I'm thinking of sending the following letter to my T before my session Wed. evening because I've been thinking about some of these issues for the last couple of months and been unable to bring them up in person. I could use advice about the letter, is it too much, too detailed, too detached (I'm an academic and tend to intellectualize things).

Also, if you want to share any stories good or bad about sending your T mail about what you want to talk about before a session I would love to hear them.

"I've been having a very difficult time expressing myself to you except when I'm in complete crisis. Since talking to you about my overwhelming feelings and thoughts has been helpful, I'd like to be able to talk about some other things.

I feel like some topics have gotten too intense and now we can't talk about them. Since the time I disassociated while talking about my mother we've avoided that subject. I'm afraid to tell you how much I still think about my childhood abuse. We stopped talking about it (except when I'm in crisis) and maybe I'm supposed to be over the extremes of emotion but I'm not.

I also want to talk about therapy in general. When I started therapy I was unaware (to put it mildly) of how therapy worked, how many different kinds of therapy existed, what was required, and what could be expected. I need to have a discussion about what your goals are (and mine), how we can tell if goals are being met, how long therapy might last. I know there might not be any concrete answers for these question but I need to talk about it. For example, I spent the first 5 months talking to you wanting to never feel bad and waiting for you to do that "magical" thing that would mean I would never have bad feelings. You were trying to explain to me some things about feelings that I still don't grasp but at the beginning I wasn't even aware we were working on different goals.

The most difficult thing I want to talk about is my relationship with you. We've already discussed how I "pull closer/push away" but I haven't told you how much I analyse what you say for what it means about what you think of me, how sometimes it feels like you are doing the "pull/push" thing with me too when sometimes you respond to emails and sometimes you don't.

I could try and describe the above in terms of transference, or my issues with attachment, abandonment, or dependence but those terms don't help me manage my feelings around them. So I'm sending you this before my session so I don't sit there not listening to you while I try and work up the courage to start talking about what I'm thinking."