I was watching Eckhart Tolle respond to a question from a 46-year old who had cut contact from his mother three years before because of the relentless criticism she had directed at him over the years. But he had found he was still exhausted with pain, fear and hatred about the whole dynamic.

Eckhart’s response pointed to the mother’s criticism as her conditioned mind playing the same old record over and over, perhaps played by her own mother before her and so on, when there is actually no meaning or significance in it; it’s just the noise of her mind. He felt it makes no difference unless you listen to your own mind telling you it’s dreadfully important that your own mother should understand you.

It’s a rather entertaining video as Eckhart goes on to relate his experience of his own mother, who made it very clear she was unhappy with the choices he’d made in his life. At one point, he was already 45-years old, she said “Oh you could have done so much, you had so many chances, and with your intelligence you could have had done so much, but you threw it away. Oh well let’s not talk about it”.

Of course, as humans we are relationally wired and need validation (which is the recognition and acceptance that our thoughts and feelings are real to us regardless of logic or whether it makes sense to anyone else). But there is a difference between caring what another person thinks and letting our whole self concept ride on it.

As Teal Swan explains “when we are children, validation from our parents helps us feel and express our emotions, develop a secure sense of self, gain confidence, feel more connected to our parents and have better relationships in adulthood. But parents who are concerned with approval and disapproval, right and wrong, punishment and reward, are not concerned with validation. Our parents (in their lack of self awareness) really did a lot of damage and now it is up to us to validate ourselves.”

In my own example this week, about a school camp dilemma, I had two things going on that related to this. One was around whether to seek another opinion about my dilemma, the other was about getting highly triggered by a response when I did.

With my eldest child going off to her first camp I had a few concerns. The biggest concern, I decided, was around her difficult relationship with food. This goes right back to weaning and was reinforced by regular stand off’s at preschool around being made to eat certain foods before being allowed what else was on offer.

I remember arriving to pick her up from kindergarten one afternoon and she was still sitting at the lunch table not having eaten anything; she wasn’t allowed any corn bread until she had eaten her soup.

I wondered if the school camp leader would take a similar approach and had visions of her hardly eating a thing, not getting enough sleep or downtime and, as a result, completely zoning out and getting into strife. Actually I’m underplaying this, I had visions of my daughter regressing a few years, traumatized by the experience and refusing to take parts any future events.

Saying that I also realised this is precisely the kind of experience that could build her resilience. So, my dilemma (knowing that the school have, at times, been fairly unresponsive to parent questions or feedback) was whether to broach this topic beforehand or just pack a three-day supply of sandwiches.

I then wondered about floating my thoughts past a couple of trusted friends, my instinct was not to bother but my mind got the better of me. I started to wonder if I was just being an over protective mum, in short, I started to doubt myself.

This falls beautifully under the umbrella of one of those self-limiting thought patterns I talked about in You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. The particular thought pattern I’m referring to is “I’m crazy”.

Being a child of the aforementioned approval/disapproval, right/wrong and punishment/reward upbringing, there are many times I don’t trust my own knowing and can be chronically indecisive as a result. There is an ongoing tussle between heart and mind that often sends me into a spin.

I love Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas’s whole definition of these self limiting thought patterns. It outlines typical behaviours and how these affect other people (for example, others might be frustrated with me because I can’t make up my own mind, or dismiss my knowing and tell me what I’m perceiving is not real).

It also suggests what my beliefs about others/life might be, skills to cultivate to move beyond that false identity, gifts, deeper truth statements and my true identity. The true identity of someone with a self-limiting “I’m crazy” thought pattern is “I can trust my knowing. I value my capacity for seeing things differently, recognising my perspectives are to the well being of all”.

So having ignored my own knowing I started up a text conversation with my friends. Now, given the amount of inner work I’ve done, I’d say this underlying “I am crazy” was more of a “am I crazy?” beacon emitting to the energy around me looking for its match. As a result, while the main response was supportive, my little doubts invited a reflective wobble.

Now here is the interesting part. Inner me knows that I know, so there was a part of me that was angry at myself for having gone down this road of explaining/defending my thoughts on this issue, which subconsciously triggered a deep and powerful tap root to childhood.

One of my friends unknowingly stepped on the landmine. I’m sure she in no way intended to come across as sanctimonious, but it is how my receiving signals were set in response to the self-limiting transmission my subconscious was making. The feeling within my body in response to her talking about how she would handle it with her child was like being instantly engulfed by the rage of a tsunami.

