Length of email to T

I’m just wondering about length of emails to therapists. Like about how many words would you typically include in an email to your therapist and how long is too long to send. Thanks so much for any input on this. I really appreciate it.

Mine used to be super long as I am detail oriented and long winded. Then I had T read an email I sent to someone else and I saw how long it took him to read it. So now I try to make it bullet points or notes style so he can read through it more quickly but the same information.

That depends on the therapist. My current one likes my writing style and "flare." So they are long to her because I put in my smart alec comments. She says she can tell my mood from how many of them they are. But I had another therapist with ADHD or something, so I made those short. She didn't appreciate my incredible wit.

Mine are really short.but like mist if my posts here.
I'm not into writing paragraph after paragraph. I would dream of taking Ts time to with to much of me.

My T told me that he often didn't understand what I needed from him when I used to email him.

He told me to put feelings and emotions into my emails rather than my one/two lines.

I usually write about 2-3 sentences max, because T doesn't usually reply unless it's about scheduling. So I don't feel like it's worth writing more than that.

when I emailed T I usually kept them to a paragraph which she typically responded to fairly quickly. However, there were times they were quite long because I had a lot going on. Those times she would usually responded saying something lik. I received your email and have printed it out so I can slowly read through it. Oh will get back to you.

Check it out with your T.

IF they allow email contact, I would keep it brief rather than writes pages of text. But again, depends on your particular T.

It's interesting that most of the replies so far centre the expectations and preferences of the therapist rather than concentrating on how much or little the client needs or wants to write. The length of the email is up to you and it should be as long or as short as you need it to be. How your therapist engages with it is another matter, but editing yourself is doing yourself a disservice.

That's an interesting point and I agree to a certain extent. I'm all about getting what I want and need from therapy. I do think that it is smart to think about why you are emailing. Sometimes I'm emailing just for the process of writing and to have someone respond back and say that they understand. With my current therapist that is almost always what I want. So they are as long as they need to be.

But with my former therapist, I wanted some very specific things from her and I found that my long, sometimes rambling, incredibly interesting emails did not get the responses that I wanted. The shorter, bullet point emails were more successful, but not totally and neither was talking to her face to face. That's a big part of the reason she is my former therapist.

I disagree that it's doing a disservice to yourself to consider length and therapist expectations and preferences. Sure, you can do as you like, but if you have expectations and preferences in terms of a response, keeping in mind that the recipient also has these things is wise. I don't think it's about editing yourself or putting undue emphasis on the therapist so much as being strategic in order to get what you want. It's not as if you can't expand on the email later.

As for length, I'm not sure what to tell you. I think it probably depends on the therapist as well as other factors, such as how many client emails they receive. Some therapists won't mind reading a long email, while others will be put off by the length.

Personally, I would probably try to be concise and remove any unnecessary bits before sending. By unnecessary, I don't mean unimportant per se, but also things that can wait and aren't required to understand your overall message.

We don't have to package ourselves to be as little, as unobtrusive, as needless, as accessible and understandable as possible. We don't have to play to our audience. We can let out all the untidy, rambling, wordy shite and (hopefully) still be heard and accepted.

I don't know about that. Communication is such a huge part of every relationship that it makes sense to learn how to do it well, and part of being an effective communicator is knowing your audience. A therapy relationship seems to me to be a perfect place to practice that. And a short email does not have to be at all unobtrusive. One of my emails to a former therapist said something like this:

"I need you to slow down and be more validating and to offer less advice before you really understand the problem. Otherwise I'm going to switch therapists."

I've sent emails of varying lengths. With ex-T, looking back on them, some of them were really novels. Like, if I cut and pasted them into a Word document at like 12-point font, they'd take up multiple pages. (No wonder she got tired of my emails!) Some to ex-MC were quite long as well. I do at times send fairly long ones to current T--and he will sometimes send long (like 4-paragraph or more) replies, though I do have to pay for the really long ones. (If he just sends replies occasionally of a paragraph or two, he doesn't charge, unless I were to do that, say, 4 times a week.) I've learned to generally be more concise though, to take my time (often sitting on an email for a couple hours or overnight) to determine what I really want to say and what I'm looking for from him. I've found if I send something pretty long that's about multiple things, he might choose to reply to one or two things that aren't really my priority. So I'm more likely to cut it down to a paragraph or two, then might end with something like "I'm just looking for a few words of support" or "I just wanted to share this so that we can talk about it next session."


I'd talk to your T about this though. I didn't realize that the length of my emails were bothering ex-T until I asked something about it, then she shared her frustration with them (she didn't usually respond, or would just say something like "Good insight! Let's discuss next week.") With current T, I've expressed my concerns over whether he'd get annoyed at the length or frequency of my emails. And he has pledged to let me know early on if it's becoming too much or is bothering him in some way--so far, he has stuck to that, mentioning something a couple times. Or I might ask if I'm at the volume of emails where he might charge me. He said I also use email in different ways than his other clients who use email, so he's sort of had to adapt his policy to me. I've found that having conversations about it and checking in are the best way to handle things and avoid misunderstandings (though of course they still happen).

I think that viewpoint is far more "interesting" than the opposite.