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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m Facebook friends with mine :-)[/quote]

With your psychotherapist? This is actually something of an ethical violation on his/her part.

I’m a therapist and this comes up for me bc my prior career was pretty public facing. Sometimes I wish there wasn’t so much out there.

FYI, it’s unethical for us to google you. [/quote]

I'm another therapist and agree with this. I had a public facing prior career and ALSO have a memorable name and put a lot of thought into locking down my social media to the extent possible. I did not go so far as to try to scrub anything, but I did do my best to remove things I would prefer not to discuss and also spent time thinking about how to talk about internet boundaries. Particularly as someone who works/worked with a lot of teenagers, you have to have rules and SOPs for how you handle it. For example, one of my teenage kids was in a band and they asked me to follow their Spotify because they were trying to boost their followers. At that time, I was advised not to, if only because it was a fuzzy area. I was fine not following the band, but because my client asked me to listen to the music, I did listen to it.

I think clients are curious about us as people. It's a weird relationship. Sometimes it's helpful to know something personal about someone in order to be comfortable sharing personal things with them. Not in a 1:1 ratio, but it is often really helpful to give a little. There is almost always a way to address the curiosity or at least normalize it so that you don't feel bad about doing something that everyone either does or wants to do. I don't Google my clients, but that's truthfully because I know it is a boundary that I'm ethically unwilling to cross, not because I'm not curious how XYZ presents in the real world rather than with me.[/quote]

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