Today I was slicing some lemons for shish kabobs and so not surprisingly I began to think about social media, attachment and what constitutes an authentic relationship.
Authenticity was a key term when I was becoming a therapist in the mid nineties, and society in general. Today, most people I have spoken to in the mental health profession would say our happiness in part depends on having authentic relationships with others. Setting aside for a moment that we often talk about “authenticity” as if there is one monolithic thing that “everyone knows” it is, this belief in the connection between authentic relationships and happiness often gives psychotherapists, social workers and educators their moral imperative to discourage use of technology. That’s where the lemons come in.
Ten years ago, I met my friend Jackie Dotson on the bulletin boards of Psychology Today. These bulletin boards were designed for clinicians to have an online forum where they could discuss a range of issues, make referrals, and share ideas. They were also a place where early-adopting clinicians stumbled and experimented, behaved badly, gossiped and misspoke, as we tried to make sense of emerging technologies. I remember heated online conversations about whether the forums were private and “safe,” where people were startled to consider that anyone could cut and paste your confidential posts anywhere on the web. People were emboldened or perhaps I should say “emoboldened” by the relative anonymity on the forum to say things that could be breathtaking in both their vulnerability and/or sadism. It was the Wild West of mental health on the web.
My interactions with Jackie were few and far between when she and I were both active there. It wasn’t until I moved on from the forums to spending more time on Facebook that I think we really began socializing more. Perhaps it was because FB allowed for a flow of text and images, more seamless interaction, and chat. Whatever the reason, over the past few years my life has intersected with Jackie more and more. We have several mutual acquaintances from the PT forums, and a mutual friend with whom I went to college with. I’m glad I friended her.
From 3,000 miles away, Jackie has crept into my online and emotional life with the secret code of affinity that could only be shared via social media. We share a love of bone marrow as evidenced by our food pics, and she has forced me to rethink my stance in social media workshops I do where I used to announce to my audience, “Nobody wants to see your food.” Our dark wit and banter is present more days than not in my FB feeds, I’ve even taken more of an interest in my local sports teams so I can insult hers. In return she pretends to be a bigot on LGBT issues to bait me. Although I’ve never told her explicitly, she has reassured me when I worried about how my picture looks online, and comforted me when my city suffered a terrorist attack.
And then last year she started sending me lemons. Real lemons.
Jackie lives in CA, and has at least one prolific lemon tree. Last year she offered to mail a box of them to anyone of her friends on Facebook for the price of shipping. I jumped at the chance. They arrived within days and were enjoyed by my family immensely. So immensely, that when Jackie began posting pictures of budding trees this year, I grew quite impatient for them. They arrived two weeks ago, and for the past two Sundays I have used them for cooking. As I write this, there are chicken kabobs marinating in lemon and thyme for tonight.
Jackie and I have never sat down together for a heart to heart or face to face conversation, but we carry our connection to each other throughout our day with our smartphones. In the decade that we have been in each others’ orbits, I suspect we have each known deep sadnesses that we haven’t spoken of to each other. Yet I am convinced that if I ever chose to reach out to her that way it would be okay and vice verse. Not all intimacy needs to be acted on.
That said, for two Sundays, as I have chopped and squeezed fresh lemons, I have thought of Jackie and smiled. I have imagined her and our conversations as I move through my kitchen, while my brain alters levels of different neurochemicals and changes my affective state in ways that are real and comforting to me.
The stubborn adherence to imagining that technological use inherently diminishes our authenticity has been eroding the mental health field’s relationship with the people we work with for decades now. Friends and colleagues of mine in the tech industry are consistently amazed that I still need to educate and advocate with my peers about this. Our profession continues to act as if relationship mediated by emerging technologies is one step removed from other relationships, less authentic because we use our bodies in different ways to achieve connection with each other. I wonder if our dogs feel that we are less authentic because we have replaced smelling butts with eye contact and uttering sounds all the time?
I jest, in part because I doubt our companion animals feels as fearful of becoming irrelevant as many of my colleagues do. I think this fear is only justified to the extent that we are dogmatic about what constitute authenticity for everyone. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said:
Love is the only force which can make things one without destroying them. … Some day, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness.. the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
I do not think it is the role of the therapist to be the arbiter of truth in what makes intimacy or authentic relationships. Our role is to help our patients explore their capacity and harness their energies for love in ways that may go beyond the imagination our own experience affords us. It is not for us to give them fire as gods would, but to help them make themselves whole without destroying them.
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