Prior to computers encompassing a big part of our daily living, it was safer and easier to compartmentalize those aspects of your life you wish to be separated or private....a box for your work, a box for your family, a box for your friends, and a box for acquaintances or strangers. It was fairly easy to navigate through the boxes. If you were cool with one box knowing certain things about you, one or more of the other boxes didn't have to know about it. But then technology started infiltrating its way in, bulldozing those safe little boxes and replacing it with one big mingling social playing (or mining?) field. Boundaries started to become vague, sometimes even non-existent.
While you could once be choosy about self-disclosure with people in your various boxes, the mainstream popularity of sites like Google and Facebook opened up a can of worms regarding finding people, being found, and finding information about other people that they don't want out there for the whole world to see. This particularly hits home for me and while I cannot speak for my therapist friends or colleagues in depth, I know they go through similar thoughts and feelings on this issue. For therapists in particular this can be a thorny issue, and it's only getting harder to manage as technology continues to rapidly expand.
Let me back up to the year 2005, where the story begins for me. After graduating with an MA degree in 2005, I started working as an addictions counselor in a small office on the north side of Chicago. While it was an incredibly hard and challenging job, it also had one major perk. At this same time, I started writing blogs on the now seemingly obsolete site MySpace. My work hours were in the wee hours of the morning and there would be stretches of quiet downtime in between doing any work with clients. This allowed me the time, space, and opportunity to write about different things I happened to be thinking about or wanting to express. It was a way for me to share with my friends and also pass the time in a meaningful way. Social networking was in its infancy stages at that time. Clients rarely mentioned the importance or even functional use of computers in their everyday life, most probably didn't even have one. I felt safe with my boxes.
Several blog posts later (in 2007), a friend encouraged me to create my own blog page (this here) that would allow a potential audience of readers beyond my two small boxes of family and friends. I was apprehensive and nervous as I thought about what it would be like for the world wide web to read my thoughts and in a sense "know" me through my writing. It felt scary being perceived as a "writer" and the vulnerabilities that come with such a role, especially since I never considered myself a "real" writer. My boxes still felt pretty intact....looser, but intact. But then Facebook came along. The boxes started to disappear, or rather there was suddenly just one big box. Everyone from the various boxes were now all with me in the one box. And some lurked just right outside the box, mainly ones I never wanted to see or think about outside of work: clients.
I once had clients at my last job (2005) that didn't even have computers and now in 2011 I have clients who will frequently talk about Facebook. We no longer have private lives, but rather only private aspects to very public lives. I am now overly conscious and aware of what I put out there. It's harder to know if and when I should share or not share (Thank goodness for privacy settings that allow me to make myself invisible in some regards!). It used to be if a client asked me a personal question, they wouldn't know if I didn't tell them. I could freely pursue my photography and writing with reckless abandon. Self-expression felt liberating. I miss that feeling. It has been replaced with borderline paranoia, a neurotic feeling that likely won't disappear. I'm pretty sure my friends and family who aren't in the counseling field think I'm nuts on this particular issue, but they don't know/understand the dynamics of therapeutic relationships. They require certain boundaries and limitations you don't have or need in the relationships you have in your personal life...hence the dilemna and anxiety for what you can't control with technology rearing its sometimes ugly head.
Thinking I must not be the only therapist out there impacted by this issue, I curiously decided to do a little online research and see what has been written on the topic. Once again, I appear to be ahead of the curve on noticing this paradigm shift....I couldn't find anything written about it. The closest thing I could find was this: http://www.zurinstitute.com/internet_transparency.pdf. Even then, all this article talks about is the impact on the client not on the therapist's personal life (especially with the therapist's own creativity and self-expression).
Ever since my graduate school days I have had a way of picking topics that have never been written about, at least publicly/no research can be found on it. I'm compelled with curiosity to start talking to more of my therapist friends and colleagues about this now. Maybe I've had it all wrong on what my first book could/should be about. haha. If I were rich and had ample time, I could write books on all the issues or topics that haven't been written about and are incredibly relevant to the mainstream even though they don't know it yet.
Time to buy that lotto ticket and go back to my one big box of public living....
