I like writing blogs, because I want them to be a way that everyone can access good quality, evidence based psychological information. There is so much out there which is inaccurate or just plain wrong, and then a lot which is just opinion and conjecture, so I wanted this blog to be a place to get information from Clinical Psychologists, which helps you look after yourself and others.
As part of my role as a Clinical Psychologist I do quite a lot of training of various groups in businesses, charities and the NHS. In this training I try to be authentic. I talk about my flaws (there are many), the mistakes I’ve made (again, many!) and the challenges of parenting, of looking after your mental health and of navigating life. I think this is important in Psychological work.This feels safe to do, and I think helps build the relationship so that the training can be more useful and meaningful.
But this is much harder to do when writing a blog, and as a result, every time I write a blog I struggle with being ‘real’. For a start there is no person/people I’m directly speaking to, and I have no idea who will read this (apart from my lovely brother who seems to read all my blogs – hi Bro!). This means it’s hard to build a relationship based on mutuality. The people who might read this are so diverse (parents/young people/adults, different life stages, different countries, different cultural experiences, different experiences of health and wellbeing etc) that it’s hard to pitch when you want to be inclusive.
And then there is the difficulties around sharing information with no control over where it goes. When our practice first got a therapy dog I was planning to update the blog regularly, talking about her progress with her training. And then 3 weeks in I got a random email asking for my address which frightened me because I was concerned someone wanted to steal the dog, who was at that point still a puppy (no idea if this is why they were asking but it was a bit suspicious).
The internet is a funny thing. Whilst it allows us to connect and to learn, it also opens the door for different forms of exploitation and risk. It’s for this reason I never write about my family in the blog, where as I would (where relevant) bring these experiences into a live training session. This means I feel less authentic when I write the blog, and I’m also sure that it means the blog is a little less helpful to some people, because it’s not obvious that is is based both on professional training and lived experience.
I grew up in the days before the internet existed, and yet some of the conversations about the impact of the internet on young people are familiar to me. I can remember being at secondary school presenting in a English exam about the impact of magazine images on young girls. Now we have social media, the same arguments are being raised like they are new. What is new though, is the democratisation of information with anyone able to post and share. If this was truly democratic then we’d be able to share whatever we wanted – pictures of us sitting under a duvet on the sofa wearing two jumpers to keep warm (as I am doing now in chilly January) as well as pictures of us fully made up, dressed up to the nines and ready to go to a ball. But we tend to only share the latter, and overall it is hard to share all of ourselves. How people will judge us based on our online information is a real worry.
And sometimes this worry is mirrored in real life as well as the virtual sphere. I often see young people who feel unable to bring their real selves to school, or even show it to their parents at home. They are anxious about the response they will get. Will people dislike them? Will they be angry? Will they be upset? Often we end up masking as a result. Putting on the face we think people want to see, saying the things we think we are supposed to say, hiding how we feel from the very people we wish we could share with. This can feel uncomfortable at the very least and for some hugely distressing.
So in this sense, I’m in good company, struggling to find the right ‘voice’ for the blog. It’s a struggle we all have. We have to make decisions about how to keep ourselves safe but balance this with our mental health and wellbeing. Sometimes anxiety gets in the way of this and we go too far, masking when it would be safe to share, hiding when people would value our true selves. Where could you be courageous and share something of yourself in order to feel more settled and authentic? Good luck with being real.