by rachelthemuse | Apr 6, 2018 | Emotional Intelligence, Friendship, Mental Health
Social media has changed our lives in so many ways, including how we communicate with our friends. There have been many positive things that have come out of the rise of social media, such as reconnecting with old friends we haven’t seen or spoken to in many years, maintaining ties with people when you’re no longer living in the same area anymore, the ability to quickly connect and communicate with new friends you meet, and even connecting and communicating with people you haven’t met yet. It’s been a great platform to share information, vocalize your views and opinions, or keep up with new happenings in the lives of people you care about. However, social media can doubtlessly be problematic too. With the rise of social media came the rise of cyber-bullying, the spread of fake news, and the virtual version of Un-friending.
In many ways, social media has complicated our friendships and other relationships. Whereas you used to only have to hear your Uncle Fox ranting about politics once a year at Thanksgiving, now he may be blowing up your newsfeed with fake news every day. Or worse, your best friend from high school hasn’t grown up much since then and is now engaging in unnecessary mudslinging and stirring up drama online, publicly hashing out her grievances and causing friction and conflict in front of everyone you’ve ever met. Sometimes it’s easy to know when to un-friend someone online, such as in instances of cyber-bullying or malicious interactions with people you don’t really know that well or care much about. However, at other times it can be more difficult, because you will still see this person in your real life at least sometimes, or because you actually value your relationship with that person and don’t want to lose them as a friend.
There are a few considerations you can use to determine if you should un-friend someone on your social media pages, and how you can continue to be friends in real life without having to lose a relationship that you value. Ask yourself a few questions first to find out if you need to restructure your contacts or rethink your online relationships.
1: Do I interact with this person in my real life on a regular basis, or is this someone that I only see sporadically when we happen to be around a mutual acquaintance?
- If you don’t have a relationship with a person in your real life, and your interaction with them is mostly online, you don’t really need them bringing negativity into your online social scene. It’s usually fine to un-friend this person without further ado and not worry about it, because you’re not really going to see them much anyways, and you both will probably benefit from less interaction with each other. If you do engage with this person in real life regularly, you may choose to use a different feature to reduce their impact on your page. On many social pages you can mute or hide the person so that you remain “friends” online, but you aren’t subjected to seeing their posts anymore. Check your platform’s settings to see how you can utilize those tools.
2: Does this person typically make my day better or worse when I see their posts on my page?
- If someone is constantly posting things that annoy, enrage, offend, or otherwise sour your mood, you most likely don’t need them on your page. See the above reference to determine what the best course of action is in this case. However, even if you don’t interact in-person with someone on a regular basis, if their posts generally make you happy because they are full of positivity, and you like keeping up with them and seeing what they’re doing, then it’s obviously fine to keep them in your feed.
3: Do I believe this person actually cares about me and/or my family, or are they someone who wouldn’t be there for me in my real life if I needed some support?
- Needless to say, if someone is making your day worse by being annoying, offensive, negative, or disrespectful, you probably don’t need them in your online life. However, if regardless of those things, you still value the relationship and believe they value it as well, then a careful approach is necessary. You still have the option to mute or hide their posts. If it doesn’t seem to be beneficial to have them on your page at all though, and you still want to preserve the friendship after removing them from your page, you can take steps to ensure the relationship isn’t damaged by the change in status.
If you want to remain friends with someone after un-friending, un-following, or blocking someone on your social media pages, then in person or phone contact is sometimes necessary afterwards. This doesn’t mean you have to bring up the subject of un-friending them, but actually seeing each other or hearing other’s voices will reassert that the friendship is still valuable and you want to remain friends. If there has been some kind of a significant conflict that played out in the social media world, particularly if it was public, then you may want to discuss the conflict and hash things out in person before writing the relationship off for good. The important thing is that you make the effort to engage with the person after un-friending so that you both can recognize that you still care about the relationship. If you are one who un-friended, it should be you that reaches out first.
