A Trauma Informed Lens on Social Media and Mental Health (Part 3)

Part 3. Coming to Terms With Our Current Situation and a Path Through

We’ve explored the system being built out into a piece of technology and that piece of technology taking over our perception of reality. Then a look into what is trauma, what happens when it happens, how we design systems to survive, how those systems sometimes stop serving us, and what keeps us stuck. Do you see the parallel?

A note on our relationship to advertisers, media and social media platforms.

Having our reptilian brains taken advantage of isn’t necessarily new news. Marketers are as blunt as to publish ‘how to’ articles for others to use the understanding of our reptilian brains to get us to click and purchase by appealing to our pain points, innate selfishness, and striking an emotional chord. There is a difference between solving for your customers’ pain points and taking advantage of them. Some relationship therapists might even call this manipulation, emotional abuse, or even sociopathic tendencies.

And as we see these days the revelations of social media companies knowingly driving towards the sentiments of anger to elicit more responses so their platforms can remain active, relevant, and the billions in ad budgets can keep flowing.

We are in an abusive relationship with media and social media. There is an important distinction here that is also important when considering relationships — intent, impact, and consent.

When did we go from knowing participants, being a part of the creation of tools and technology to provide us news that would be helpful to our lives to being non consenting participants where our human physiology is being used against us to drive the profits of organizations. It seems a classical example of technology designed for good, bred with the underlying incentives of profit in a capitalist system, gone awry. We have entered into an abusive, non-consenting relationship.

The intention may have been good, the impact, not so good. We may have once consented, and now, I guess that’s to tell.

What now? Now is a time where we are coming to acknowledge the reality we are in. We are becoming aware, we are starting to speak up, and we are starting to draw boundaries. Values, integrity, and a healthy dose of therapy is what I call for.

Below is a process found after years of therapy, medicine work, and deep inner inquiry. It is a tried and true approach to healing trauma, to healthy relationships… and its application to our current quandary with social media.

Step 1: Acknowledge and take responsibility for what is ours and what is not ours

See reality for what it is and accept it. Understand why this started, how it came to be, and what it is now. All parties must recognize their role and responsibility in it. Some media outlets and social media platforms must see where it has become an abuser. The consumers and users must see their role and complacency.

Step 2: Forgiveness of self, forgiveness of other

Realize the media is playing the part that we’ve asked them to. They are the protector and will go to all ends in order to serve its purpose. Then systems and AI were built in to more intelligently tell the systems what we want. Our deep reptilian brain responds with never-ending scrolling and likes. Social media platforms are confused because they are doing the things they were told to do.

Forgive ourselves for creating a system to protect us and forgive ourselves for being a vulnerable human species that is trying to survive this chaotic world. Forgive the resulting organizations for doing the bidding and falling to their own vulnerabilities of greed, chasing the promises of riches whilst sacrificing the collective health.

Step 3: Presence and Compassion

Be present with ourselves. In the process, at some point, we must come to face the very human part of it all. We come to face all of our shared vulnerabilities. Our fragility, fear, loneliness, scarcity, anger, resentment, sadness. You will likely find in this process your own traumas, what lay underneath the root of your actions. Did something happen early in life that made you promise to yourself, you will never let anyone hurt you and your family. So you created something to help prevent that from happening. This is a sweeping generalization though I state it as I’m confident the majority of people have something unseen and are not asking the questions or looking. As we come to what truly sits underneath and bring to it presence, we will learn what it is to extend compassion to ourselves. And only then, do we learn to extend compassion to others. The pain composts back into the universe instead of Twitter and we are lighter.

Step 4: Gratitude

After the storm, comes the rainbow. I promise you, the sun will shine and the rainbows will glow and there is life with air worth breathing. With your eyes closed, tears will stream down your face in gratitude. Gratitude to feel joy, lightness, happiness. In these moments, we come together and connect as friends, family, and community.