I literally couldn’t hear any more, my first reaction was to switch off my phone so it could receive no more incoming messages. It was an intense sensation, and it felt dangerous, I felt dangerous, so I held fire and let it wash over. That in itself is a minor miracle, but a necessary step to changing the pattern, to not react and allow myself to fully feel what was happening.

As the rushing sound in my ears began to settle and the ability to reason returned (this was full blown fight or flight and I was ready to fight), I knew that this had little to do with the actual conversation at hand and I immediately jumped to “when did I first feel like this?”

Because I was so triggered into an old trauma state I actually couldn’t get an answer from within as my body had responded by doing what it had done many times before and dissociated from the part of me that felt that bad.

However, the next day I did embark on the healing process I describe in How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present. It took me back to the moment of birth, when I was immediately swept away by a doctor and – wrapped only in a hospital cloth – laid on the metal table top.

Birth itself felt bad enough, these prolonged periods of feeling like the life was being squeezed out of me and my head was going to explode, then that first moment of emerging and those horrid glaring ceiling lights and cold air, I missed my warm and comfy space where I felt held. But the shock to my system as I hit that table was something else.

The whole hospital process was designed for mother and baby to slot into, as though the devisors of it somehow knew what is best for us or did not care. I re-imagined orientating the whole process around what the mother and baby wanted and needed and giving little baby me lots of hugs and attention.

There were many more moments in my life I recalled like this. I found myself asking “why?” a lot: Why do I have to sleep on my own? Why do I have to drink from this disgusting bottle with its rubber teat? Why do I have to wear these scratchy woollen clothes? Why do you have to do my hair? Why do I have to have a bath? Why do I have to eat now? The list goes on, and that was not me even out of babyhood, someone else’s will being forced upon me as though they knew better than me what I needed.

That and numerous examples through life up until the present day, I thought about the kidney stone I had passed in pain in June and the lack of recognition of that pain from those around. The image that kept coming into my head was from a movie I’d seen of a mermaid in tank banging on its walls but no one could hear her.

And, in my regressed state, I am asking over and over “Why? What is the point of being here if I can’t even express myself? If I can’t be seen and held for who I am?”

This gives a glimpse of what kind of memories and experiences lie at the root of these moments of getting triggered. While there are other things that will help stop the way I react to how people think, to stop being triggered by what other people think this emotional healing was necessary.

The crux of all any kind of emotional healing work (I am aware of) deals in exactly this type of exercise; where I re-envisage the scene as one that would make me feel seen, loved and held. This changes the emotional signature of the memory.

As I talked about the “am I crazy?” beacon emitting energy around me looking for its match, this new emotional signature emits a different frequency, attracting kinder experiences.

The other suggestions Teal Swan has on this topic are also fantastic, but that one is the real key. I also liked her suggestions about taking accountability for increasing my self esteem by writing a list of things I approve of in myself and meeting my own needs by asking “what do I need right now?” when I’m feeling wounded by someone’s opinion.

The suggested skills to develop in Claire Zammit’s document are also really useful, I especially resonated with trusting my ability to discern right action based upon the inner guidance I’m receiving, and developing the ability to empower the decisions I make by mentally letting go of paths not taken.

“We learned when we were children that doing something wrong made us wrong. Doing something bad made us bad. So now, we have serious issues with rejection, disapproval and negative criticism because our self esteem was and still is essentially dependant on approval.” Teal Swan

The point is, I cannot just decide to stop taking things so personally, willpower just won’t cut it in this maze of deep emotions within the human psyche. If I care what others think, and try to not care, I’ll only end up feeling guilty or ashamed about feeling bad. Instead I have to work on the reason I care so much in the first place.

Can you imagine a world filled with people who recognise and are working on their self limiting patterns? This would be an evolved world, with grownups making grown up decisions rather than the ones that have been thwarted through life by our earliest experiences. If you want to stop being triggered by what others think, be prepared to get to know yourself in ways that seem uncomfortable and strange, but enjoy the unwinding, it’s a powerful process.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness, How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present, You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough,  and Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This week I was reminded to keep my toes pointing in the direction I want to go rather than becoming entrenched in old patterns that I’ve become aware of. I can say with no doubt that the kind of relationship I want is one where both people are aware of unhelpful dynamics and destructive patterns and are actively seeking to break them.

In fact, while this is a good baseline, I embrace the idea of being seen within the relationship, having unconditional love for who I am while being supported in who I am becoming, and having intimacy and connection in a growth orientated dynamic.

In What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People I described the narcissistic bubble versus hyper-attuned (people pleasing) dynamic that my partner and I had and, together with other patterns we learned from our early childhood, those fed on each other and created predictable patterns in our relationship over the years we have been together.