There are times when this is unnecessary. First, they may not have even noticed that you un-friended them. There’s no point in making a big deal about something if you didn’t often engage in each other’s posts. They may just think you haven’t been online much lately or didn’t notice that your posts weren’t showing up in their feed. If they did notice or they bring it up, try not to make personal attacks. Make a more general point about why you made that decision. For example, if it was about politics, you can say “Listen, I just made the decision that it was healthier for me to reduce the political chatter on my feed because it was stressing me out”. Or, if it was about because there was a public spat online, you can say “Look, I value our friendship and I didn’t want to continue to hash out our problems in front of everyone online, so I’d rather us talk things through in person”.
What if you’ve been un-friended by someone else? First of all, don’t freak out or get offended. If the relationship is meaningful to both of you in real life, you can still be friends or acquaintances and you don’t have to run in the other direction or escalate a conflict. All of the above advise still applies, and sometimes the best way to repair a damaged online relationship is to make more of an effort to get together in person and/or via phone and focus on building real interactions instead of virtual ones. If it wasn’t a very meaningful relationship in the first place, then it’s no loss and everyone can go about their business feeling better about the online friends they do have. You can still see your uncle at Thanksgiving and seat yourself at the opposite end of the table like you always do. Don’t let social media ruin important relationships that you value, but keep in mind that you certainly don’t have to allow people or posts on your newsfeed to make your day worse for no identifiable reason. Now go adjust those settings!
by rachelthemuse | Mar 17, 2018 | Culture, Mental Health, School Violence
When I was in about 3rd or 4th grade, my classmates and I had all the standard safety drills in elementary school. Fire drills, tornado drills, and the like. There was one drill though, that I remember doing only once, which was the active shooter drill. I don’t know that they called it exactly that at the time, but I do remember that they made all of us kids run zig-zag from the stairs of the school to the playground down the field and into the woods behind the playground, hiding wherever we could. I remember it being somewhat odd that we had this new drill, and at some point they explained to us that if someone ever came into the school and started shooting, that this is what we were supposed to do. I grew up in a suburb of Atlanta in a good school district. Overall it was a great place to grow up, and felt safe most of the time (though not always). This drill seemed a bit of an outlier, as though the district had heard about shootings in other schools and thought they should be prepared, just in case. Never mind that the strategy they adopted was totally wrong and unsafe given our current knowledge of active shooter survival. I’m sure they were doing the best they could back in the 80’s when this kind of danger was relatively new to the public consciousness. These days, though, an active shooter with an AR-15 and hundreds of little kids zig-zagging across a playground is a recipe for our next national tragedy.
Fast forward to 1999, and I was a senior in high school. In April of that year, the Columbine shooting rocked the national news. Prior to that, news of violence in urban school districts was not unheard of, and discussions about guns in schools and how to keep schools and students safe were certainly in the public discourse. The Columbine shooting was different, however, for many reasons. The affluent, mostly white suburban school, the arsenal of weapons, the bombs, the depressed, gun-obsessed teenagers who idolized Timothy McVeigh, the suicides. It was horrifying. Not long after the shootings, a copycat began calling in bomb threats to my high school. It was always around the same time of day on the same days of the week. I was always in art class, which was located across the hallway from the school nursery, where the babies of students and teachers were. My fellow art students and I would jet across the hallway and grab a baby before running across the street to a community center, where we stayed with the babies until their parents came to pick them up. Even as I write this now, it sounds totally insane. I didn’t go to a hard core inner city urban school. It was in a middle class, diverse, low crime town. The bomb threats continued for weeks, and to my knowledge, they never caught the person. It became clear pretty soon that whoever was calling the bomb threats in was pulling a prank to get out of a certain class, but in the aftermath of Columbine it seemed impossible to feel truly safe in that context. Years later, in college and afterwards, when I would tell people about the drills and the bomb threats, they were horrified. “What kind of school did you go to? Oh you’re from Atlanta? That must’ve been so scary! They must have some really bad schools where you lived!” Well… no, not exactly. What kind of school did I go to? A good one, or so I thought.
