Posted by mair on April 10, 2004, at 21:48:11
In reply to Re: Compassion of Convenience, posted by lucy stone on April 10, 2004, at 12:20:10
I agree with what the others have said. I think alot of T's stumble on this issue because they really don't want any single client deluging them with phone calls, and yet probably until you start calling, they have no idea what category you're going to fit in. I went for a long time (over a year I think) with my current T before the subject of phoning her came up. I think she just assumed that I would call her if I felt I needed to and I think she assumed I knew how to reach her. I could figure out how to reach her; her home phone number is listed, but I took the lack of an offer of a home number as a message that she didn't want to ever be called. Since the issue first got flushed out, we've probably spent many sessions discussing when it's ok for me to call. Once she realized that I was pretty much incapable of ever declaring any state an emergency, her rule for me got to be that i should call without reservation whenever i felt like it (which of course has been pretty much never). But I think it impeded progress for me to float along for so long thinking that she was so uninvested in her clients that she looked at phone calls as being a real nuisance. It would've been better for me if she had raised the issue early on, but I'm sure the danger from her perspective might be that I was the sort of person to call too frequently.
Mair
poster:mair
thread:334855
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040409/msgs/335051.html