Telling your T you google them

then they need to be aware of their digital presence. that's their responsibility.

You also assume they have the power to get anything removed they want removed. Not so easily accomplished.

I googled my ex-T...I was curious about something in particular and I told him about it. He was cool with it; he said that therapists should expect a natural curiosity from clients and that it is the responsibility of Ts to be aware of their Internet presence (esp. on sites like Facebook, which he said he did not use at all). I don't see the big deal...the Internet is public info. I didn't go through his trash or something.

so because they might have something out there that they don't want i should not do what pretty much is very common and standard for my generation? i'm a millennial. while some may not google, almost 99% of my friends google other people. we all google everyone. we google ourselves. we google our professors. we google our teachers. we google our employers. Our bosses. Our friends.

this is simply a fact of this generation. you can debate the merits. you can declare that you find it 'boundary crossing' but honestly, i don't because i'm not doing anything to my t that i haven't done to every single other person in my life and they haven't done to me. it's like looking up to see if someone's in the phone book. i remember doing that too.

we're curious creatures, us humans.

if it bothers you, don't google. but i don't bat an eye at it. heck, i hardly remember half of what i find because most of what you find is mundane and boring. an address (yawn) or a work location (double yawn). but sometimes you find something interesting about another person, like a blog or a website or an article. and those are fun times. like a friend of mine who had someone else who shared her name that wrote erotic poetry and she is *not* the erotic poetry type. we still laugh about that.

nowhere, whats your real name? I want to google you! (lol im j/k)

Students look me up and drive past my house and so on. I just don't think it a big deal. I don't bother much with the therapist because I just don't care, but it is not unusual for clients to be curious. People would look others up in phone books, court records and so on in the past. It is just a little easier with the internet. I think the one I see would be happy if I looked something up about her rather than dismissing her as non-interesting/pertinent to me.

lol. you wouldn't find much i purposefully conceal my identity on a lot of sites because i'm paranoid

I discovered (via googling) my T's real name (she had it legally changed), her old address and the listing from when she sold her old house, her parents names and addresses, her brothers name and address, her sisters name and the sister's children's names, the youtube videos of her doing her competitive hobby, a photo of her husband, an article she was interviewed for about her husband, an article where a client of hers was on a tv show and mentioned her name as treating therapist, and last but not least- found her facebook and some photos.

I've told her about everything I found except for her facebook. When I found the other stuff it was before I ever even met her, I was researching her. But she was upset that I had uncovered so much in random googling about her, and if she knew I found her facebook she'd probably **** a brick.

For two years I was convinced she didn't have a facebook, I stumbled upon it quite by accident. No one can find what isn't there, though

There is a HUGE difference in googling and 'cyberstalking' someone. I work in a public service field and I am very careful about what information I put on facebook and social media and other sites because I KNOW people will be googling me to obtain information. I absolutely do not see it as an invasion of my privacy when they do and I don't believe that 'just googling' our T is either.

I sure hope I am not wrong, but I am going by the way I feel about being looked up in my job by the people that come and go to relate to how I feel about look up our T's. My private world is of no concern to the people that come through my job and so I watch what I allow out there to be freely viewed. I have nothing to hide, but I am aware of what I put out there anyway because I know that this is the time we live in.

Now, if we are going to measures to obtain personal information that he/she has not willingly let out there, that is a COMPLETELY different story and as I understood this we were only talking about typical internet looking.

Also, I agree that if the 'googling' is because of a dependency or some inappropriate need on the part of the client to attach to their T in some manner, that would also not be appropriate. Again, I did not take that as the point of this post.

Hopefully this was as I perceived it and not something else.

I don't see the difference. Google is the same tool being used in both "googling" and "cyberstalking" it is the same activity- snooping.

What separates googling from cyberstalking?

i always think of cyberstalking as being a bit... obsessive. like finding your t's fb page and then camping out on it regularly or possibly paying for information. idk. like me, i googled my t. i found his fb page. i glanced at it for... eh, five minutes? looked at some pics, thought he had a lovely wedding photo, and then went back to whatever i was doing and haven't been back since. his address is pretty easily found because he owns a house but i've googled him all of twice in the six years i've known him.

like that's just 'googling' someone. and that to me is no big deal.

I'm probably too late with this response because you might have already had the session, but anyways...

I see nothing wrong with sharing that. I've done all of those things, with the exception of I haven't found pics of the interior of his house or looked for voting records, anyways I told him about it. Yes, it was a bit awkward for me, but it didn't seem to surprise him. I think it's normal, and expected with those of us with attachment issues especially. I felt like less of a creeper after telling him, but I continued to Google here and there for a month or two after that, and now I've finally stopped (I think).

What I came to realize is being close to something related to him comforted me, and I think that's what all this behavior is really about. It's like here I have this attachment to someone who feels "safe" and sometimes I need to remember that feeling more than once a week. There was a picture on his website so I saved it, the only one I have. Now I look at the picture from time to time, like when I'm panicking or overwhelmingly sad. I highly recommend this if you can get over how lame it feels. This is crazy, but I think the picture is almost equivalent to Xanax.

I like what this writer has to say:

" the ingredients of a person are not so easily pegged. “You can find things you don’t have the back story on, meaning there is loads of room for misinterpretation, and your imagination going wild…. To form an opinion on that person based on your ‘knowledge’ — and that’s assuming that everything on the internet is fact, a dangerous assumption — is really unfair and does you both a disservice.”