Now, that term has no meaning. There is no such thing as a “good school.” There is no school where children can be kept safe from gun violence, from bullying, from racism, from sexual harassment or assault, from exposure to drugs and alcohol, not even from predatory teachers. As hard as we try to put in policies and security procedures, and codes of conduct and mental health resources, we have been unable to protect our children from the world that we have created. A world in which violence is glorified and murder makes you a celebrity. A world in which anger is the most readily accessible emotion and violence an acceptable recourse when you feel provoked. A world in which we are quick to label violent criminals as part of the mental health crisis, yet refuse to properly fund community mental health centers, or put social workers in every school, or teach basic communication and conflict resolution skills to children. Teachers are vilified, blamed, and punished for classroom problems that originate in the home, yet we refuse to give teachers the support they need from social workers and school psychologists to help families become successful in the classroom. I say families, and not just children, on purpose. Families need to be treated as a whole, to ensure that we see and address all areas in which the family is struggling. We keep insisting that test scores are the best way to measure a child’s potential and progress, scores which completely ignore a child’s emotional, social, and psychological progress. While politicians starve our public schools of resources and ignore the needs of the mentally ill and struggling families, we have turned our anger on each other, vilifying our fellow citizens and digging our heels into the culture wars to make up for the lack of a functioning public sphere.
Our schools should not be war zones, yet that’s what many of them have been for decades, and any attempts by parents to get their kids into a “good school” are increasingly fruitless. There is no panacea to solve the culture of violence that has resulted in the mass shooting epidemic that we are currently suffering through. It cannot be solved with thoughts and prayers, it cannot be solved by banning bump stocks, or raising the age to purchase certain weapons, or bringing religion into schools. It cannot be solved by school resource officers, as we so crushingly discovered during the Parkland shooting, and it cannot be solved by instituting more anti-bullying campaigns. Trying to imagine any of the teachers that I grew up with as pistol-packing renegades seems not only incredibly dangerous and ineffective, but incredibly unfair given the sacrifices and responsibilities that we already expect from teachers and our refusal to pay them properly for the amazing work they are doing every day. We are way beyond all of those ideas now. People continue to shout their ideas for solutions, and many of those ideas have merit, while others seem reactionary and insufficient. I am not going to pretend to know all the answers. I certainly have my own opinions about what I would like to see happen, but I fear that nothing we can do at this point will be sufficient without an enormous cultural shift that our country seems unprepared for and unwilling to recognize. The problems that go into the making of an active shooter are deep and resonating throughout our culture. Lack of empathy, isolationism, misogyny and racism, rampant abuse and violence in our neighborhoods, families, schools, and media, easy access to weapons ranging from hunting weapons to handguns to military style assault rifles, glorified violence on television both fictionalized and reality based: all of this has indoctrinated us to the point where we don’t even try to stop the violence any more, we just try to prepare for it.
I am sick. I am sick of this culture of violence. I used to get angry when I would hear people say that they don’t like to watch the news because they don’t like to see all the violence and terrible things going on in the world. How could they just turn a blind eye and pretend it’s not all happening? I understand this more now. It comes from a feeling of abject helplessness in the face of the world we have created. It comes from a sense of self-protectionism, akin to hiding in a closet while a gunman murders your classmates. I used to watch Law & Order episodes like a junkie. Ditto the ID Investigations, and Forensic Files, and other reality based crime shows. However, after years of working with victims of violence and abuse in my real-life job, I cannot see violence as entertainment anymore. I don’t ignore it, I can’t ignore it, and my job necessitates that I continue to confront it daily. Yet I can’t shake the feeling of helplessness and self-protectionism. So I will continue to battle as I have always done, one life at a time, one client at a time, and one family at a time, which includes my own. This is the only way I know how to fight back against our cultural sickness.