Rather than a healthy interdependent relationship, we had been unconsciously mirroring the hurt children within us. This is considered normal in our society, since most people appear to be completely oblivious that it is a factor that even exists (far less one that can be changed). I see it more as a call to action, a call to mature so we can fully embrace the life we came here to live.

I know I did not come into this life to simply get hurt, adapt who I was being in order to survive childhood, and then spend my whole life repeating this inauthentic pattern and attract more hurt. No, I came to use this as a growth point, an enabler, in order to step into the real reason I came, which was to help evolve the outdated paradigms and systems of our planet.

So rather than go through life stuck in this unhelpful relationship pattern, my partner and I have become aware of it and work hard to break the cycle. But it is worth noting that these patterns are like addictions. Breaking the cycle of co-dependency very much means breaking the entrenched behavioural patterns in at least one person in the relationship.

“It is important to accept that codependency is not about how much time you spent with someone or the degree to which you depend on them, it is about the desperate and very real need for needs to be met; such as self esteem, companionship and closeness and the superbly unhealthy ways we go about trying to often manipulatively achieve those needs.” Teal Swan

For me, I certainly find it hard to stay in a corner once I realise I’ve boxed myself into one.  In the past I’ve removed myself from the corner by changing my circumstances, but over the years I’ve come to realise that circumstances tend to recreate themselves when the behavioural patterns endure.

As a child I became hyper attuned to those around me, in short a people pleaser; someone always acutely aware of what others might be thinking and feeling and always worrying about upsetting them. This resulted in having poor boundaries, in knowing where I ended and others began. My typical pattern would be to suppress my true feelings and then explode.

I saw an example of this so clearly in another person last year when we were travelling home from a vacation on a plane with the kids. About six hours into the journey, the guy in front – having had zero interaction since flashing us a smile in the queue at check-in - turns around and barks “that is the final straw, my chair has been kicked one too many times.”

Now, of course, my six-year-old had been unconsciously swinging her legs and it must have been annoying him, but he hadn’t said a word – not even shot a glance - until it had got too much to bear. It was a perfect mirror of my own unhealthy behavioural pattern.

Just the other day I snapped at the family because I had had enough of dishes being put back on the draining board next to the sink when the dishwasher hadn’t washed them thoroughly enough. Generally there are only one or two items, but on this occasion there was a bigger stack of them.

I had been getting mildly irked by this over a number of months. Clearing up after dinner is the responsibility of my partner and kids, and I was annoyed at the lack of ownership when dirty items got left there, taking it for granted they would just magically get cleaned.

Being the person responsible for most of the domestic chores in our house, the idea is that this is the one time I should be able to put my feet up knowing others are making their valuable contribution to our home.

However, like the man on the plane, I hadn’t really raised this with the family when I was only mildly annoyed and could have been calm and rational. It seemed easier to just clean and put away those one or two things than actually have a conversation about it.

I decided what would help is to keep a Things That Irk Me journal, so I can bring things that annoy me into more conscious awareness and remember to proactively raise issues that recur when I’m still at a point of being calm and rational, not at the point of exploding.

It seems like the polar opposite of what a lot of teaching prescribes (like positive affirmations and gratitude journals) but for people like me who have learned to put others’ needs before my own, it is about awareness and taking ownership.

More importantly, I can have a calm conversation and not throw the others into flight or fight mode, which triggers all their unhealthy patterns and defenses. I did realise this when my partner, who had had a hard day, demanded “What have you done today, mm? Tell me, what have you done?”

Sound familiar? This was enough to jolt me into recognizing that we were slipping into a well worn path. Neurons that had fired together and wired together in the past were all being activated. This was the juncture at which I’d normally then become activated around not being seen nor appreciated (having had a busy and stressful day myself).

Becoming aware of it in the moment gave me power, the power to make a different decision. My internal chemistry was begging me to unleash the insulted defence. I knew if I did, in the terminology of the American Military defence system, we would move into DEFCON 2, next step nuclear war. And really, to give this perspective, over six or seven dirty utensils?

As I said in Change Unhealthy Reactions, every time something comes up that triggers me, whether into an addictive habit, an angry outburst, a place of terror or a depressive spiral, there is a moment in which I can choose a different path.

This was that moment. It felt not dissimilar to the cravings my partner described when giving up smoking. And to take that a step further, this isn’t just about willpower, it’s about healing the emotional signature of the early memories that started the pattern. If I was to rely on willpower alone it would leave me feeling like I had this constant cloud hanging over my head, that at any moment I might succumb to that chemical craving to just lose control and let the old familiar patterns take their paths.

