Wysteria,

The crazy thing is that I feel your pain. I've been harassed online and I know how scary it is. I've even received weird harassing emails from strangers. It is an awful feeling.

But, I don't see how my refraining from a Google search on T in turn protects the T from some bad person who would do the same with an intent to harm her. I don't stalk, I search. I don't harass, I look.

Stalking is defined under the law to be harassing in nature.

In other words, it stinks that this stuff is publicly and legally available at little to no effort. But since it is available, I partake of it with a free conscience.

We don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to free public information.

I searched out of curiosity, yes, but also for my own protection. I want to make sure my social network does not overlap with T's. I want to make sure that T is living a clean life. I have a lot at stake in therapy, in my mind. I've trusted T more than anyone with vulnerable information about myself.

Now that I have a basic sense of who T is and who T hangs out with, I've laid off on the searching. As I said, I found out enough to believe that T is trustworthy and won't turn on me. I think it has helped my therapy because it helped me to relax.

And I don't hide it from T because I'm afraid of what T might think. I am paying a lot of money out of pocket for therapy and I frankly don't want to spend dollars and time discussing this issue because for me, it is not an issue.

I am not able to divorce from the reality that I am buying the therapist's time. I don't want to ask the therapist these questions and pay for that time to talk about it because I can find the stuff out on my own time and not pay for it. This maximizes my minutes with the therapists talking about my issues, rather than dealing with the issue of trust to eliminate suspicion of T's private life. What am I searching for? Major red flags such as drug use, hanging out with a bad cast of characters, going through a major life transition, etc.

There are some times where I want to warn T, like, "Hey did you know there is information out there on you?" But that's not my responsibility and it's not my job to take care of the therapist. If she were really concerned, she could hire someone to do a search on herself or she could search on herself to figure it all out.

Finally, I do searches on everyone whom I hire. I find bad stuff and have still hired people anyway. (Nobody is 100% clean. We are all human.)

To me, T is just someone else whom I hire and I need to be particularly careful because I am trusting T with so much. I don't mind if the accountant doing my taxes engages in (insert your own poison) when off duty. I'd mind if my T did, because of the nature of therapy.