Finding your therapist on social media

I've seen a lot of post about this stuff over my time here. I thought I'd post an article that I thought was pretty good on the subject.

Friending Your Shrink: When You Find Your Therapist on Social Media

The last paragraph quoted here kinda gets to the point: It's human and mostly harmless to be curious about your T's public media presence but be careful of your own expectations, and be aware that if you're particularly obsessed with the idea, or upset by something you see in their profile, that is something that could be useful to talk about with your T. It most likely speaks to something else deeper down about your own needs, desires and attachment patterns.

Right? For me, googling someone is something I just do. I googled my H back before we started dating with googling was only just starting to be a thing (this was like early 00s).

I literally google all the people. :P

So googling my T, looking up his FB account, is just part and parcel for me. It's come up naturally in conversation and he knows and doesn't care. He works with teens so I think he's just used to it.

I think I've found my T's Pinterest account, through Google. I have a Pinterest account but I don't want to take the effort to log in and look it up on there. I feel like that's a step to far, just personally speaking. Her Facebook is locked down so I'm assuming she doesn't want any of her own stuff to be out there and I'm willing to respect that.

But gosh darn I'm so curious.

The beauty of Pinterest though is that it's not designed to be super personal. It's meant to be like "OH LOOK AT THIS FOOD THAT I WILL NEVER MAKE!!" and "LOOK AT THIS CRAFT I'LL NEVER DO!!!" and "LOOK AT THIS LIFE HACK THAT DOESN'T ACTUALLY WORK!"

XD

But definitely if we have our boundaries, then we respect our boundaries.

I'm not letting myself look up my marriage counselor, due to the whole transference thing. I don't think I want to see a picture of his wife (I'm sure she's beautiful and awesome. That's what I tell myself, anyway). He also has a very common name, so he'd probably be difficult to track down anyway if he locked stuff down at all (like didn't list his location, etc.)

Come to think of it, my T has a pretty common name, too. Less so my p-doc, but I don't have the same desire to track her down, plus I researched her online a bit before starting to see her (she was new to the practice). Of course, her name must be more common than I thought because I totally thought she was this other woman, then met her and was like, nope, not the one I found! :-)

My therapist told me to go ahead and google her to find out that she is who she says she is. She also friended me on facebook so we can have more of a connection.she has a facebook page that does not have her real name, for privacy. We follow each other in pinterest and on twitter. I think it all just depends ln the therapist as an individual and what they ate comfortable with.

Just an educated guess, but I would say that if a therapist doesn't want to be known, he/she won't put stuff out there. They didn't get where they are by being stupid. Everyone knows by now that anything whatever that you put anywhere on a computer is up for grabs by anybody.

I don't think this is true. Any number of educated people are surprised at what is available on the internet about them.
I don't think it is wrong to look them up, I just don't think those assumptions are accurate.

In addition, there is information out there about people that they didn't put out there themselves and may not even realize it is there, nor do they have any real power to have that information removed. As a government employee (which I am considered as a public school teacher), there are things out there, including my salary to the penny, my education/certifications, etc., that I didn't put out there and I have no control over whatsoever. There is more to the internet than social media.