I was reminded of that just yesterday when I saw a video of Brittany Watkins talking about her revolutionary method for overcoming emotional eating. Phrases like revolutionary method usually turn me off as it sounds gimmicky. But I was curious as it had been recommended by The Tapping Solution, who normally have their feet firmly planted in the ground.

It turns out Brittany uses a mix of tapping and a practice that facilitates a change in the emotional climate within us, which I know to be the real key in breaking free of any unhelpful pattern of behaviour. I liked her approach, it is simple and I can see that it would work. For an example of this type of work have a read through How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present.

With a mix of conscious self awareness, willpower and a willingness to heal, I am quite certain that breaking free of addictive relationship patterns is not only possible, but it’s our responsibility. Moving past the necessary dependency of childhood into the adult co-dependency that reflects back some things we need to change in order is just a process of maturing and claiming our best life.  

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present, What Addiction Has to Teach Us on the Pathway to Joy, What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)?, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries? and I Am Worth It – Are You? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog. 

I was reading some of Dr Ellyn Bader’s work recently on how, when and why to confront narcissistic behaviour; Dr Bader is a couple’s therapist who trains other therapists. She makes the point that narcissism exists on a continuum from the narcissistic features we all have, to a narcissistic style to narcissistic personality disorder.

Now I’m not talking about the extreme end of the scale, which tends to the more psychotic behaviour. My experience relates more to the middle ground, which I suspect is more common.
Dr Bader says narcissists emanate “I don’t need anyone. I am great, special, important etc, but I need you to tell me I’m okay and not wrong. And I won’t let on how important you are to me and how much you mean to me.”

In my experience, this is how narcissists often show up under pressure, sure. There is also the flip side: the magnetism, charm and lovely feeling when basking in their sunshine.

But I like Teal Swan’s explanation on how this type of behaviour arises to begin with - from a lack of attunement; it helped me to soften my approach. To recap from my deeper exploration of attunement in an earlier article:

“Attunement is the process by which we form relationships” Dr Dan Siegel says. “When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift to come to resonate with the world of another.”

As Teal then points out, “We learn attunement by virtue of other people being attuned to us. Ask yourself the following questions...Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me? Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not? Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way? How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

I would imagine as most people read this, they would recognise the lack of attunement in their own childhood, for being seen and not heard and do as I say not as I do have been predominant tenets of parenting for a long long time. Thus, as Teal also points out, dysfunctional relationships are the norm, not the exception.

She says “when our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:

1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience.

Or

1. being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm.”

I certainly feel the truth of this in my own life, in hindsight I can see I became hyper vigilant to others’ feelings and co-dependent in my relationships. It’s no surprise that each of these coping styles tends to attract its opposite and – while one is good at taking care of everyone else’s needs - neither is actually good at recognising and taking care of their own.

Dr Bader talks about how limitations show up in intimate relationships when narcissists are asked to be collaborative or extend themselves in a giving or nurturing way. And how they want to be adored/respected without doing much and put a major emphasis into career to protect their self esteem.

I definitely observe these traits. In my experience, narcissists:

• Lack empathy and compassion
• Like to be in control
• Are not great at teamwork

This doesn’t make for the easiest of relationships, particularly when children come along and more empathy and teamwork are called for if we want the children to flourish.

I also agree that a narcissist “rarely expresses hurt feelings directly in a vulnerable way, but instead expresses their pain in a hostile or brutal manner. Their defensive angry response becomes so offensive they many frighten or annoy a spouse who then withdraws or disengages.”

I personally have a tendency to get annoyed and withdraw to a point before eventually exploding.

It is clear from Dr Bader’s work that even many therapists tend to shy away from dealing with narcissistic behaviour, as the narcissist “likes to be in control and will often try to outwit the therapist and stay dominant.”

She therefore teaches how to confront undesirable behaviour in order to achieve breakthroughs and reminds herself “I know there is more to them than this angry, demanding criticism. I know inside there’s a part of them that doesn’t want to be so lonely”.

I find, though, that it is hard to feel sympathy for someone who’s constantly gunning at me, blaming me, and completely blind to any kind of struggle or challenge I have, never mind able to sympathise or appreciate what I’m going through.

But I’ve also found there is certainly a silver lining in being in adult relationships with people who display these behaviours.

As Dr Bader says “many people are stuck in symbiotic relationship patterns that impede the growth of each person and yet that is exactly where tremendous growth potential exists.”

