Posted by Penny on January 15, 2004, at 9:03:18
In reply to Some ruminations about what to tell our Ts, posted by Asya on January 14, 2004, at 20:32:35
Asya,
I've been debating on whether or not to share my input on your sharing your knowledge of where your T lives, etc. I guess perhaps because my opinion here is a bit different from those in your thread above, but here goes:
I think you are doing the right thing by not confessing to your T at this time. I say this because of personal experience. My current T is quite computer savvy, and she knows what I probably can and can't find on the internet. She also knows that I research everything, so even though I've never officially told her that I know where she lives, she probably figures that I know where she lives.
But my former T wasn't that computer savvy, and I don't think she realized how much info about her is available online. What happened? After I had been seeing her about 2 years, she became pregnant with her second child, which triggered some major abandonment issues with me. I became so attached (I was already attached, but became moreso) and dependent on her - probably a bit to the extreme. She was good about it. She kept her private life pretty private, but I knew she had a daughter and now, obviously, was having a second child, which she couldn't hide from me. I knew she was married, but didn't know anything about her marriage or much else about her life.
So, one day I was surfing the net, and I was trying to find out how much property tax I owed that year, so I got on my city's web site, and, lo and behold, they give you the ability to look up the value of ANY HOME in that area, by the address or the homeowner's name.
My T had an unusual last name. Even though she never told me her hubby's name, they were one of the only families in that area with that last name. Out of curiousity, I looked it up and, of course, there was her hubby's name and her name, and their address, and the value of their house, all open to the public. Her's wasn't the only home I looked up that day - I looked up my boss's house (I already knew the address, but was being nosy!), my doctor's house, etc.
Anyway, after that I knew her hubby's name, so I, of course, being the type of person I am, looked him up online. Well, he's a VP for a fairly large company (that I had never heard of though) in that city, and his picture was on their web site. So now I had her address and knew what her hubby looked like.
I shopped fairly frequently at a store near her home, which I hadn't known before, so now, even though we lived in a fair-sized city, I was paranoid about running into her around town - what would I say? How would I act? Would she even acknowledge me? (In three years time I never once ran into her anywhere outside of her office. Didn't even know what kind of car she drove as she parked behind her building!)
One afternoon I was in her area, running errands, and I decided to drive by her house, to see what it looked like. It was a colonial style brick, large, in a housing development. I don't know what I was expecting, but, unfortunately seeing the house cinched for me the fact that my T didn't live a very exciting life, as I would have liked to imagine she did. Oh well...
Anyway, as her pregnancy progressed, and I became more depressed and more despairing because I felt so attached to her, and jealous of her pregnancy, AND jealous of the baby inside of her! I decided I needed to confess that I had found this info. So I did. I left off that I had driven by her house, after her reaction to my knowing where she lived.
She wasn't overly angry, but she wasn't happy with me either. In fact, she tried to use the whole experience as a learning opportunity, saying to me that it was good that I could see that someone could be upset with me but not abandon me. I guess, in retrospect, she did show me that, but at the time I was in so much pain because I felt like I had forever changed her view of me. I felt like now she saw me as someone who had violated her privacy - because I knew that I had found information she would never have shared voluntarily with me.
Eventually I got through it, mostly, but even now, when I think about telling her, what resonates with me is that she said it was okay that I knew because she had known me for two years, and if I had been a new client, she might have been a little more freaked out. I guess I see her point. She knew at that point that I wasn't going to stalk her (and I never drove by her house again, and never told her that I did it the first time!).
My current T knows all of this, and that it still causes me pain. I don't think my current T would care if I knew where she lived. I've been seeing her a year, and she's no where near as guarded as my former T. Of course, she's also single with no small children at home to protect, so that probably is partly the reason she's more open. Plus, we live in a pretty small area where there's a good chance that at some point I will end up running into her - at the bookstore, at Walmart, at the library, or somewhere. And I don't worry about it, because I know she would be cool about it.
My point? I think you should know your T a little better and make sure she knows you a little better before telling her all that you know about her. Or bring it up in a generic way first - to get a feel for what she thinks of all the personal info that's available on the net and her clients having access to that info. I guess in retrospect I would have told my T the whole thing anyway, but, then again, in retrospect, I don't know if I would've looked up the info in the first place, because it was such a painful experience for me. I felt like I had disappointed her, and, since I saw her as a mother-figure, that was the worst thing in the world as far as I was concerned.
Just wanted to share my experience.
P
poster:Penny
thread:300894
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040110/msgs/301080.html