The Social Media Spiral: When Social Media Gives You a Piece of the Truth

Let’s talk about social media…

As I write this, my current season of life is early parenthood so I am going to start with a relatively parenthood-focused example, but bear with me, because I am going to touch on social media from a non-parent perspective as well.

As a new parent, you want to get everything right.

For me, I find the posts saying “This is what your child sees when you pick up your phone” or “This is what will happen to your child if you don’t respond using this recommended technique” the most spiraling.

You often lock into articles or videos that teach you how to better support your child. However, social media can make this challenging because, while technically the messages are accurate, they are somewhat misleading.

Like in my example, yes, when you pick up your phone, your young child does see a distracted parent. At about 2 years old, my child started saying, “Get off your phone.” She was clearly aware of the distraction from me.

And it is okay for me to pick up my phone to finish a work email, text a friend back, or put in a grocery order.

I do not need to hide my phone every waking second of my kids’ lives, but that is almost what the post seems to allude to. This idea that your world must revolve around your children and you can’t upset them.

This is unrealistic.

Firstly, your kids can and should experience being upset. It teaches them to navigate it. They will be disappointed in life. You can’t—and shouldn’t—protect them from everything.

Additionally, the other post creates this idea that you must be a perfect parent and that good parents don’t make mistakes. If you’ve followed my other blogs, my therapeutic approach, or my courses on parenting, you know that this is another misleading message.

Parents can make mistakes. In fact, repair from a mistake is seen as much more valuable than the absence of mistakes.

Think about it realistically with me: you cannot protect them from every wrong in the world, harsh-spoken person, or disappointment. They will encounter them.

If you shield them from these instances entirely in their early years, you are robbing them of the opportunity to learn about these hardships and be taught how to navigate them.

Often, a child who is shielded from these instances becomes more reactive and more disrupted by these experiences when they occur in adulthood.

They’re the adult who doesn’t handle direction or inconvenience at work well, often making career and professional development more challenging. They’re the adult who displays intense anger or outbursts, almost mimicking toddler tantrums, when disappointment arises.

These are examples of a lack of learning about how to deal with these experiences.

So, You’re Not a Parent. This Still Applies.

Ever see a post alluding to the idea that your partner must not care about you if they don’t read your mind? Or maybe one suggesting that your partner needs to get their act together and start taking more initiative because they’re not being a good partner—and you’re the one suffering. Poor you.

Or the post that says successful couples shouldn’t have hard moments if they follow these specific steps?

Again, the ideas here are technically accurate, but the vague, limited detail is misleading.

Your partner may not care about you if they are consistently oblivious to you, or there may also likely be an attachment wound, past trauma, or another underlying reason why they are unable to focus on those details.

Maybe they are carrying a lot of stress from work or other areas of life and simply don’t have the capacity to think about grabbing your favorite snack on the way home from the store.

Past experiences can also greatly influence this. Not everyone was raised with the same model of “love” or “relationship values.” Sometimes we find ourselves in relationships where that creates a conflict.

And circling back around to conflict: there are many valid strategies for couples to use when navigating conflict, but sometimes reading them and trying to enact them isn’t enough.

It’s easy to get caught up in these videos—for me too. I’ll see one, especially on an off day, and think, You know what? That’s right. My husband needs to treat me better. And I almost forget that my husband’s life doesn’t revolve around me. He has his own plate full of stressors that impact the way he may be showing up that week. That doesn’t make him a deadbeat husband, even if that’s how the video makes it seem.

Sometimes there are valid barriers to enlisting the strategy, like the barriers I mention in “When Communication Problems Aren’t Really About Communication.”

So yes, the strategies can be helpful. But if you find yourself unable to facilitate them, be consistent, or find the right groove, that also doesn’t necessarily mean your relationship is doomed.

And Now to You, the Individual Who Isn’t in a Relationship.

Maybe you get stuck on the videos trying to diagnose you.

Or maybe it’s the posts that allude to the idea of “the right mindset” being a simple fix.

Or maybe it’s the posts that tell you if you tried harder and planned better, you’d be a successful millionaire, business owner, or someone who sits on wealth with no effort.

Same theme here.

Information can be technically accurate, but misleading.

There is much research showing that changing your mindset can be effective—Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, neuroplasticity/neuroshaping, etc.—and it is not as simple as “think differently, change your life.”

That’s where therapists step in a lot of times, because the work of “changing your mindset” is much more complex than TikTok made you believe.

The same goes for diagnosing.

Therapists and medical professionals receive extensive training—training beyond simply reading the diagnostic criteria that your reel just read off to you in a leading way.

Our job is to sort through not just the criteria, but you as a person and what you’ve been through, to accurately identify the etiology of your experience, which may be a diagnosis, and it may not.

I see clients finding relief in these reels because it gives them a label for what they’ve never been able to fully understand.

But others I see spiral in this way:

“So many of these diagnoses sound like me, and I feel like I am just a broken human.”

And I think this is where we have to be careful.

Social media can give us information. It can give us language. It can even help us recognize something about ourselves that we may have never had words for before.

But it cannot always give us the full picture.

Because you are not a checklist.

Your child is not a checklist.

Your partner is not a checklist.

And your relationship is not a checklist.

There is almost always more happening beneath the surface than a 30-second video can explain.

So the next time you see a post that makes you think, “Oh no, am I doing this wrong?” or “Is this what’s wrong with me?”, it may be worth pausing before you spiral.

The information may not be wrong.

But it may not be the whole truth, either.