A handful of you may remember that a couple of years ago I had a therapist I called 'Manatee'. Although I was very invested in the relationship and I did some good work with him, it didn't go well in the end. He was having a couple of major personal crises through much of our time together and it kept spilling over into the therapy.

Manatee was the fourth in a series of therapies that didn't work out for different reasons. I bumped from him to a couple more that didn't work out either. Eventually I sent a message to someone whose writings I had long admired and whose philosophy I appreciated, and asked if she would consider therapy by Skype (actually we use Facetime, which is much smoother). She agreed, and we have had a wonderfully productive relationship since then - about 9 months ago.

Last week I decided it was finally time to revisit the painful breakdown of the relationship with Manatee. I went back through old emails with him from the period when it started to go south and selected some to send to her.

The session that followed crystallised the differences between them in extraordinary ways - and even the differences between current T and the others before her.

The emails were from a period when I was in crisis. My relationship was breaking down, I had snapped and self-harmed (v unusual for me) and I was about to go on a trip away from home where I was under pressure and had no support.

I had an emergency session with Manatee before I left, which was helpful. Then while I was away I wrote a handful of emails to him to try to ground myself in my actual emotional reality and connect to him. I was frightened of losing the plot even more.

In general with Manatee I was allowed to write emails, but he made no promises of reading or responding to them. We decided it was a form of journal-keeping for me, and I tried not to expect a response because I never knew if one was coming. I also felt guilty, because I needed the contact but he was inconsistent about whether it was okay or not, and I felt I was asking for something out of bounds. In that period I was on my trip, his responses were erratic, brief and wildly misattuned. Summoning courage and trying to dig myself out of a deepening hole, I wrote that I sometimes felt a bit abandoned and isolated when he didn't respond, or when he responded only briefly - but that I knew this wasn't a 'fair' feeling, and I wasn't asking him to do something differently - I just wanted to acknowledge and share the feeling (which was a major echo of childhood pain that I was currently trying to process). He responded by reminding me that the arrangement was supposed to just be journal keeping and telling me why I couldn't expect a response from him. Then, in 'journal' mode, I wrote about a painful, paranoid nightmare I'd just had (in which I happened to be wearing rollerblades). He wrote back a brief breezy email saying it was an amazing dream, he loved rollerblades and he loved dreams.

Well, things got briefly better and then worse again on my return from the trip, and soon enough it was all over.

When I discussed these emails with my current T, she said she felt protective of the me in the past, and that her first reaction to reading his emails involved the words 'fXXXing aXXXole'. She said if she had had a client in that kind of crisis she would have set up safe ways for me to check in while I was away. She said 'that's the gig' - that as a therapist you take on looking out for your client's emotional well-being in the ways that you can - that even though this often happens imperfectly, and that mistakes are sometimes made, 'that's still the gig'. She acknowledged and shared in and validated my anger, and also encouraged me to talk about the loss involved of the positive aspects of my relationship with him, the context that led to this situation, and his humanity as well as his failure. And then she made time to very carefully and slowly go through the ways that she and I each saw the 'ghost of Manatee' as haunting my relationship with her. We talked about how to handle the related fears and anxieties that come up for me.

She reassured me that she felt NO intrusion from my contact emails, which are usually brief, purposeful and fairly self-sufficient (I'm often giving her something to 'hold', such as loneliness, fear, a dream, etc, or affirming an insight for myself, or marking out work I want to do with her soon). She said that she thought I used email in a really constructive way, and that she found it helpful both to have the emails and to have time to mull over certain things before session. She said she'd never had a sense of tracking the number or having a cut-off where I was 'too much'. She checked how I feel about her responses, which are usually simple and brief, but warm and attuned. I said they were fine 9 times out of 10, and she asked me to let her know when I felt especially anxious about emailing or worried about her response. She explained how she would handle it if her situation changed and she wasn't able to continue respond in the ways she has so far - that she would let me know something was happening at her end and she needed to handle things differently for a while, and she would work out a way to do that that was safe for me.

All of that in 45 minutes.

I think back to the guilt and strain I felt over pressure I was putting on Manatee, and how I assumed my needs were the problem. Manatee, who had good sides, actually acknowledged at the time that it was about an incompatibility in the ways we each needed to work. But I still felt that it was not possible for a therapist to meet my needs. Neither of the next two therapists I saw accepted email outside session and that seemed to confirm it.

I'm glad that I kept looking. The truth is I more or less had to because the needs never went away, and because I was committed to doing the work that would let me find a better quality of life. I don't know what the long-term outcome will be of having such a different kind of relationship but I do know that the therapeutic relationship now very much feels like an asset and a support in my life, rather than a strain.

Writing this up because I hope that others who are stuck with relationships that are strained and painful in this ongoing, counter-productive way will at least consider the possibility that we ARE allowed what we want, that it may be possible to find it.