Over the last several years, I have witnessed a persistent and accelerating trend in my psychotherapy practice: my clients are referencing Facebook throughout the day— sometimes tangentially but often as the central fixture of a story, dilemma, or emotional devastation. Facebook has made its way into my office and has moved onto the couch.

My clients, like the general public at large, are wrestling with and processing the various challenges, injuries, and negative behaviors either generated or exacerbated by the site. Some are grappling with the hurt of stumbling into third-party information both “seen” and “overheard,” news that they weren’t prepared for and do not want to know. Others are unable to stop checking the status of ex-lovers, or current (but suspect) flames. There are patients gingerly navigating sticky dilemmas involving colleagues, in-laws, or their own teenage sons and daughters. The list of boundary issues stirred up by the site is long, and fast growing. And the human tendency to look, and keep looking, even when we know that information might be damaging or hurtful, is facilitated by this format. Between innocent pokes and tags, traumatizing events and pathological habits are brewing. In The Wires is built on the premise that within this complicated social soup is the opportunity to look closely at ourselves and our relationship to technology and to each other.

Facebook has become a daily ritual in the lives of millions of Americans. People join for a variety of reasons: to find old friends and lovers, to market or promote a product, event, or cause, to view each other’s vacation or family photos, or for everyday socializing. Without question, the Facebook revolution across the Middle East and and the events of our recent Hurricaine, demonstrate, in real time, the powerful impact and potential of social networking. Likewise, we have watched how Facebook can be a remarkable tool for reducing isolation and connecting far-flung friends and family. Facebook has even brought love and marriage to the most cynical of users. I could fill a book or another blog with the various ways that Facebook has improved the lives of specific individuals, families, organizations, and communities.

But that is not what this blog is about.

In The Wires assesses this new social media environment from a different, but equally important, angle. We turn to Facebook for various positive reasons—to connect, to share, to get involved—but what happens when logging onto Facebook routinely results in feelings of panic and dread? I am interested in how the dynamics of the Facebook environment have led to many unintended negative consequences and emotional side effects with great, largely unexplored, psychological implications. I believe that relationships are not simply created between users of Facebook, but between users and Facebook itself.

The culture of Facebook can lead its visitors to emotionally unhealthy places and compromising states of mind, encouraging disabling habits and pathologies to flourish. Facebook-generated issues that clients have revealed in my practice to date include (but are not limited to): masochistic and obsessive behavior, negative fantasizing, presenting and creating false self, boundary issues (parents-children, exes), avoidance, intrusion, comparing, voyeurism, obsessive gleaning and extrapolating, competitiveness, false sense of intimacy, jumping the social line (i.e. knowing things about someone that do not match your level of relationship and intimacy), hurt by stumbling upon third-party information, and more.

Facebook has provided us with a mechanism to be in constant touch, to be able to pop in on each other whenever the urge strikes. But how do we manage this tool if we have difficulty controlling our impulses, or if we are too tempted by the easy access to the people in our lives we should be doing our best to avoid? Or what do we do if we have peripheral exposure to someone whom—for our emotional health and boundaries—we need to remove from our lives altogether? The urge to look, to see, to watch is persuasive. Facebook is a potential black hole for individuals who do not have the self-protective emotional armor or ego strength to back up, log off, or unfriend. The obsessive personality, the masochist, the self-critical, the hider—all of these personalities are at risk. People get bruised in love. We get hurt. But typically, in time, we move forward. Facebook can bring us up against the same emotional sore spot over and over again, interfering with the healing of old wounds while creating brand new ones.

It is my hope that In The Wires will reveal and explore the complicated role that this social media platform plays in the psychological lives of its users. This blog is conceived as a firsthand perspective on the ways in which Facebook has become a significant player in our emotional lives, and offers a look at the related stories, dilemmas, and psychic wounds regularly brought into the psychotherapy office. From the perspective of my work with patients, In The Wires will reveal and examine this new social terrain and will take a look at what the explosion of mediated experience is producing in and around us, while also incorporating the observations and opinions of other experts in the fields of psychology and sociology. I invite you to join me in discussion as we consider, together, the larger social and psychological issues and implications of life-in the wires.