Many things require extensive research and planning. Going to the moon? Rewiring the electricity in your house? Stepping into the Octagon? By all means, Google at will, learn everything you can. But human connection is different. It can’t be forced or rushed; information is proffered in time with the growing intimacy. It is earned. Accessing the information on someone all at once interferes with the health of the dynamic, not to mention that it ruins the inherent magic. “I like to learn things about (people) through experience,” my friend said. I had to agree. Maybe I wouldn’t Google new acquaintances anymore. Maybe I would let the process unfold organically."

eh. i think people are way to hung up on ol' google lol. like i said, it's fun to see if you can find something interesting you won't convince me otherwise. too many years of googling people (including my hubs before we dated) and i've not had a problem with it interfering with relationships.

sorry i have a suspicious nature, I absolutely google new people. they could be a pedophile or wanted murderer or a scam artist. a basic google search can save a lot of grief.

oh i agree. i met hubs via the internet and googling him corroborated some info he'd told me and let me meet him without worrying he was going to kill me a decade and some kids later we're doing good. lol.

I pretty much agree with all of this and it's why I want to tell him so I can be sure I'll never do it again. I do feel badly about it and I'm hoping he will forgive me and help me better understand why I did it and move onto the reasons I'm actually in therapy....

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In my case I didn't have any detrimental effects from googling my ex-T...maybe because a healthy attachment was already in place. I guess being able to talk to him about it was really normalizing for me. He didn't reject me for being curious...something my parents did to me when I was a child.

I think the part about "letting the process unfold organically" is the exact reason people google their Ts...therapy is not an organic environment! It's an artificially created one that is unbalanced, unlike perhaps a friendship.

I believe what seperates the two is the intensity and reason behind it. It would be like walking down a really nice neighborhood street and seeing in a few open doors and windows as you walk by. The people have their house open and are aware that anyone walking or driving by can see inside the house. The houses are beautiful and you like going for your walk in that neighborhood and sometimes seeing something nice. You are not 'stalking' anyone. You are not trying to invade anyone's privacy or fulfill some inappropriate internal need. NOW..... If you walked up to 4 of the houses and started looking IN their windows, you are WAY over a line and have crossed into stalking. You are now invading someones privacy in a manner that they would not expect. You are now fulfilling some inappropriate need within yourself and are crossing boundaries.
That would be the best way I could describe it myself. I guess the big point is two-fold. What is going on inside of you when you google someone AND are you ONLY going and looking at things that the person would know is public viewing or are you desperately trying to find 'hidden' information.

I do like what the one poster said about the T having boundaries. I agree 110% and I would NEVER EVER EVER want to cross my T's boundaries even if his boundaries were less then what I would think they were. I want to stay FAR away from that possibility. That act in and of itself might send me over the edge. I guess that is why I didn't see it as a big problem. I find it ok in my job for people to be googling me to find out about me and expect them to and my intentions were not to cross any hidden lines with my T.
*now I did miss the part in the original post about going as far as to look up tax records. That might be taking a google/facebook search a bit far. Think motives and what is going on internally.

If that is what you feel inside then you are absolutely correct in that you need to tell him. I think it is what you feel inside that is the best gauge of whether what you did was right or wrong for the relationship between you and your T.
NOTHING any of us think either way should over-ride what you feel is right for your relationship.

True. It is a totally artificial relationship. Definitely not a friendship.

I agree with this too. If it is something that really bothers you then you should bring it up.

I think there's some truth to this, yeah. It's an odd, unnatural kind of relationship. It requires a lot of self-disclosure and trust in someone we barely know anything about, may never know much about. It's not like an ordinary relationship between two people, where self-disclosure is mutual and builds gradually, and no one is expected to just let it all hang out with no reciprocation from the other. How could you expect people not to get intensely curious?

Personally, I think the searching I did do seemed to quell the itch to find out more and more...I found some pretty mundane, unremarkable stuff, and even though I may never know this person like a friend, I guess what I did find was enough to give me the impression that she's just a person, take away some of the mystique and relax about it.

As for the difference between information searching and stalking, I'd say it's a matter of how readily, publicly available the information is. There was an example in the other thread of someone being deceptive about who they are to get friended on Facebook and view information that is not public. That would be crossing the line. If the same person had made that info public on Facebook, then fair enough as far as I'm concerned.

I also think there are kind of two different questions here: what is ethical to do to the therapist and what is healthy for the patient, and if the OP is having intense feelings about this they're worth talking about even if no real ethical line has been crossed.

I don't think one side will convince the other on this.

Some people are big about privacy and see it as respecting and honoring their therapists by not engaging in internet searches. I'd guess those folks are also a different generation.

I agree that this is just the millennial way of life. I once dated someone who got angry at me for Googling him before our first date. That relationship went nowhere.

The relationship that lasted for me was with someone who was proud and amused that I sought to protect myself by doing a search.

All my friends Google everyone all the time. It's just how the world works. You can say it says something bad about society or that relationships lose their magic in this way, but I'm a fan of having more information (legally obtained) rather than less.

I don't expect to convince anyone of my position. But also, nothing anyone writes is going to make me believe that I should reconsider my behavior, because Googling one's therapist is not the end of the world.

I have had people google and stalk me. I feel extremely unsettled when they admit it to me. Some people have thought they had the right to because i am well known. I have always guarded my online privacy and tried to keep things as private as possible, but people still find things out.
I do not feel safe enough anywhere online (even in private forums like this) to talk about anything much, i avoid as much as possible putting anything personal, and when/ if i do i may change little details. I wish so much that i had somewhere safe to just be me.
If people google me, i would rather they just keep it quiet and dont admit it to my face.