Nope, not that eff-word. I love that eff-word – where would we be without it’s delightfully releasing fricative force?
I’m talking about Facebook. Bane of my life and perverter of otherwise normal days into wasted little husks.
Reasons why I (tell myself that I) keep Facebook in my life:
1) The photos. I am a huge traveller and I love that most people post photos from their various travels. It’s a great way to get insight or inspiration when trip-planning. Similarly, I love being able to post my photos from trips I’ve taken so that my family and friends don’t have to sit down for a boring slideshow in order for me to let them know how my trip was.
2) Keeping in touch with people I genuinely care about. This is actually a secondary reason to the photos one, because I could obviously just shoot off emails to them. But of the people I’d like to stay in touch with on facebook, there are very few that I’d actually email (chances are I don’t even have their emails): distant cousins, childhood playmates, friends of your parents, etc. etc.
*shameful reason* 3) I’m terrified of being “left out” if I left Facebook. I’m not exactly a social butterfly anymore, so if I wasn’t able to see all the “group invites/events,” it’s possible people wouldn’t think to invite me to anything via other methods of communication. At least that’s my paranoid thought process, much as I hate to admit it.
The reasons I should leave Facebook are way too numerous to mention, so I won’t list them out. But anyone can easily think what they are. Aside from the sheer number of wasted hours you can spend with your eyes glued to a little screen taking in oddly addictive information that you don’t actually care about (ummm sadly kind of the story of the Internet, in general, for me), Facebook and all its stupid, stupid little trivial dramas can ruin my mood. Just shatter it. And I really don’t like the person I am when I’m in its thrall.
A very real and recent example: me logging into the eff-word to find that one of my best (albeit now far-off) friends is in touch with someone who hurt me very badly in the past. In fact, she’s evidently more ‘in touch’ with him than she is with me, as they were chumming it up in some recent photos while she hasn’t seen fit to return any of my emails for a few months now. Ouch.
My reaction? Delete. Cut out the friendship entirely in a very silly and immature way. This is someone who I feel deserves an explanation – but she hasn’t asked for one (so now I’ve added to this equation the stress of not knowing what she even knows!). If it weren’t for Facebook, sure I could have found out that my friend had ‘betrayed’ me from some other source, but there’s a good chance I would have found out from her, accompanied by some kind of explanation.
Aside from the unnecessary downer/drama aspect of Facebook, the comparison aspect kills me as well. Whether or not we’ll all admit it, we all know that Facebook’s primary reason for existence is to compare ourselves to other people – consciously or unconsciously. Examples:
“OMG they’re on their fourth kid and they have a body like Kate Moss!?!? How is this possible?!” (implicit thought process: I’m fat and ugly and I don’t even have any kids to justify it).
“OMG they finished that PhD they were working on and now they’ve bought their first home” (implicit thought process: I’m stupid and my life sucks compared to everyone else’s.)
Be honest: how many Facebook photos have you posted with the knowledge that “this will make people jealous of me/my life”? For me, it’s a lot. A hell of a lot. Admitting that disgusts me and fills me with deep self-loathing. I feel shallow and pathetic. I do not want to want to make other people jealous of me – which obviously smacks of insecurity. And the irony is, by engaging in this process myself, I should be realizing that people ALL do this on Facebook – including all the people I feel so jealous of sometimes. They ALL work to present a version of themselves/their lives that other people will be impressed with.
There are a number of recent articles on the explosion of mental health issues related to Facebook, and one I read made the excellent point that Facebook is a “best of” reel of each user’s life. It’s like a little movie we each work so hard to compile and edit (and edit and edit and edit) in order to feel validated by other’s people’s respect or admiration.
The problem is that all of this is a presentation. Like the beautiful but miserable celebrity head-case who is glorified as “naturally beautiful” after hundreds of dollars of fake hair dye, make up, plastic surgery and expensive clothes, you know deep down that it’s all just a presentation. And you can never ever feel happy or validated if all you’re exposing for validation is, essentially, a lie.
The only way to break the cycle is to present the truth – the whole truth. But Facebook is SO not the venue for that either! None of us want to be that sad-ass person who posts their every emotion and juvenile mood-swing on Facebook (or, for that matter, displays them in real life all the time either). That just reeks of an equally pathetic type of insecurity.
The real solution? Self-validation.
I am on the “self-validation” unit of my DBT group which is why this topic is particularly important to me at the moment. Self-validation is the answer to so many BPD problems – but it’s incredibly difficult and deeply counterintuitive if you’ve spend years looking to everyone else to make you feel happy/confident/safe/functional etc etc.
Self-validation means a quiet inner assurance that what you are feeling is real, logical, understandable and important. To say that in my mind – let alone out loud – is SO HARD. I don’t like myself enough to self-validate, and I simultaneously don’t like that feeling of “letting other people off the hook” (if you know what I mean) by keeping the struggle inside and not putting the burden of it on others’ shoulders. Which is clearly why self-validating essential and I have to learn to do it! :-S
Without self-validation, you’re overcome with the desire to “act out” what you’re feeling, at any cost, in order to make people realize and validate just how terrible things are for you. When BPDers don’t get “enough” of a reaction to how they’re feeling, they may purposely embellish the problems they have in order to manipulate that validation out of people: they may develop obvious self-harm mechanisms, or even make up “traumatic events” from their past in order to get the reaction they want to their pain. But by doing so, we’re caught in an even worse spot: now we only get validated for the lies/performances/tricks/manipulations we use, and not the actual emotions. And so, the more you have to rely on the lies and performances, and the less real/validated your pain feels, and on and on it goes.
Oh foolish, foolish borderlines, when will ye (or rather, ‘we’) learn?
