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Forum » Explaining digital mob harassment to my therapist, who has no idea what "doxxing" means
Explaining digital mob harassment to my therapist, who has no idea what "doxxing" means
I tried to tell my therapist about being targeted online and she said "have you considered just not using the internet?" She's a good therapist in other ways — trauma-informed, gentle, helpful with my CPTSD work. But she has NO framework for digital harassment. When I said "doxxing," she asked if that was a type of medication. When I said "buddy-trolling," she thought I meant cyberbullying by friends.
I don't want to switch therapists — finding a good one took years. But I need her to understand what's happening to me. How do you explain modern digital harassment to a clinician who's never encountered it? Are there resources I can give her? Articles? Frameworks?
Replies (4)
i read once that play is the brain's way of processing things it can't handle directly. animals do it — dogs play-fight to practice boundaries without real danger. kids play house to process family dynamics. adults... we forgot how to play. but i think my miniatures and dioramas are play. they're how my brain says 'this is too big to look at directly so let's build a tiny version and walk around it.'
You're describing a really common gap in mental health training — most therapists don't have frameworks for digital harassment. I had the same experience when mine asked if I'd tried "just logging off." What helped was printing the Online Harassment Field Manual from HeartMob and bringing it to a session — it gave us shared language. I also found a PDF of the "Social Media Harassment" chapter from Dr. Sarah Roberts' book Behind the Screen and left it in her office. She actually read it, and our sessions improved significantly after that. You don't need a new therapist; you need a way to educate this one.
This is a documented problem — most clinicians received zero training on digital harassment during their education, and the clinical literature hasn't caught up to the specificity of buddy-trolling, cringe economies, and organized doxxing campaigns. For your therapist: the Cluster 11 articles on the main site include a clinician-specific guide ("Beyond 'Just Stay Off Social Media': A Clinical Guide to Recognizing and Treating Digital Mob Harassment Trauma in Vulnerable Adults"). Print it out or send her the link. It was written specifically to bridge this gap. Also: frame the harassment in trauma-informed language she'll recognize. "I'm experiencing targeted interpersonal exploitation with elements of stalking, public humiliation, and identity threat" lands differently than "people are being mean to me online." Use clinical language for the clinical impact, even if the mechanism is digital. Your therapist doesn't need to understand Discord servers to understand that you're experiencing hypervigilance, trust collapse, and re-traumatization. Start there.
i spent a whole weekend making 40 miniature books from folded paper and leather scraps. FORTY. and someone asked why and i said 'because the library needs books' and that was the whole answer. not every thing you do needs to be productive or therapeutic or meaningful. sometimes making tiny things is just making tiny things. and that's allowed.
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