The secret life of social media and validation

Q: How much do we use social media for validation that is – or has been – missing elsewhere?

Recently I’ve been thinking about the adult impacts of what our inner child misses. I talked about our desire to feel good about ourselves – to attain, progress and succeed in a way that society deems viable. It seemed to really resonate with a lot of you, and I wonder to what extent our relationship with Instagram is a reflection of that?

Ponder this with me: Often as children, we did not get our emotional needs met. If you’re a parent or a grown-up child and that sentence is triggering to you – I understand. Many of you will have had happy childhoods and been well loved, looked after and provided for, but what I am talking about is something different to that. Having positive memories of your childhood and simultaneously not having your emotional needs met are not mutually exclusive experiences. Meeting the requirements of a child’s emotional needs is a huge undertaking, and one that requires the caregiver to have mental availability; to have healed from their own (personal and generational) traumas; and most importantly, to have a robust and abundant sense of self worth. How many people do you know in a societal model such as ours, who could be described that way? I suspect very few. Spoiler: that’s not a coincidence.

For the most part, we find it very difficult to meet the emotional needs of our children because its absence from our own lives means we don’t know what it looks or feels like. When you felt sadness, shame or rage as a child/teenager (normal, healthy emotions), were those feelings held and validated or were they shut down, rejected and distracted from? Were they used against you or weaponised as ingratitude? Were you made to feel like they made you unlovable or problematic?

When the full spectrum of our feelings are not validated and unconditionally embraced, there are big chunks of our self-worth missing. Our internal narrative becomes “I’m lovable when I..” rather than “I’m lovable.”. Does our innate human desire for inclusion and acceptance water down our worth for glimpses of validation, however temporary or inauthentic?