Bridge healthy relational connectivity
Solutions to social media codependency & human trafficking
Excerpted from the original repost…
It's worth calling out specifically that social media is designed to keep you on the platform, to entice you to come back to the platform if your attention deviates momentarily from it, and to affect your functions in a way that causes you to be disinterested in other platforms (or, as many of us have experienced, disabled from being able to use other platforms).
There are infrastructural, algorithmic, and marketing methodology approaches that are layered into place in order to accomplish this; it's how colonial imperialism has tended to do business.
Where human trafficking methodology overlaps is also worth examining, because of the ways our relational neurology is affected.
Which is one of the reasons that I laughed again when I saw this memory highlighting, near the beginning of my Facebook tenure, that I noticed it being codependent.
Facebook and other tech platforms are actively using relational flows that can be abusive if you don't have enough resilience against them; if you don't have enough contact with stabilizing relational integrity in the rest of your life.
This has been crucial for survivors of extreme and invisible violence and severe disablement to recognize, because we are endangered by it if we don't have social structures elsewhere in our lives that protect us from it.
Many people without their own experiences of severe disablement don't realize this... and many don't realize why survivors can experience significant deterioration using social media and then disappear (sometimes permanently) from communities, for instance.
Especially considering the ways that Facebook -- and certainly not only Facebook -- has been known to seed conflict or influence public dialogue, we in the Intuitive network prefer to cultivate strong practices of bridging healthy relational connectivity.
We build bridges that assist everyone in repairing relational neurology, which is exactly what is needed to strengthen and stabilize survivors of other forms of relationship violence, especially in terms of intimate abuse and sex trafficking.
These turn out to be excellent toolsets for mitigating and preventing forms of relationship violence and interpersonal trauma that when facilitated by a complex large scale social media technology can look like something simple, like codependence.
I'm very lucky to have been able to recognize that, to have found other survivors of extreme trauma to collaborate with, and now to be able to verbalize it.
The bridges we build between very different lives, very different languages, and very different lived experiences -- these are a very powerful way to inhibit and eliminate predatory influences from our community spaces.
When we demonstrate respect, patience, integrity, kindness, and courage for and with one another -- regardless of what we might see differently -- we make it increasingly impossible for perpetrator networks and predatory interests to take advantage of our relational neurology.
This has been the most powerful work for me and I'm very grateful for what it's taught me.
When we practice this together, we change the way business is done.
We change the way marketing is done.
We create new flows of attuned presencing and collaborative fluency when we repair and revitalize our relational connections this way.
The tools of social media can be used by us to nutritive purpose; there is no need for us to allow ourselves to be used by them.
We are not a dead resource for commoditization and extraction.
We are beautiful, complex, creative, vital living beings.
We get to choose what happens next.