Do you tell your T about PC and how do they feel about it?

The way I see it, PC is group therapy.

Bad Facilitator said the therapists tend to underestimate the value of group therapy in general.

My Ts have been negative about my going on PC and a similar forum in the past. Mostly it was because they thought it wasn't helpful to me. I used to get criticized a lot in my threads and I'd get defensive. I'd also start to question my therapy and feel depressed. I was taking the advice too personally instead of thinking for myself.

I did switch Ts due to reactions on the forum, so that was a good outcome. I have also become less defensive and triggered if someone gives me advice I disagree with. So, PC has been a learning experience for me.

My Ts didn't like that I spent so much time here, also. My current T doesn't say that anymore. She knows I come here for support instead of continually bothering her every day!

I said "other" because I don't really know what they thought or would think. I showed the forum to my first therapist via email once when there was a thread I thought might be of interest to him. I did not reveal my username. He just thanked me about it and said "interesting", we never talked about it again. I mentioned to my second T that there is a forum called PC with good therapy discussions and asked if he knew about it. He said it rings a bell and might have seen it, and that was all.

Wow, some crazily defensive Ts here! They have no right whatsoever to try and stop us from posting here - it's really none of their business.

I have mentioned these forums to my T a couple of times - he appears to be fairly neutral about it... Although at one point when I started getting into a rant about something that had happened here he cut me off with "I don't care about that", which is a bit odd.

Although I didn't specifically name the site it could be easily googled, and he could identify me fairly easily and quickly if he went to the 'romantic feelings' subforum. I'd be somewhat embarrassed if he read my posts here but there's nothing really that he doesn't already know. It doesn't really matter anyway, because I'm really quite sure that he would never bother... I don't think he's that interested.

Its been about 5 years that ive been on pc and that my t has known about it, so yeah i think hes even got treatment plans worked out for some of you! Jk/nk!

Mostly we talk about my relationships with the people here, and how i see myself in your issues.

There is a great article about a favorite current french author of mine. He is very psychologically oriented. Anyway in his approach to writing, this article quotes him as saying, it is easy to write about yourself because you know to stop when it hurts. But when you are writing about others, you cant tell when it hurts. It made me think about what "being supportive" here means.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/0...onfiction.html

I used another forum in a similar way a couple years ago and discussed a lot of what I experienced there in therapy. I found it just as useful as talking about 3D relationships, perhaps even more, because an anonymous forum is quite limited in terms of how much direct perception and reality it allows and so it can be a goldmine for subjective perceptions, projections, whatnot. That experience with the forum was very intense for me in many ways and I don't have any desire for anything similar now but it was certainly insightful and also overwhelming at times.

My T knows about it, one way she sees it as good support, but then she knows I bring questions to the forum to get an explanation or answer, that I should be bringing to her. I see no reason why I can't do both though. The more answers I have the more I have to pick from as to what would be best for me

Quite right. Tell her you are building your support network, because it is not healthy to be over reliant on your therapist.

I voted: Yes and they are neutral about it

I don't think she is neutral about it, I think she likes some aspects of it and dislikes others.

I believe she seriously dislikes the posts about terminations, taking away/firming boundaries, and about the relationship being artificial as they can set me off into a spiral of doubt in our relationship.

I believe she likes the fact that I have an outlet to post some of my stresses and not rely completely on her.

These are precisely the areas where a second opinion or a shared experience is most useful. They believe in informed consent, don't they?

Another thing I wish I'd said to madame T:
"You don't own my disease."

[QUOTE=CantExplain;5522258]These are precisely the areas where a second opinion or a shared experience is most useful. They believe in informed consent, don't they?[QUOTE]

I think she dislikes them not because they are here but how I react to them. It does give us stuff to work on and tells her stuff about me. I think it makes the work harder on her. It is all speculation though, she hasn't out and out said anything other than it is nice to not feel alone (or something along those lines).

I would be too afraid to tell her incase she could work out who I was.

Hmm.. I've never really thought about this

I think she'd be okay with it. She'd probably ask me questions on how I feel about the forum and what I'm getting out of it. (Not in offensive way, but mostly just to gauge how I feel about it.) I just don't know if I'd be comfortable enough telling her about it.

But in all honesty, I'm not afraid she'll find me, as realistically, I think there are too many posts and too many people for her to figure it out... and I don't think she'd really bother/care enough to snoop around to figure out which person is me. I mean, she MIGHT check out the site and read a few posts, but she'd probably get bored.