What I’ve discovered with my partner and I, who have this narcissistic bubble versus hyper-attuned dynamic, is other patterns we learned from our early years then feed on this and have created predictable patterns in our relationship over the years we have been together.

For example, when our kids are told no and then go ahead and do what kids are meant to do and continue to push their boundaries, persistently challenging that no, it brings up an intense feeling of discomfort.

I wonder how many people heard “Because I said so!” when they challenged a no as a kid and then experienced their parents getting angry as a result? As Dr Gabor Mate says, it’s not our kids behaviour that causes a problem, it’s the anxiety it elicits within us in the form of these old ingrained emotional (more so than cognitive) memories.

In both my own people-pleasing case and my partner’s narcissistic one, it requires becoming more comfortable with feeling bad. Instead of me seeing these uncomfortable moments as a stick to beat myself up with or, as in my partner’s case, a burning hot potato to quickly pass on, we have the opportunity to really shine the light on our internal anxiety and grow past it.  

It’s taken me a lot of hands-on hours as the primary caregiver for my kids to work through that to the point I can now remain much more detached and objective when this happens. I’m usually calmer in the process, simultaneously holding a no while being compassionate towards their disappointment (I’ll add a disclaimer here though as I’m no saint and do crack under pressure now and again).

For my partner however, whose primary focus is usually outside the home, he’s not yet practised at this and – when challenged by the kids – gets frustrated. Simultaneously to whatever I have got going on in the moment I’m then also hyper-attuned to his discomfort and what’s going on emotionally for the children.

In typical narcissistic fashion, he then often expresses his pain by blaming me. Now, as a child, it was drummed into me to be a good girl and to always tell the truth, which I duly did, so when I get unfairly blamed for something I then get triggered. And if I’m getting blamed in the hostile manner of a narcissist... kaboom!

This well worn path becomes ever more intricate in its dance as one event triggers another, and we step on one emotional landmine after another. It is laughable when we have enough distance from it (which would be somewhere out in the stratosphere) certainly not anywhere near home anytime soon after one of these incidents have occurred.

There is a stigma attached to the word narcissistic, which is a shame because it’s unhelpful in owning and addressing the behaviours that alienate the people who display them. The same can be said of my own tendency to be hyper attuned to others and, as a consequence have poor boundaries.

In our case, it is something we now thankfully both recognise and own. For many years patterns like this have – as Dr Bader says – impeded our growth. But we have begun to discover that this is where the gold is, where the potential for our personal and relationship growth lives.

Just as I can learn to attune to my own feelings and develop healthy boundaries, so can someone with narcissistic tendencies. Teal mentions the potential is also there for them to notice others’ feelings, at first more intellectually, but over time more empathetically. This can then open the gateway to fruitful collaboration and teamwork.

There is also the potential in our parenting to break these patterns for future generations, a key driver for us, instead of blindly passing them on as they have existed for hundreds (if not thousands) of years.

I often reflect on my complete lack of awareness about my own poor boundaries for so long, or even an understanding of what that meant. What I did notice though, was the appearance of more narcissists in my life. I’d obviously been missing the signs for a long time and the universe decided to up the ante and send in some more blunt and brutal players and scenarios to get the point across.

I’m not saying I enjoyed the lessons - they felt brutal – and I’m not saying anyone should put up with a partner, friend, family member, colleague, boss etc who treats them badly. But I love what it’s taught me, I love what it’s shone a light on in terms of my own authentic growth.  

Just the other day a friend was talking about how she gets really upset when people are thoughtless. She was giving me an example where someone hadn’t turned up for a game at a club and hadn’t bothered to text. While there was no personal commitment to turn up, the previous week it had only been the two of them who had, so in those circumstances she would have thought to text the other person.

It took me back to that moment in my twenties when I was learning about different personality styles and I really started to understand that not everyone thinks and feels the way I do. Being wired to recognise others feelings in order to avoid bad feelings is very different wiring to disconnecting to avoid bad feelings. The chances are it would not even have crossed that other person’s mind to send a message as there was no firm commitment.

Because the interaction with narcissistic people can run so hot and cold depending on whether one is in their favour, it can be an emotional rollercoaster for all concerned. I know firsthand there is the potential for growth into something more mutually fulfilling, but I also know that unless the narcissist is self aware and willing to do this, the onus is on me to set more healthy boundaries.

