In practice

"I was at a training day recently where we revisited the main theories of object relations. Freud remains familiar enough, and kindly Winnicott too, but his old supervisor Klein I admit to struggling with still"

In practice – The avoidance of endings

"I’ve been putting off writing this month’s column. Been thinking about it for weeks but until this morning have avoided putting fingers to keyboard. I suppose that’s what so many of us do with endings: avoid them"

In practice - Apples of guilt and shame

"‘You know, there’s no shame these days,’ said one old woman wistfully to her friend as I stood behind them in the post office queue. I confess to eavesdropping to gain some clue as to what might have given rise to the comment. I never did find out, but it set me pondering the role that shame and guilt play in our lives."

In practice – What am I doing here?

"I am writing this soon after my return from a welcome Christmas break, revived and shattered, excited and flattened. This is a familiar, annual state of flux, resulting from an intense period of family gatherings, over-excitement (mine) and myriad modes of travel"

Learning zone

Dilemmas

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In practice – Breaches of confidence
by

Julia Bueno

This week I saw a client who had a very strong hunch that his partner had read his diary. He had left it unopened, but lying amongst items usually up for grabs – keys, remote control, phone charger. He brought his burning worry that his partner had seen the part that fleshes out, in some gruelling detail, a number of serious doubts about their relationship and its future. The only proof that the offending material had been read was a notable ‘cooling off’ between them and withdrawal of affection. My client was trying to work out whether he should raise his suspicion. If he does, he risks having to explore some thoughts he isn’t quite ready to share. If he doesn’t, however, he’ll be left with an unbearable ‘not knowing’ that seems likely to gain an increasingly uncomfortable weight over time.

This is an unusual take on the breaches of confidence that I often deal with in practice, more often in the past couple of years than before. Clients ‘confess’ that they have read a partner’s text, looked into a Facebook or email account or (far less often) snooped into a diary or paper missive. If they are bringing it up with me, it means they have discovered something uncomfortable at best or devastating at worst. Sometimes these discoveries are ‘inadvertent’ – ‘just happened to be checking X when I saw…’ Sometimes they are predetermined, but justified in a similar way to the work of investigative journalism – the ‘greater good’ being a preservation of a right not to be humiliated or cheated upon, or simply a ‘right to know’ that feels to be implicit in any trusting relationship.

I don’t find dealing with these breaches of confidence easy. Not least because I have developed a knee-jerk reaction to any mention of social media in sessions. It’s never a good outcome when it is mentioned, and I’m building up a lengthy list of them. While I’d probably agree with most of my clients’ assessments that they ‘transgressed’ in looking at others’ accounts, I am also aware of the ease of which all information is available to us now. I know it is easy to log on to another online account by accident if your computer has saved settings. It is then easy to see photos or messages not intended for you, and clamouring for attention with their visual bells and whistles. I was briefly on Facebook a few years ago and had the jarring experience of seeing graphic photos of a caesarean section on my ‘wall’. I really didn’t want to see this (not least because I’m haemophobic), but had little choice in the matter, having agreed to be a ‘friend’ to the birthing mother.

I work hard to hold many ideas in mind when clients bring these ‘hacks’ to me. I’m curious about the motivation to hack in the first place, the client’s response to their motivation, and my own response to all of this (bracketing of course). And this is before we even deal with the (often damaging) material discovered as a result of the snoop. And then what to do with the material – where to put it psychically and literally, and if it means ‘coming clean’?

All of this can feel tangled and brings me back to the security and containment of the frame we therapists have. There have been times when I’ve been very grateful for the parameters of confidentiality that bind me. There was a time a client’s girlfriend emailed me with her impassioned and lengthy psychological discourses about my client’s inner world. Another time an anxious mother texted me questions about her adult son’s weekly work with me. Unlike my clients, however, I couldn’t (nor wouldn’t, I feel I should add) give into any sliver of temptation to divulge.

Now I’m not so naive as to assume these breaches of confidence are a recent phenomenon. Curiosity (or desperation) has long got the better of us. But new social media seems to mean a greater ease of access to others’ private worlds. This year alone, both the Arab spring and summer riots have highlighted the double-edged sword of our new paradigm of communication. While the Hackney youths could gather with great ease to loot JD Sports, the clean-up brooms galvanised equally swiftly the next morning. In the same way, while I embrace the boons technology bring to my work, the flipside seems to be the fall-out from increasingly blurry lines of what is mine and yours.
Details have been changed to protect identities.