With a new lens, free from distorted chips and jagged breaks, we can now see the gifts that technology has afforded us, the ability to know what is happening across the world, to communicate with our loved ones at any time, to learn the infinite knowledge of those who have came before us and living teachers around the world. We remember our agency and power and see the opportunity and privilege to carve a new path, a new system, new beliefs, that will be of greater service to ourselves and the whole.

Step 5: Spirituality

Holding the complexity of the human experience as well as seeing the bigger picture. As spirits in human form, we come from a place of unity and incarnate into being human, an experience of duality, with nothing but our emotions, thought, and language to help us, it is traumatic! And our journey here is to evolve beyond our self, our own needs, to transcend the self, to go from scarce and competitive to giving, abundant, collaborative. This is the path of human conscious evolution, and is the ride that we have all agreed to be on together. With that framing, our current situation, the ugly and all, is just another spirit in form and a reflection of what we are here to heal.

Step 6: Embodied Action

The most spiritual path is right here on earth. When you do your own work, you are led right back to your own body, your own breath, this one life you have the privilege to make your own. The shift after this work however, is you begin to embody the wisdom from our experiences. You live from a place of knowing you have a choice.

The choice we have here is intentionally knowing how to walk the bridge from our sympathetic nervous system to our parasympathetic nervous system. This bodied path we walk going forward is not to be lived entirely through the sympathetic nervous system, hijacked by advertisers and social media. Yes, there is a time and place for those responses and it is within our power to remember to restore, reset, and reside in our parasympathetic response. It is through our pause, our breath, our presence. We must look down at our ankles as we sit in the cave and see they are not actually bound. Remember, we are here to delight in the rainbow. Come out of the cave, breath in the air.

Step 7: Rinse and Repeat, it’s not linear, its not quick, its a lifetime journey

I’ll share one important piece of wisdom i’ve learned on my path of healing trauma. It’s slow and it’s lifelong. This goes against what modern society sells us — quick fixes and immediate results. This path is nothing short of miraculous and things can and do change in an instant. However, the promises of quick enlightenment, like what many people are turning towards psychedelics for, is a fear I have. We must refine the art of integration which is really just called life-ing.

We will all find ourselves falling back into old patterns — swiping through the ongoing profiles of people when you’re feeling lonely to never message a single person or rant over twitter with the protection you’ll never come face to face with them. Next time, try and witness what’s happening.

We have more agency here than we think. Instead of getting overly mad at yourself or the media, self regulate, be present with what is happening within ourselves. This will slowly develop the muscle overtime and leads to the ability to be present with others, which births compassion, connection, collaboration. Then sometimes, instead of falling in the unending scroll of loneliness and isolation, we come back to ourselves, we turn off the TV, we go into nature, we connect with our neighbors. We use those hours to invest into our local community, to share in music and culture together, we look at the rainbows.

To finally wrap up this three part exploration, I don’t mean this as a bypass to say the problem of social media would be solved by breathing. However, the immediate response that was required to escape the lion is no longer the same defense needed to figure out, let’s say, climate change. Engaging our quick twitch muscles kindred to a sprint reaction and firing off a quick tweet is not going to change the world.

It’s about becoming aware of what state we are in and changing the place from which we are trying to solve a problem. Pause. Turn towards. Talk to people in person. Listen. Gather in community. Parasympathetic nervous system. And all the meantime, we chill out and become more resilient.

From there we arrive to a totally different mindset. Most of us know by now that responding while we are agitated always leads to less than promising results. So reset ourselves first and from there we will be with a whole different set of situations to solve for and technology will still be there to be a better ally to help us. This is how we guide ourselves and each other into the next iteration of social media that will be of more service, to thriving communities, relationships, health, prosperity, balance, and love. As Einstein said…

And in parallel between now and then, while we do the work, bring balance to what we project on the cave wall from doom and gloom, with all else that is also out there — possibility, opportunity, change, smiles, laughter, hope, faith, connection. Because I’ll tell you, its happening everywhere. We have just yet to give it the place on the wall it deserves. Then we’ll realize, we don’t need to hide in the cave. We can go outside and experience it for ourselves. This is about observing how we live our lives, how we can live better lives, and how we can come back into the right relationship with technology to support us in that endeavor.