I saw a post on Tiny Buddha this week that speaks to this. It says “Family does not mean: keeping secrets, walking on eggshells, lying to keep the peace, pretending others are healthy when they are not, tip toeing around the truth, attending events that derail my healing process, defending poor choices, engaging in toxic behaviour, remaining loyal to destructive patterns, or sacrificing my needs in an attempt to fix or save others.”
 
Whatever your experience with narcissistic people, I hope you have set healthy boundaries (or will make it a priority to learn to), because this is the silver lining I believe. With each of us being called into the fullness of who we are, aware of and attentive to our own needs, this world has the potential to really evolve.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Value Your Unique Perspective – Especially When You Feel Rejected, You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth and I Am Worth It – Are You? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

When I watched Tristan Harris in The Social Dilemma documentary recently, recommended by my partner, it had a similar impact as watching Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth back in 2006. While I already had a little insight into the additive quality and manipulative effects of social media across the various sectors of our society, I learned a lot from listening to those who created today’s popular platforms as they voiced their grave concerns.
 
Through a series of interviews with Silicon Valley engineers and executives who designed the technologies they now fear, the documentary explores this topic in an eye opening way, taking us through exactly how these platforms make money. As the documentary makes evident, it’s confusing because it’s simultaneously utopia and dystopia, trapped by a business model and shareholder pressure that makes it difficult for these companies to do anything else. 
 
The answer therefore lies outside of these companies. While introducing better laws and regulations, adapting the technology and the economic incentives seem obvious answers, there is a long way to go to catch up and I’m not yet seeing the sense of urgency and scale of action to achieve this in the near future.
 
On a personal level though, there are some immediate actions anyone can take, the most important of which is an inner shift to help navigate these sometimes treacherous waters. Firstly though, it’s worth understanding just what the real issues are. For this I highly recommend watching the documentary and doing some research.
 
But given the little understood and perhaps unintended consequences of social media, I decided to include the key take outs I got from the documentary as I believe it’s one of the most important issues of our time. If you have watched the documentary, feel free to scroll past the sets of bullet points and article continues below them.  
 
To start, here is an outline of the social media business model and how it works

• The three main goals of a social media platform are engagement, growth and advertising; the first two powering the potential for the third, which is where the money is made. All three of these goals are powered by algorithms that are designed to keep the numbers going up.
• Algorithms are optimized to some definition of success, in a commercial enterprise that is usually profit, they are designed to learn/change/improve/adapt as they receive more data
• The images we look at, for how long, what we are doing at any particular time. Data comes from everything we do online being tracked/measured/monitored and stored.
• Lots of data is great for making predictions, which is great for feeding you more to increase engagement, which means more targeted adverts and feeds, which brings in more revenue. It’s not the data that is sold; it’s the predictions that attract the best advertising dollars.
• These systems know more about us than ever imagined. All that data gets fed into systems that have little human supervision and are getting better and better about predicting what we are going to do and who we are.
• “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”. Though Jared Lanier says it’s not as simplistic as aiming to get as to spend as much of our attention as possible on these platforms “it’s the gradual, slight imperceptible change in your behaviour and perception that is the product.”

 
This leads to a number of key points around the unintended side effects regarding our self esteem created in the bid for our attention:

• Social media taps into our biological imperative to connect with other people, giving us the dopamine hit to keep us coming back for more. In effect, they are deliberately designed to be addictive.
• Edward Tufte said “There are only two industries that call their customers users: illegal drugs and software”
• Online connection, especially for the young, has become the primary form of connection, yet it’s financed through these sneaky third parties (advertisers) and we’ve put brutal popularity and manipulation (more about this in a minute) at the heart of human connection.
• We used to protect kids’ viewing, by regulating what they watched and what could be advertised at kids’ viewing times. Those protections and regulations do not exist within social media.
• This stuff is not designed by child psychologists; it’s controlling their attention, self worth and identity. In correlation with the introduction and widespread use of social media platforms, anxiety, depression and suicide have increased significantly, particularly in pre teen and late teen girls.

 
And now that these platforms have our attention, this has lead to perhaps another unintended and insidious threat, the potential and ease for manipulation:

