Posted by fallsfall on December 27, 2003, at 18:17:49
In reply to Does Your T Call You Back??, posted by Speaker on December 27, 2003, at 16:27:26
My former therapist was on a beeper, but then her group changed to having one therapist "on call" - so if you called after hours you could talk to a therapist, but it could well be someone you had never met. That didn't seem helpful to me (unless I needed to go to the hospital) - and I never did call to talk to the therapist "on call". But by that point I had a pretty good set of coping skills, so I could usually hold on until the morning or through the weekend. If I didn't have the coping skills, it would have been more difficult.
My current therapist carries a beeper (but he doesn't "guarantee" to have it all of the time - so if I called him after hours and he didn't call me back, I should go to the emergency room if I needed help immediately). I did call him once on a Saturday. He was at a conference that weekend in a nearby city. So he couldn't see me like I wanted him to, but he did talk to me and told me that I could call him again that weekend if I needed a short chat - and that we "would talk about it on Monday". I have also called him during business hours and he gets back to me that day.
I think that if you know what your therapist's policy is, that you can find a way to work with that. Maybe you can talk to your therapist about some coping strategies that you can use between 3AM and 8AM until he comes into work.
What I find unacceptable is when you don't know if they are going to call you or not (either because they aren't reliable about calling back, or because you don't know when they check their answering machine - maybe they don't work on Tuesday, so if you call on Tuesday you won't get a call back until Wednesday - I would have a problem with that if I didn't know not to expect the call back until Wednesday).
Since you are used to different support than this therapist is offering, I would suggest that you talk to your therapist about how you can best adapt to survive with the new strategy. It will take some getting used to, I'm sure, but he should be able to help you figure it out.
poster:fallsfall
thread:293814
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20031221/msgs/293836.html