A Psycho Among Us?

Fellow MTs: I hope you will share this with your networks.

Facebook isn't the only place we all meet up; there are also lots of blogs written by massage therapists (one of them mine, of course!), message boards, forums and chat communities for massage therapists. There are a lot of FB groups devoted to MTs, plus the new massageprofessionals.com and other websites where we all converge our family of hands.

I heard an incredible story yesterday. It seems that there is an unhappy MT in the state of Washington who has been posting negative and sometimes downright vicious remarks about the massage profession in general on these forums, and here, folks, is the scary part: this person has created over 60 names, email addresses and identities for herself. She has discussions with herself. For example, she'll post a question on a forum about whether it's possible to make a good living doing massage, then she'll answer herself under another name, stating how awful it is trying to make a living, putting up with people expecting happy endings, discouraging people about going to massage school, and that's the least of it.

Since I'm notorious for my opinions on the politics of massage, I am the last one to criticize freedom of speech. And if someone is unhappy in this as their career, they should certainly move on to whatever they think is better.

However, I think she has gone beyond the pale, as she has recently homed in on several popular therapists in the Seattle area, and has posted some things on their discussion groups that are just over the top. She has also written negative reviews of their books on Amazon.com. Now, anyone is welcome to get on Amazon and give MY book a negative review if you're so inclined, but I'd appreciate the heck out of it if you didn't write a whole bunch of them under different identities just to try and make it look like everybody agrees with you.

These therapists started noticing commonalities in the things these different people were saying, and started investigating. They found that these numerous postings were coming from the same IP address (the unique address that identifies which computer someone is using) belonging to a therapist in Vancouver, WA. The therapist has actually admitted to it and dared anyone to try to stop her. She made another posting this morning; I read it myself on indeed.com in one of the massage forums.

It's just my opinion that someone who would go to the trouble to create over 60 identities for herself, throw such a negative light on the massage profession an an obvious attempt to keep people out of it, and then do what amounts to cyber-stalking fellow massage therapists, is unbalanced at best and a downright psycho at worst. Would you want that therapist to put her hands on you?

It's my take on it that there are two things wrong with her: she has a fear of not having enough for herself, thus her need to keep discouraging others from joining our profession, and she is suffering from professional jealousy of these successful women.

I'd just like people to know who you're dealing with if you get sucked into a conversation with her on a message board, or she comments on YOUR blog. Quite a few of the 300+ therapists that are my friends on FB have blogs and belong to different massage groups. To me it's sad that someone feels so desperate she has to attack other therapists like this. I am glad to say that I have never thought my success had to depend on someone else's failure, and until I heard about this, I've never heard of any massage therapist that felt that way. We're a group that's usually supportive of each other, whether we've ever met in person or not.

Some of the aliases that this woman is using are MT IN WA, Manny in Denver, Terry Time in FL, Lalani Parker in SanDiego, searching4morein Bell CA, Teri in Portland, Teresa Lyle in Trout OR, Sabeena in OK, abodyworker in LV, Mic Ben in UT, Nunya Beezwax, Mia in Portland, Mari in Portland, Tracy in Portland, Sum Bunny in FL, yeameagain in LA, ABZ129 in LV. They're all one and the same person. If you're in the Vancouver area, you may know this person. If that's the case, I think you should encourage her to get professional help. I think she needs it.