This brings us to your question about what your therapist should do if this happens. The answer might depend, in part, on whether your wife asked your therapist to keep private what she had written. But your therapist’s primary obligations are to you and to your welfare. What your therapist should do in those circumstances — disclosing only that your wife wrote; disclosing what your wife wrote; or neither — depends on what’s best for you. As a default, I’ll venture, the therapist should reveal the existence of this communication. A relation of trust with your therapist depends on believing that he or she will be honest with you about such matters. It might be all right to tell you that the letter had come and that, because your wife wrote in confidence, you needed to ask her what she said. But telling you nothing could reasonably be seen as a betrayal.

I’ll leave for the therapy profession the question of whether what your wife’s therapist did was consistent with professional norms. What puzzles me is your sense that the situation was made worse by the fact that your therapists work out of the same office. Why would it have been better if the therapists were strangers?

All these considerations are less than pressing, though, given that your wife has informed you about the letter and will share its contents with you. A plausibly generous hypothesis is that she has told her therapist something that might help your therapist guide you toward improving your relationship. You will now know what this is, as will your therapist. I hope it helps.

I have been divorced from my husband, the father of my children, for about 10 years. Our children are now adults. I have a close relationship with both, but one child is estranged from her father.

My question is what to do with the gifts that he sends her. She has made it clear to her father that she will not accept them, and when they have been sent to her directly, she has sent them back. The problem is that he enlists my other child to bring the gifts to her. She is further upset that he would put her sibling in this difficult situation.