at 09:41 AM
  #17
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The more vulnerable emails, though, are ones where I complain or disagree with him about something and then I feel bad about it afterwards even though it was satisfying to hit the send button. These are the ones that are harder to bear without a response. So maybe there’s something there. I don’t know. When I’ve talked briefly in the past about no longer emailing he looks perplexed as if to assure me that he’s not asking me to stop. But this time I’d like to stop.
Rhetorical question: can you tell others when you complain or disagree with them in real time? Especially people who are your peers or if you have them, bosses or the like. Could you do this with your parents as a child or with your mother as an adult, before you stopped your relationship altogether with her? These questions may be things you've all worked out but I think you might gather some clues in understanding your "negative" interactions with people. My guess is that mostly you don't complain to others because you don't ask or expect very much from them, and you gave your mother the boot from your life because either you couldn't complain to her, or she didn't respond appropriately to complaints.
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Default May 29, 2019 at 05:05 PM
  #18
Today I told him that I didn’t think sending emails was helpful to me any more and that I’ve decided not to send them. He said he thought they had been helpful in the past and that I had been able to express myself in ways I never could in person and that it helped him understand me better. But if sending them caused shame and no longer felt helpful, then he didn’t want that. I think I was feeling shame because I could feel my face flush and my eyes water as I thought about how how intrusive my emails might have seemed (he said they were not) and how he said (after I asked) that his other clients don’t email with any significant content, only for scheduling. He thought maybe we were re-enacting something (maybe something with my parents) where I’d express a need for connection and not be heard. I said I didn’t need that any more and I didn’t want to give him the power to do that to me. He never once discouraged me from sending emails. In fact, he reminded me that that was our agreement- that I could send them and that he’d read them.
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Default May 29, 2019 at 05:34 PM
  #19
This kind of mind game upsets me on your behalf. I keep coming back to my T and I being peers in age and education, and sometimes referring him clients bc he is newer in town. I work 6 or 7 days a week; he works four days a week. I answer all my emails from clientsl he ??? is too busy doing self care? Anytime I hear a T on Reddit complaining they dont have enough clients, I just shake my head. The 45 minute hour and the above-email and all of it seems too hard for an average person in my state to grasp with enthusiasm if they are new to therapy. It is all a little precious and stylized. Maybe you are the expert on yourself, and right now you need to email and feel what it is like to get a steady, caring response?

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Default May 29, 2019 at 05:43 PM
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Today I told him that I didn’t think sending emails was helpful to me any more and that I’ve decided not to send them. He said he thought they had been helpful in the past and that I had been able to express myself in ways I never could in person and that it helped him understand me better. But if sending them caused shame and no longer felt helpful, then he didn’t want that. I think I was feeling shame because I could feel my face flush and my eyes water as I thought about how how intrusive my emails might have seemed (he said they were not) and how he said (after I asked) that his other clients don’t email with any significant content, only for scheduling. He thought maybe we were re-enacting something (maybe something with my parents) where I’d express a need for connection and not be heard. I said I didn’t need that any more and I didn’t want to give him the power to do that to me. He never once discouraged me from sending emails. In fact, he reminded me that that was our agreement- that I could send them and that he’d read them.
That sounds like a really brave conversation.

It’s so very hard when we want something badly and wish we didn’t.

I hope you’re able to determine which path is best for you and take it without regret or shame.

Your therapist seems to handle these situations beautifully.
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