Looking up T on social media

I know this topic has been discussed to death but I am really struggling with it and need to talk about it.

Some of you may have read my post from several months ago where I talked about stumbling across some very personal information about T/her family. I felt horrible about it but managed to come clean and tell T. It was incredibly humiliating to explain how I actually managed to find this information as I really had to go out of my way and look at her family members' profiles. T responded well and didn't seem uncomfortable or angry about it but I still felt guilty.

I banned myself from looking at any of the profiles after that by blocking all of them but that only lasted a month or two. Since then I have been looking at photos of T and her family members' profiles regularly. We hadn't talked about it since then but last session the topic unexpectedly came up in conversation. T asked if I have still banned myself from looking and I had to admit that no, I started looking again. She told me it was okay but it doesn't feel okay. I feel incredibly ashamed and guilty about it yet I can't stop? Why am I so obsessed with her? T said she thinks we should talk about it more and while agree that talking about it is probably the only way to work through this, I am terrified. I am terrified I am going to say something that crosses the line and she will stop seeing me. I also worry she's not going to like me if I tell her everything or that I will be punished somehow.

For those of you who have gone through this, how did you resolve it? How did you stop?

That's the lure of social media

I'm sorry you're still going through this. I stopped looking L up on fb because she locked down her account. Like she got rid of everything view publicly. It hurt, however, she sent me a bunch of pictures that were on there and will pretty much show me any picture I ask for. T, on the other hand, stopped posting pictures except for a picture of herself that made her look like a *****. It's really off-putting.

I still look from time to time, just to see if they have new pictures. Sadly, several months ago, I even looked up ex-T. I don't look at family members even though I know their names. I believe it's up to the T or family members to lock down their profiles especially since the person is a therapist. I respect L's decision even though it hurt. I don't want someone else who might harm her getting information about her. I'm just thankful that I can have the pictures I already saw and can request other pictures as well.

T's own profile is very private/locked down, it's her friends/family members who post things I can see which is even more embarrassing to admit to. I do worry that T will tell her family members to make their profiles more private as part of my "punishment". Do you think you would have stopped if L hadn't locked down her account? I just don't know how to feel close to T between sessions without doing this and I can't really image myself feeling differently, although I hope one day I do.

One of my therapists blocked me on Facebook. It really upset me. I found out after I stopped seeing her. I've never had any other therapist block me even the ones I've had issues with. I think she was just paranoid since I never mentioned Facebook much at all during our sessions. And she told me she had a fear of running into her clients outside of sessions.

I've looked up my pdoc before and found his facebook to be really odd. A lot of rich snobish posts. So I just blocked it.

My current T practically told me where she lived and she is always telling me about coffee shops in the area I should check out.

It sounds like you're just looking for connection. That's actually very healthy. Maybe your T could send you a photo or two that you could save in your phone and look at when you want to feel connected. My T did that. He sent me a few photos of himself and also a couple of his pets. We talked a lot about how that would be helpful for me. It really lessened my need to look him up or wonder about his life or whereabouts while traveling.

Speaking of vacations, he will also send me some pics from his travels if I request them ahead of time. They are always just landscape photos or pics of the scenery- that sort of thing- but it is very healing and connecting. It helps with the longing and/or feelings of disconnection. He's also willing to share an overview of his travel plans, where he's going, etc... if I want to know, that is. Not tons of details but just an overview so I'm not left wondering. Honestly, his willingness to share some of himself and his life just feels very human and makes the therapeutic relationship feel less one-sided and weird (but still with safe and appropriate boundaries).

My Ts family doesn't have much of an internet presence (which I can see), the most would probably be my T. But I have both grown up with researching people online and there is some stuff on the internet of them, so I do have some experience with this. Though to be honest I have never talked to my T about it, mainly because I do not feel bad about it.

