- Moderator
- #13
Sideways
VIP Member
Do I remember right that recently you were thinking about looking your dad up on Facebook as well?
There seems to be something about the lure of social media, and checking up on toxic people from our past. Maybe it's the hope that seeing pics of them will just let all the pieces finally fall into place with some grand truth, or maybe it's denial or a form of self-punishment. Idk.
What I do know, is that social media is full of pics of people either doing something funny, or having fun. So seeing those pics, quite apart from just seeing the person and retraumatising ourselves with the image of them (cue flashbacks, anger, shame, guilt, and yeah, self-harm and suicidal thoughts), we're exposing ourselves to a myth. A myth that this person is good, happy, funny, has friends, kids, pets, holidays. That feeds denial, bigtime. It feeds the idea that "why am I holding onto this, when clearly my abuser is leading a happy and fulfilling life?" It's the antithesis to what we're trying to recover from.
If social media were full of pics of abusers abusing people, it may be a therapeutic tool. But it's the opposite of that. And we just don't need it. We don't need the confusion. We don't need the self-doubt of "this person looks like a good person, so why am I...?" We don't need to feed our brains with images of all the things that the person wasn't to us.
Some people venture down the path of social media in partnership with their T for a specific purpose and in a controlled manner. But unless you're doing it like that? Don't do it. As compelling as it is, just don't. Remind yourself that you wouldn't put yourself in a room with this person for realsies, which is borderline what you're doing by visiting their Facebook page. Very very few good things will ever come of that.
There seems to be something about the lure of social media, and checking up on toxic people from our past. Maybe it's the hope that seeing pics of them will just let all the pieces finally fall into place with some grand truth, or maybe it's denial or a form of self-punishment. Idk.
What I do know, is that social media is full of pics of people either doing something funny, or having fun. So seeing those pics, quite apart from just seeing the person and retraumatising ourselves with the image of them (cue flashbacks, anger, shame, guilt, and yeah, self-harm and suicidal thoughts), we're exposing ourselves to a myth. A myth that this person is good, happy, funny, has friends, kids, pets, holidays. That feeds denial, bigtime. It feeds the idea that "why am I holding onto this, when clearly my abuser is leading a happy and fulfilling life?" It's the antithesis to what we're trying to recover from.
If social media were full of pics of abusers abusing people, it may be a therapeutic tool. But it's the opposite of that. And we just don't need it. We don't need the confusion. We don't need the self-doubt of "this person looks like a good person, so why am I...?" We don't need to feed our brains with images of all the things that the person wasn't to us.
Some people venture down the path of social media in partnership with their T for a specific purpose and in a controlled manner. But unless you're doing it like that? Don't do it. As compelling as it is, just don't. Remind yourself that you wouldn't put yourself in a room with this person for realsies, which is borderline what you're doing by visiting their Facebook page. Very very few good things will ever come of that.