A few weeks ago, my daughter filled me in on some of the 2nd grade struggles going on in her school that week. A student did not want to include one of her friends in their games, and was trying to get the other kids to leave the other kid out. This upset my daughter because she didn’t want her friend to be left out. We processed this for a while, but she came to her own conclusion: “I’m going to stick up for my friend tomorrow”. “I think that’s a good idea, I’m proud of you,” I said. Meanwhile, back at work in my office, we prepared for another annual active shooter drill. So when the alarm came on via my computer and cell phone, alerting to the fact that there was an active shooter (exercise) on premise, I closed and locked my office door as instructed, and listened as we heard pretend gun shots, people running through the halls, and the first responders practicing their take down in the building. Back in elementary school, zig-zagging across that field, it seemed silly, remote, and implausible. Sitting in my office that day, listening to shots fired and the boots running through the hallways, it felt more real than ever before.
It’s on all of us to change the culture that has created this mess that our children are now paying for with their lives. What each of us can do is going to be different. Perhaps engaging in the policy battles and protests, perhaps donating to or volunteering with your local school systems or other organizations, perhaps changing your buying or viewing habits to promote more of what you want to see and support, and less of what continues to sicken us. I can’t come up with a catch-all prescription and say “here’s the solution, this will fix it”. I just know that most of us can do something, including our feckless leaders, and we all have to be a part of creating the world our children deserve. I will continue to hope that we can make progress together, despite the political barriers that seem insurmountable at this time. I can increasingly sense the desperation, the anger, and the futility that is seeping into every area of our society. I’m not willing to give up, though I understand why people do. When it feels overwhelming, I try to remember that even though I can’t change everything I want to change about our culture, I can still be responsible for my little corner of the universe. I know that small scale change leads to bigger changes later on. If anything is clear to me now, it is that change comes from the bottom up, not the top down. To me, that means working on myself, on my own family, with my clients, with my friends, and with my community. I want bigger change, but I can’t single handedly pull it off. To that end, bottoms up.
by rachelthemuse | Jan 27, 2018 | Abuse, Mental Health, Parenting, Self-care
Many people struggle with healing from an abusive childhood, and when the abuser was a parent, the healing process can be particularly complicated. Everyone has a unique story and the impact on individuals is affected by many different factors. The severity, frequency, and tactics of the abuse, and emotional strain on the victim all impact the degree to which people are able to cope with and recover from past trauma. One area of struggle can revolve around the concept of forgiving your abuser.
Forgiveness is often one our culture’s go-to prescriptions when it comes to dealing with painful incidents that continue to impact our current lives. These prescriptions may come in the form of religious instructions, moral obligations, and the promise of healing. While forgiveness may be an important and helpful step in the recovery process, it is important to understand who it is being done for and why. Otherwise forgiveness itself becomes confusing, complicated, or even meaningless.
At one time in my career I was working as a hospice social worker. Most of my patients were very elderly, and the majority of them had supportive and loving families who had the comfort and peace of the patient as their priority. However, occasionally I worked with families where there was significant emotional strain in the relationship between the dying parent and the adult son or daughter, sometimes due to past abuse by the parent. Needless to say the issues each family was dealing with were unique and there were long and fraught histories involved. I had some family members who spoke to me about their own process of forgiveness and how it helped them to heal and find their own peace, and I had other families who had no interest in a dramatic reconciliation at the deathbed. They were tired of being judged for keeping their distance from a formerly abusive parent, and their own healing was better served by strong boundaries and detachment. Our society loves a Hollywood ending, and popular culture is littered with depictions of those reconciliations.
