River, your post reminded me of a time right soon after I started therapy (August?) I had a hard time in a session - apparently what I did was called dissociating (I find/figured this out this week). *sigh* I had to say "I'm sorry, I didn't understand what you just said, I was busy being scared" to Tfella a lot.

The next week I canceled the session on the day of the session, by calling and leaving a message with the answering service over the lunch hour (I didn't know they did an answering service 12-1; they do). I said I was too busy with work or something. *mutter mutter nonspecific mutter*

Tfella called me the next day (I certainly hadn't asked him to), and asked if the reason I canceled had something to do with what had happened in the last session. I muttered something about that being possible, though I hadn't really thought about it when I was canceling. We set up a session for the next week.

Point for me was, it was really cool that he called, and I managed to tell him that. And it was really helpful for me to remember this when I had to actually email him to ask for an extra session recently: it was two weeks ago, when on the same day I had to talk my closest friend, who was feeling suicidal (eek! never grabbed for a phonebook quite so fast!) and found out my g-aunt had died and I had to go home to the fam.

You're totally right, AG: knowing that Tfella is there and that I _can_ ask for help makes it much easier to both deal with needing help and with actually not needing it quite so often. Weird!