• YouTube Recommendations’ algorithm, for example, is extremely efficient at keeping you online. It’s designed to feed you more of what you want and take you down rabbit holes that are powerful, so it’s trying to find out which rabbit hole is closest to your interests.
• A rabbit hole means that a person is caught up in going deeper and deeper into a particular subject and, at some point, making a detour to other places that are completely unrelated to the first thing you were looking at, but look and sound cool.
• Since there are many trillions of articles, videos and data in general available, and all of them are interlinked, you can spend literally days, months and years of your life researching a topic. For more on rabbit holes read here.
• MIT did a study that determined fake news spread six times faster ion Twitter than true news.
• Systems bias towards false information because it makes more money than the truth (something we have known for years through our other forms of media). The truth is often boring.
• It’s a disinformation for profit model. The system allows unregulated messages to be read by anyone for the best price. Facebook has trillions of these newsfeed posts, they can’t know what’s true and what’s not true.
• Because the platform knows so much about you (your likes, your triggers, your interests, even whether you’re introverted or extroverted etc) newsfeeds give you this sense, over time, that everyone agrees with you because everyone in your newsfeed thinks like you. Once in that state you’re easily manipulated.
• Others then think “How can they be so stupid? How can’t they see all this information that I’m seeing?” Well, they can’t, they are seeing their own unique feed.
• When that happens at scale, we’re no longer able to consume information that contradicts with the world view we’ve created, meaning we are not being objective, constructive individuals.
• “As a tool of persuasion it may be one of the greatest things ever created.”
• Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard Business School, shared that “Facebook ran an experiment using subliminal cues to see if they could get more people to vote in the mid-term elections, they succeeded. We now know we can affect users behaviour without them knowing.”
• To manipulate an election, you could go into a conspiracy theory group on Facebook, for example, and find one hundred people whose attention is gripped by the Flat Earth topic, or discussions on why we never landed on the moon, and say “give me one thousand users like that”, or one million, and you can feed those people more conspiracy theories to undermine politicians, parties or even systems of government.
• The manipulations by third parties is not a hack, they’re using tools built for legitimate advertising for nefarious purposes.

 
What perhaps struck me the most is that the inherent design of social media makes addiction and manipulation not only likely but necessary based on today’s business models. Here’s the final wrap up and conclusions:

• There’s no regulation, no rules, no competition, and the companies are acting like de facto governments saying “we can regulate ourselves”.
• Given the topics touched upon and the real world examples highlighted in the documentary that I haven’t gone into here (but everyone will recognise when they see), the technologists who created social media are perhaps not so silly to be worried about its ability to create civil war, to send democracies into autocratic dysfunction, and the failure to meet the challenges of global climate change due to its distraction, the collapse/ruin of the global economy and perhaps even an existential threat.
• It’s not that highly motivated propaganda hasn’t existed before; it’s that the platforms make it possible to spread manipulative narrative with phenomenal ease and relatively little money.
• It’s ability to create chaos, outrage, instability, lack of trust in each other, loneliness, alienation, polarization, populism, distraction, an inability to focus on the real issues; these are all issues we contend with today. Certainly its ability to bring out the worst in society is the real threat.

 
When I thought about all this, I realised my own experiences with my children and the sheer pervasiveness of YouTube, not to mention its inappropriate content and addictive nature, were just the tip of the iceberg.  
 
My kids used to watch YouTube Kids, but it was just too easy for them to interconnect with YouTube at so many turns. For those who think there are parental controls for Youtube, there are not. YouTube has one restriction mode and that is it, and it basically is an 18 and over restriction that you can click on or off, and all videos on restricted mode cannot earn money on You Tube, so it's basically only effective for porn type stuff.
 
Other than that the options are to sit with them and watch everything with them, or continuously go through and delete history, unsubscribe etc; there is also a complaint button. To block channels you have to create your own channel, and none of it is straightforward. How did we go from a society that only allowed mature content after 9pm and all content was screened to be age appropriate to this monster of a free for all?
 
My kids started to watch YouTube for EllieV and her lego building, which had mysteriously vanished from YouTube Kids for a while, and from there they discovered YouTube family channels i.e families that post fun games online, like their family navigating obstacle courses etc.
 
However, then it took a more sinister turn. The YouTube families (there are probably hundreds of them, but my kids liked to watch three or four in particular) started doing these Dollmaker videos, where they received a doll that seemed to come from a mysterious Dollmaker and took on a life of its own. Some dolls were good, some were just weird and creepy.
 
So there were my kids, age six and eight at the time, watching good clean, healthy family fun, then suddenly these weird creepy dolls turn up and the families play along like they are trying to get rid of these dolls but can't, then a member of the family gets possessed by a doll and will become a doll, and my children are wondering "is this real?"
 
I could not believe the blatant manipulation, nor the fact that I had no reliable way of allowing my kids to watch any of the content they enjoyed without falling prey to scary nonsense like that. Since then we decided no more YouTube. But its not easy unless they have zero access to devices, which they both use for listening to audiobooks and playing games for a couple of hours on the weekend.
 