My T has a unique name (in my country). I know his wife's name because she works in the same office, though for her she literally has no internet presence at all. From his name, as well as seeing his license plate once I have figured out:

- his address
- his children's names
- one hobby of his girl and one of his boy
- photos and other data connected to the hobbies, as well as some photos of himself
- the school his children go to

My thoughts on this are the following: although some people do not consider it or sometimes I feel like aren't even aware of it, things you put on the internet are public. Never, ever assume that anything you put on it will disappear, nor that it could not be seen by literally anyone on Earth. Not because the internet is some magical place, but because as soon as something is online, somebody might have seen it, and they might share it, use it, publish it somewhere else without any of the precautions you took or without care for the fact that you want it deleted. And this just snowballs. Of course this doesn't always happen, but it can happen.

So, the people you look up decide themselves to put up stuff for the whole world to see. It's certainly not intrusive to see it.

Now, to me I do not obsessively check these things, I have saved everything I can and if I need a certain kind of comfort, I might access it. If you feel like you struggle with looking things up too much, that's certainly something to look at and discuss in therapy.
I also would think it to be problematic if I now showed up at his address (without there being some kind of unrelated reason at least), if I went to his kid's training to see his kids, or something like that.
A good example is there is the real possibility that I walk into his son travelling to military training where he'd have his last name clearly displayed for anyone to see. I'd obviously look at him. I'd obviously not go up to him, say hi, your dad is my therapist, so how is he in real life. I'd probably tell my therapist about it just to share, but I'd not feel ashamed of it.

I think this is a really important point. Not only is it natural to seek out whatever connection you can find with your therapist, social media is designed for you to do exactly this thing. Social media and its powerful algorithms are built around searching, connecting, looking at lives from the outside. It literally wants you to have the most access to the things you want the most. Combine this with the deep need to connect and attach in therapy and the mixture is very potent.

Thank you everyone for your replies. I don’t think I could ever bring myself to ask T for a photo that I could keep. Another issue I have is asking for things or simply just asking questions and I don’t fully know why.

I’m just dreading talking about this with T again as there is still quite a lot I haven’t told her. I hate that she asks what photos I look at and how I found them, it feels like she asking out of her own curiosity or concern about what people could find about her but I’m probably just projecting. I don’t know. I just think she couldn’t possibly accept me if I told her everything.

I do this too, and I’ve mostly come to accept it. For me it comes in waves. I used to tell my T about and she was understanding, but I haven’t talked about it with her in a long, long time.

My T has a business FB page where she shares a lot of personal information, experiences and strong opinions etc. that’s why I chose to work with her, I could see who she was and that she would be my kind of person before I even met her. It was actually really helpful to me in the beginning
Even though I follow her and her stuff is there for all to see, I had to not look at times because of how triggered I could get
We have never discussed it but I can totally understand wanting to see who they are etc as it was so helpful to me to be able to do that and it both helped and triggered my trust issues at different times throughout my journey but I am getting better at it
I can’t imagine a T with stricter boundaries to be honest, my T is so open

So, an update. We talked more about the social media stuff today but it didn't really make me feel better. I told T that her questions reminded me of how my mother interrogates me about personal things I didn't feel comfortable discussing. I told her how I went through a brief period of SH over a decade ago and it was brief because my mother found out and interrogated me about it. I felt like I was getting into trouble for it and my punishment was having her check my body everyday when I undressed which really isn't what you want at 20 years old. Anyway, we had some discussion around that and T said what if instead of her asking me questions we have an agreement that if there is something I keep going back to (on social media) that I have feelings about then I tell her when I'm ready. I said to be honest I don't think I could keep up my end of the bargain but now I feel obliged to and guilty if I don't.

I fell into a pretty long silence at one point and T eventually interrupted and said she had something very "random" to ask me. She asked me if I like Harry Potter and I said "sort of". Anyway, she brings out this book of architectural drawings of Harry Potter buildings and I asked if I would be interested in it and handed it to me. I was completely caught off guard and didn't know what to do. I awkwardly flipped through a couple of pages but told her I wasn't really interested in it and asked her why she showed it to me. She said she wasn't sure but thought that asking me more questions would feel intrusive but wanted to offer me something. I still don't know what to make of it. It was such an awkward situation for me but knowing her intentions were good I guess makes it kind of nice?

