Harriet M. Welch

I know I may have been cryptic this week. The whole “giving my therapist my blog address” has been so totally screwed up. I really regret that this ever happened, and I feel like such an idiot for thinking this might help.

What happened was last week I emailed my therapist, J, with the address of my blog. I can check statistics for my blog – who visited, the day, time, whether they came from a link from another website or from an email, their ip address, what pages they looked at, and if they searched for anything. The day after I sent him the email I checked my stats and someone in my area had clicked on a link from an email to get to my blog. While they were there they searched for the words “sex” and “job”. I also got an email from J that morning saying he took a look at my blog. The ip address on the email was the same ip address of the person who had looked at my blog and searched for those words, and the email came within a few minutes of the time that the person visited the blog.

I was feeling really creepy about this. Why would he, or anyone, want to see if I write about sex? Sex isn’t an issue we discuss in therapy, probably because it is not a difficulty for me in my marriage. It’s one part of my life that is actually ok. And the job thing, I really didn’t get that, but I had some wild ideas in my imagination.

Today was my therapy session and I said to J, “So about my blog. Did you find what you were looking for?” He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about, and said he wasn’t looking for anything. A while later I asked him to tell my why he wanted to look at the blog, that I thought maybe he was using it as a way to find out things about me. I said that I know that I don’t disclose much, but if he ever wanted to know anything about me he could just ask. He acted confused and said that he wonders if I want him to ask me more. I said, no, I just want him to know that if he ever does want to know anything he should just ask.

He did say that he was surprised that I sent the link to the blog, he thought I would just send him links to posts that I thought were important. But that is the whole problem, and I told him I can’t do that. I don’t know which posts are important. I know he doesn’t want my gnocchi recipe, but most of the others aren’t so readily apparent to me. I mentioned that whenever he does something I may not like I don’t tell him because I think he is the expert, and he must be right. Like the session when I was thinking we would talk about my email from the week before and he didn’t talk about it. OK, I thought it must not be important, who am I to determine what is important? Apparently I’m wrong about that. But it’s really difficult for me to say, “I think xyz is important and I want to talk about it, even if it seems trivial to you.”

I told him about the blog stats and all of the information I can see about each person that visits my blog. He acted like I was just telling him about the weather.

I asked him if he would ever lie to me, and he said he never would.

I never actually came right out and asked if he searched for stuff about sex and jobs on my website. That would have been the smart thing to do, but if I was able to do that I wouldn’t need therapy.

I told him I was very uneasy about the whole blog issue. I don’t think he’ll be visiting here anytime soon because he knows I am uncomfortable.

One good thing about this is that it did raise some important issues. Like is therapy even helping me. J said it seems like I always leave my sessions feeling worse than when I started due to him not understanding me, or screwing something up. I feel badly that he thinks this, and I told him that most of the time I do leave feeling worse than when I started, but the majority of the time it is NOT because of anything he has done. It’s just hard for me to talk about difficult issues. And if at anytime I am feeling misunderstood it’s totally my fault, because I don’t come right out and say what I’m thinking, as today’s session proves. I know he is so frustrated, and today must have been the worst, because there was obviously something bothering me and I can’t say what it is, and I’m asking weird cryptic out of left field questions and he is not getting what is going on. I told him this is hard and not getting any easier and he wanted to know if it is worth it for me. And that is a good question.

So did he snoop around on my blog to find out what I wrote about sex? I never directly asked, so he never directly answered. But he said he wasn’t looking for anything, that he didn’t intend to view my blog to satisfy any curiosity, but to help me, and that he would never lie. If he is a liar that doesn’t hold much water, but I don’t really think he is. I thought he was an ok person. I am, however, a very poor judge of character.

On the other hand I have the stats that show that someone from his computer snooped around on my blog. Maybe he got up to get a glass of water and someone else sat down and saw a blog and decided to see if the writer of that blog ever writes about sex. And they wanted to see if I have a job. That’s possible. Not likely, but it’s a possibility.

So what do I do now? Just forget about this issue, trust that J didn’t do what the stats say he did, and move on? I have serious trust issues to begin with.

You know, getting back to the important issue. The skills that one needs in therapy are the skills that I am in therapy to get. That is a problem. How does one resolve this?

I want to go running, so I will be back later with more about how I am feeling. Which is bad, I feel very bad.

Tags: blog, email

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