The old me would have said “never.” The me of even a mere six months ago would have said that. But I’m tentatively being able to consider the possibility of change. I hate these patterns. I hate these coping “tools.” I hate the person that they make me and the effect they have had on my life. Now it’s time to transform that hate (negativity) into growth (positivity) by using it to spur me onwards in the daunting quest for change. I’ve written the following little mantra for myself *squirms with self-consciousness* when I start to feel horrendous emotions or my BPD mode kicking in as a result:
Every hateful and counterproductive BPD “technique” I’ve developed has developed for a good reason: to protect me. However, those techniques are not protecting me anymore – they are hurting me. As I open myself to start feeling emotions, I will take a pause with each one to remember that it is real, important and valid. I deserve to feel everything that I feel, and no one has the power to make me feel otherwise.
Have you ever vowed to give up Facebook? Or even succeeded? And do you self-validate? How?
Cat xx
Half of a Soul - Life with BPD 
ummm also meant to tag this “posts that are way too huge” – sorry! :S
Enjoyed your post. I stay clear of Facebook.
I’m with you!!! I’ve been going back and forth with Facebook for the last four years, deleting my profile then bringing it back. So silly. Finally, about a year ago I deleted my Facebook for good and have never looked back! I feel better since I’ve gotten rid of it. All it did was make me mad and remind me that no one (even family) wanted to talk to me or interact on Facebook. It made me feel bad. I say NO to Facebook!! 🙂
Thanks for the comments – you are making me think it would definitely be best to axe it!
Great post, thank you! Your paragraphs on what self-validation is and what happens without it, really hit home with me and crystallised some of the things that I do, but hadn’t really thought of in terms of ‘validation’ before. And ironically, those paragraphs were very validating too, though you could quite rightly point out that of course I shouldn’t need that external validation! But I struggle hugely with thoughts that there is nothing really wrong and that I am making it all up or bringing it on myself, and so when I read something that confirms that some of my behaviour (particularly unconscious behaviour) is symptomatic of BPD, it’s a little bit more ‘evidence’ to try and wield against the accusatory voices/feelings that tell me that my diagnosis isn’t real.
With regard to Facebook, I took a 3 month break from it earlier this year, and I do think I was more stable without it, though it’s hard to disentangle cause and effect when there was so much other stuff going on, and it may not have been solely the absence from Facebook that contributed to that change. The break from FB was triggered entirely by the near-breakdown of a very close friendship (which subsequently did break down, at least temporarily). On both occasions, the actual triggers for my behaviour/reactions and the friendship breakdowns were themselves partly Facebook related, in the sense that I saw I lot of stuff that triggered me, that I would not have seen otherwise. That’s not a reason for saying Facebook is evil – I need to manage my reactions to my triggers and try to reign in the impulsivity. Having said that, you might well ask me why I would return to Facebook and put myself in a position where I am exposed to more triggers than I need to be – although it’s not sensible to hide from people or not get close to them, just to avoid being triggered, there are other ways of keeping in touch, that wouldn’t expose me to the same level of potential threats to my sanity and my friendships!
I completely agree with you on the time-wasting aspects – I am tired a lot of the time, and part of the reason is that I spend time that I don’t have on FB, when I should be sleeping. It also means I don’t do other activities that might actually benefit me e.g. reading. And yet I find it so hard to actually contemplate leaving for good, for many of the reasons you’ve spoken about. I think part of me definitely feels that the sensible and brave thing to do would be to leave FB – but as the thought of increased sanity and stability is scary and bewildering in itself, and as the self-destructive tendencies are themselves fairly persuasive and my willpower has always been set to zero, I can’t see it happening any time soon!
I’ll leave it there, as this comment is getting way too huge!
Thanks for the comment, StillHiding (love long comments haha). I am with you: I know full well that leaving it would be the best thing to do but social media has a very deep hold on me – argh.
I’d also like to note that there is no “should” with me (or at least I’m trying to notice/release from my vocabulary, as DBT made me realize how judgmental and counterproductive it can be), so I hope I didn’t make you feel like you “shouldn’t” need external validation! I think we all need it, and BPDers need it far more than most because of just how little self-validation we’ve ever had. Learning about that was a biiiiig click for me as well: suddenly the crazy desperation I felt to make people see/hear/feel/understand just how bad everything was for me (even in the form of hurting them so they felt pain because I did) made so much sense – I’d never once even thought of taking a moment to validate my own pain/anger/whatever; hence it became absolutely crucial to prove it to everyone else, because I didn’t believe deep down that my feelings were important or justified. Now when I feel rage and pain bubbling at the realization that someone seems to be dismissing my feelings, I make an effort to breathe and think, “I’m in so much pain right now, and I feel like no one is ever going to understand just how much. I’m lonely, angry, desperate, and really disliking myself, and that’s really important.” Sounds stupidly simple but I’d say it really does work maybe 8 times out of 10, depending on the severity of the situation? Not bad! xxxx
Ha ha – it’s dangerous to tell me you love long comments – I’ve had ‘wordy’ tendencies all my life, why use one word when ten would do?! Please don’t worry, you definitely didn’t make me feel I ‘should’ feel/need/do anything. Your posts are as far removed from judgmental as they could be – my words reflected only what my invalidating ‘inner voice’ was telling me should be true….
Your reply to my comment hit home and resonated just as much as your original post – I was sitting there going “oh oh oh oh, this is really uncomfortable, I’m reading about me, and it’s so true, such a relief to know someone else feels/does the same, but hard to read it at the same time.” Had a similar experience in therapy earlier in the week – I absolutely cringed at hearing my therapist suggest that the invalidation I was feeling due to certain comments, was down to the need to feel special and unique. All I could think was “that sounds awful, I shouldn’t feel the need to feel special or unique, that’s childish and wrong.” I’m SO glad you’ve found something that works for you in this situation – definitely ‘not bad’! xx