When I am working with clients to process and heal from childhood abuse, we discuss forgiveness and what it means for their individual recovery process. Some of the things we have to figure out through that process include knowing who the forgiveness is for (the victim, the abuser, or someone else), how it will or will not facilitate their healing process, and why it is being given. The answers to those questions help people come to an honest conclusion about whether they want to forgive their abuser, whether it will help at all, and the intentions behind that forgiveness. I don’t ever tell people that they need to or have to forgive their abuser in order to heal and recover from an abusive childhood. If people feel forced to take the moral high ground by offering forgiveness to someone who may or may not even be in their life anymore, they may continue to struggle to recover because it feels insincere and obligatory. However, if that forgiveness is offered for the right reasons and at the right time, it can be an important step towards releasing the control trauma can have over their life and emotional wellness. The “right reasons and right time” are not for me to decide. Those decisions need to be made by the individual who is healing from that trauma.
As friends, families, communities, and caregivers, we can place value on forgiveness without making it into an obligation for people who have been abused. Coping with the emotional labor of processing the abuse inflicted by a parent who is supposed to love and care for you is difficult enough without having social pressure to rush the process and bring it to a convenient and neat conclusion. Allowing abuse survivors to direct their own recovery and determine why, when, how, and if forgiveness is a part of their healing journey is a more supportive and intentional way to promote recovery.
by rachelthemuse | Jan 21, 2018 | Anxiety, Mental Health, Self-care
Many people are familiar with the practice of pet therapy, as well as service animals, but I’ve noticed a rise in both the benefits and recognition of a newer category of animals known as emotional support animals (ESA). Emotional support animals are not trained to perform specific tasks for their owners in the same way that service animals are. Service animals may be trained to do things that help people with mobility and sensory conditions or other disabilities, and they are covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which means that they legally are allowed at any public place that their owner goes and receive protections from housing discrimination, among other legal protections. They specifically do things that the individual cannot do for themselves, such as guiding or alerting people, picking up objects, responding to PTSD symptoms under duress, or assisting with other tasks. Emotional Support Animals are not specifically trained to do these things, but may otherwise provide comfort and reduce distress in conditions such as anxiety and depression. ESAs are not service animals and are not covered under the ADA. Nevertheless, emotional support animals can be an important and legitimate tool for people who experience relief from distress when spending time with and receiving affection from their animals.
The benefits of service animals are considered a necessary aid to people with special needs. We have long been accepting of service animals in public places (I once saw a woman with a service pony in a Target), and more recently have increased the training and accessibility of service animals for veterans through different programs specifically targeted for veterans with physical or mental health injuries. However, despite these socially acceptable and recognized benefits, people with less severe conditions are sometimes mocked or dismissed when claiming the need for an emotional support animal. It’s true that with any specially recognized category there is potential for abuse by people without true needs who want to claim benefits. Yet just because someone’s condition doesn’t necessarily disable them, this doesn’t mean that their ESA isn’t providing a true benefit to them.
Many people who are high functioning have learned to cover their conditions well, and continue to work and engage in other areas of their lives while still suffering from depression or anxiety in private. When an ESA can provide some relief from these symptoms and comfort to those who are suffering, I can find little reason to deny people the right to maintain access to their animals. Mostly, people with ESAs simply want access to housing that they may otherwise be denied if they want to bring their animal with them. Apartment complexes with no pet policies will usually allow ESA animals with documentation from a medical or mental health provider certifying the need for an ESA, whereas they would be legally required to do so under the ADA with a certified service animal.
An emotional support animal is more than a pet. While from the outside it may look as though someone is functioning just fine, you don’t know what symptoms a person may be experiencing privately. Anyone who has loved an animal can attest to the very real comfort and companionship they provide. An ESA can be an invaluable tool for people with anxiety, depression, or other related conditions that helps them improve their quality of life and cope with their symptoms. With proper training and care, there is little downside to accepting ESAs more openly in our society and reducing the stigma towards people who use them responsibly. Even if you do not need an ESA or suffer from a mental health condition, your relationship with your pet is meaningful and can improve your quality of life. Bonding with an animal helps you focus on the needs of another being, and they can reward you with affection and unconditional love. If you want to learn more about ESAs, visit therapypet.org.