I have had to go into the administrator function on our modem and block every conceivable YouTube web address I can find on their particular devices, and the devices only connect to the wifi while I download new audio books or games for them, so I am constantly having to connect/disconnect the devices. It requires a lot of hands on management to regulate their viewing, something I could rely in being regulated through TV or movie theaters.
 
I also thought of a good friend of mine saying one day during our lockdown that she’d “swallowed the red pill”. I vividly remember that she had then spent the best part of the night way down deep in a rabbit hole, over her head in conspiracy theories about COVID19. Ever since, through her, I have become more aware than ever of the conspiracy theories that exists and the lack of trust and fear they perpetuate.
 
It is easy to see the division and polarization that is happening; vaccines are a case in point. That I might question the efficacy of a vaccine all too often results in an automatic and derisory label of being an anti-vaxxer.
 
Knowing how sublimely our immune systems work when supported by the right diet and lifestyle, the fact that my kids had twenty vaccines by the age of four as a matter-of-course should be something I’m encouraged to investigate and question; it seems like a lot of intervention for burgeoning little bodies. But instead there appears little objective welcome on either side of the debate, there is however a lot of anger and fear.
 
So what is the answer?
 
The advice of the technologists is to uninstall apps that are wasting our time, turn off all notifications on anything that is not timely/important right now, and not to accept recommendations on Google search but to scroll down and choose your own and to think twice, three times, before hitting emotion buttons, likes and shares.
 
Reflecting on these recommendations, these were actions I’d already taken some time ago.
 
I don’t generally tend to participate in media of any kind, except when using it as a tool, because I know I can lose hours of my life. I know there is as much misinformation out there as there is information (although this documentary has perhaps taught me there may well be a much greater proportion of misinformation), and I only want to be sifting my way through all that when I’m actively interested in learning about something.
 
Even knowing this I still catch myself checking for new email or messages often.
 
The key question I began to ask myself with my device is “Am I using it as a tool? Or am I letting it demand my attention and manipulate my thinking?”
 
But why is it that I had come to those conclusions already I wondered?
 
Well, in part, I had learned the lesson about not engaging in media decades ago when I was self employed. Because it’s designed to be sensational and pull me in, I decided it was a time waster. I want to stay positive and focused on my own goals in life, not pulled into dramas I have no direct control over.
 
The other thing that has really helped me navigate the fears (of 2020 in particular), which are being fed by and prayed upon by social media in my opinion, is quite simple. It is an internal shift, the practice of observing my thoughts.
 
This has allowed me to notice when I’m thinking things that are putting me in a fearful state, which then empowers me to take action to bring myself back into balance. It’s like the game of hot and cold, the more fear I feel the colder/further I’m getting from my truth. The warmer/closer I am to my truth, the more peace I feel.
 
Examples would include topics like vaccines, or government conspiracy theories. As I sit here typing this I am aware through others that tomorrow is the date banded about online by which New Zealand would come under martial law, and a separate theory that it is also the day on which we will plunge into darkness as planet Earth shifts on its axis.
 
Now, if you are reading this it means we are past the date and we will either be in apocalyptic chaos or, well, we will be trucking along in the more chronic kind of chaos already well outlined in here. I do know someone though who is stocking up their food reserves just in case, and who urged me to do so because they do genuinely care about me.
 
How do I navigate situations that? I can feel the tension and fear in my body rise when these conversations are broached. I have to take some time to myself afterwards and really sit with the feelings and sometimes do a little research to figure out whether there is something I need be concerned about or not.
 
I wish to remain objective, and I know that to do so I have to work hard at creating space between me and the hype. So when a documentary comes along like The Social Dilemma, I have the head and heart space to take it in.
                           
To achieve this I meditate daily. As I discuss in Meditation – the Cornerstone to Your Success, it’s a practice of noticing when I’m thinking and letting those thoughts go, in short I become the observer of my thoughts rather than completely swept up by them.
I also make sure I take regular walk in nature to clear my head, practice yoga for my mind and body also, go for a swim to help me defrag, and so on. Actively making regular space in my calendar for these things gives me space on the inside.
 
Making that internal shift gives me perspective, keeps me objective, able to explore alternative views, and helps me maintain focus on the bigger picture of not just my own life, but life here on Earth.
 
As Jared Lanier wisely comments in the The Social Dilemma, even if only a small percentage of people change their social media habits as a result of the documentary, it’s at least creating space to have a conversation about how we navigate our future. Will you make the internal shift and join the conversation?
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Your Answers Are Within, What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, Stand in Your Own Truth and How to Be True to You When Life Pulls You in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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