Every time I leave Ts office after a session I immediately want to go back and can't bare the thought of having to wait another week to talk to her yet when I'm there I feel terrified and struggle to say what I want to say. It's so frustrating! I feel like my whole life is just spent waiting for my next therapy session and then when I get it I'm too afraid to use it properly.

Hi retro chic, I am new here but have been reading the forum for a while before joining and followed your story. Maybe something that could help is is your therapist makes you some audio flashcards. They are a thing in schema therapy, an audio recording of the therapist saying something helpful for a particular situation that the client can listen to on their phone if they experience that situation and need a bit of help doing the adaptive behaviour that has been worked on instead of the maladaptive one that they really want to do. If your therapist could give you one to listen to when you feel the urge to look up something on social media, perhaps the combination of whatever helpful words she has to say that will help you not do it, plus the sound of her voice that will give you the feeling of connection (which is probably the need that is driving you to do it), might help you with it.

I have a strong feeling about finding pictures of mine but it is the complete opposite direction to your experience! The clinic sent a Christmas email to the clients, with a link to its Facebook page. I went to it and had a look. Lots of posts about their new premises and the new things they were doing which they were proud of, and I thought it was nice. But then when one of the photos had my therapist in it I had an extremely negative reaction. I don’t know what the feeling was exactly but it made me close the Facebook app immediately and then go back to my email in an attempt to not think about it. I can’t explain why but I just really really do not want to see her face.

My T is a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis doesn't view symptoms as something negative that need to be changed as soon as possible (like behavioural therapies do). It views symptoms as messengers delivering information about the patient and the therapy is about understanding what these messages mean. It sounds like you are lacking insight into your own experience despite so-called "tools" being provided to you...

I don’t really understand what you mean.

You want to stop looking up your therapist online, but there is a reason you are doing so - you can’t just stop because you want to (otherwise addictions wouldn’t be a thing). Finding out what the need is that’s being fulfilled by doing it, and meeting that need in another way, is probably the only way to do that (besides having someone else control all your internet and device use - which would be unpleasant in itself and also leave the need unfulfilled which would be painful). Someone else suggested asking her for photos you can look at, but you weren’t sure about that. My suggestion of an audio flash card was along the same lines (having photos to look at or her voice to listen to could meet the same need).

“Symptoms and messages” sounds like just another way to say finding out what your needs are. It sounds to me from your posts that it is connection you’re after, but maybe you think it is a different need. Hopefully you can make sense of it eventually, then you and your therapist can work out a way to get that need met ☺️

The whole concept of the therapist "saying something helpful" to make the patient to change their behaviour is incongruent with psychoanalysis. Substituting one behaviour for another does not resolve the core issue. I want to stop the behaviour because I feel guilty and ashamed about it but the work stops there if I just substitute the behaviour with something that I think my T "approves" of more.

Ok, I see how you interpreted what I said now - it seemed like I was only talking about changing behaviour without thinking about the reasons and things behind it. Try this instead of what I said before:

What about having your therapist record an audio flashcard, using words that she usually says in session that you like or feel reassured by. And when you start feeling like you want to search for her online, you listen to the recording, and see if it makes you feel better. Maybe you do end up continuing to look her up or maybe you don't, but even if you do you might feel better in total afterwards because you've had two kinds of connection instead of just one.

I work in community mental health and we have to set boundaires with clients. my name is not my real name on my facebook bc ive had clients fb stalk me

I did "stalk" my T prior to making a call to set up the first appointment. But nothing since then. It's not my style, although occasionally I look up an old friend from high school (more than 40 years later).

One idea I have is that the guilt and shame you feel can lead you and your T into a new direction for therapy. It seems to be a very good sign that you can admit to this behavior and that the T is non-judgemental about it.

Other ideas:

• When you feel the urge to return to talk to the T after the session, would you consider writing your thoughts down instead so that you could read them next time? Perhaps halfway through a session, you and T could pretend it's the end, and then you could go back and discuss further.
  
• If you were the therapist, how would you feel about a patient viewing the social media profiles of your family members? Why?
  
• Pretend your best friend feels guilt and shame about reading her T's relative's accounts and that she can't stop. What would you say to her?

Peace

Wow, I'm sorry you experienced that.