Google and Therapy

I often employ a co-therapist during my sessions. There are many co-therapists that I work with, but none that are more available, none that I more frequently turn to than the one who ‘has all the answers.’

Yes, it is Google. I love Google. It staves off my faux pas, quenches my thirst for information, and immediately gratifies me, all at the tap of a finger. I love it.

Where else can you find, sports, history, current events, health, food, animals, spiritual, visual and retail information all in one place? Google! Google! And, Google!

Did I mention I love Google? Why wonder about anything, when you can Google and learn? The two reasons I love Google so much has just dawned on me:

Number 1: I am insatiably curious, and

Number 2: I love to learn.

As you might be imagining, I use Google in my personal life, frequently. However, you might be curious how I use it in my therapy sessions. This is simple.

Let me first tell you why I might need it. I often witness that the people who meet with me often have some very strong beliefs about how life works. On occasion, especially when they are not feeling good emotionally, spiritually or physically, the beliefs that they are holding about themselves and their situation create an obstacle to feeling better. In other words, the belief limits the healing. It is my job to deconstruct that belief, thus undermine its power which dismantles its potential for further harm.

There are many instances when I do not have the answers. Shocking, right? (My family’s rolling on the floor laughing). Sometimes researching information helps us deconstruct the beliefs, as in finding evidence that they are not ‘true’ or that there is another belief contraindicated to them. For example, a woman who was sexually abused held the belief that people who were sexually abused had a greater chance of being sexually assaulted again. This belief limited her ability to heal from her anxiety of going out in public. We googled this idea to see if we could find any evidence for or against it. Our deconstruction questions were: Is this a myth or a statistic? And, if it is a statistic, what is the theory behind this?

Our great search engine came up empty because we found very little evidence that this was true, save a few people’s opinions. The woman in therapy felt that ‘opinions’ did not make good proof that this was ‘true’, however their reasoning helped her believe that it doesn’t have to be true for her (since they were specific cases). She felt safer trying to go out of her house.

Finding information this way, has the added bonus of de-centering me as a therapist. As we are co-researching is it plain to see that I am not an expert. Actually, it is not just Google that is my co-therapist; it is all the writers and commenters on the internet who share their ideas and knowledge. For them, I am grateful.