Can Social Media Worsen HPD?

I have been coping with HPD pretty well for 3 months, because I had to make sacrifices and one of them was deleting all my social media accounts, that supposedly were too harmful for my stability at the time.

I wanted to know for those with HPD, how does social media make you feel? Because now that I am more in control I was thinking about reopening the react of my social accounts without having the fear of relapsing.

All you with HPD can surely understand where I'm coming from when I say I'm having trouble with this stuff

Hey Blondie1010,

I have no specific advice, but by analogy -

Many people have a drink now and then (just as many people use social media now and then) and that's the end of it. They enjoy it in small/reasonable doses, but don't need it to feel good.

Some people though drink to the point of it damaging their lives (and sometimes others).

So if you had a friend who drank to the point where it was damaging his/her life, and they had reached a point where they had entirely given it up for 3 months, and they were doing better, what would you advise them to do if they were pondering drinking again?

Blondie1010 wrote:I have been coping with HPD pretty well for 3 months, because I had to make sacrifices and one of them was deleting all my social media accounts, that supposedly were too harmful for my stability at the time.

I wanted to know for those with HPD, how does social media make you feel? Because now that I am more in control I was thinking about reopening the react of my social accounts without having the fear of relapsing.

All you with HPD can surely understand where I'm coming from when I say I'm having trouble with this stuff

Hey Blondie,

why do you feel social medias are harmful for you? Did you use them as a source for attention?

Hello, to answer your question, i did use it to get attention. It was mostly me being provocative, but in my mind I thought that was social media all about, so I took it too seriously without realizing that I was playing with people to get what I wanted. I don't know if any HPDs like me have or had the same problem.

Blondie1010 wrote:Hello, to answer your question, i did use it to get attention. It was mostly me being provocative, but in my mind I thought that was social media all about, so I took it too seriously without realizing that I was playing with people to get what I wanted. I don't know if any HPDs like me have or had the same problem.

Well, the need to get attention is a core feature of HPDs; it just can be expressed in multiple ways, for instance get attention by dressing provocatively, get attention by being "the life of the party" in a party, and so on.

The problem is that this need stems from a need of validation/being accepted, which in turn points out deep self-esteem issues. Do you feel to have such issues?

PS: If you want to read some interesting documents about core issues behind HPD and how the disorder expresses itself through common patterns, here are some:

http://maretwebproject.com/users/docs/histrionic.pdf
http://www.universitypsychiatry.com/cli ... _PICPs.pdf

The answer, for me at least, is yes, going off Facebook was huge. Fb is just one big "look at me", but also it's not real. It made me always think other people had it better than me, whatever " it" was, but it's just a facade. In short, I was very glad I made that decision. When I finally got back on, first thing I did was to delete 75% of my "friends". I kept only the people I actually had a true connection to and cared about. Now I moved to a new city, and I've been on more as I get to know people in the new place and need advice about various aspects of our new lives, but I don't post, or if I do it's not at all anything of a personal nature.

This is an interestint topic, and it would be of great use if more persons with HPD could comment on this, and perhaps address the following angle:

Since HPD results from environmental triggers affecting the development of certain areas of the brain (and more particularly such circuits coding for lower level mechanisms which are responsible for the ability to influence one's social surrounding to organize itself for provision of resource and care to the individual, as is necessary for direct consumption by children, and for shared / redistributed consumption in healthy adult female subjects), and since the brain development significantly slows down to a relatively insignificant level following an individual's early teens, there is no hope, with the current state if science, in permanently reversing the neurological portion of and HPDIs capacity for the extreme behaviours characterizing the disorder. There is however a great deal of opportunities as to (A) the degree of depression which can be instigated on the neural potentiation for such lower level mechanisms, as well as on the neural potentiation for related maladaptive defense mechanisms derived therefrom on a higher cognitive level (building up self-awareness, stress tolerance, healthy mechanical crisis response mechanisms, modulating supply from the environment, etc) such that these mechanism gradually cease dominating the lives of HPDIs, and (B) the degree to which the expression of these mechanisms (which cannot possibly be reduced to zero) can instead be channeled away from deleterious and toxic behaviours that destroy the lives of HPDIs and of their loved ones in an exponential manner (until either there is an accute change brought up to the HPDIs consciousness, or until the environment gradually ceases to reinforce these mechanisms) towards more benign, neutral, or even highly admirable behaviour.

The topic of Social Media is interesting because (1) they have the capacity to act as a tremendous source of social behaviour reinforcement for HPDIs, (2) they provide a substitute for social interactions and as such they have the potential to induce deep harm of the same sorts as that of any other social interaction (up to another individual's suicide as may be seen in teens or more fragile adult individuals), but at the same time, (3) provided strict adhesion to certain boundaries, it may be a great tool for people with HPD - and more especially for those in a relationship with a great person, married, with children or prone to abnormal levels of recourse to pathological sexual interactions as a source of supply - to channel their need for validation in significantly less harmful manners in early phases of "healing" until having reached a sufficient level of willpower, insight, and self-esteem to be able to decrease the need for validation all together (it's arguably better to get validation from thousands of likes on your last outfit than from losing the person who loved you the most, contracting/transmitting STDs, and forever influencing the perception that your children have from their dad/mum from getting validation by getting sex with one/several partner(s) displaying food-for-ego attributes, for instance).

Now from this, the following questions arise:
(1) To which degree can a new/different supply medium provide enough ego food to comparatively decrease the urge of using a highly reinforced pre-existing competing medium?
(2) To which degree can social media hyperpotentiate the underlying need for validation and thus also the overall behavioural expression of pre-potentiated means to satify that end (in quite an uncontrolled manner given the high frequency reward provision capacity built into the very structure of social media) vs the degree to which it may allow higher level transferal away from pre-existing validation media of a more harmful nature?
(3) How big are the risks / how hard can it be to enforce boundaries preventing slippage / bridging between social media and more harmful sources of supply?

Yeah i found it was really bad for me when i was in those periods where i just did absolutely nothing with my life other than lay in bed and then get really drunk in the afternoon. It was also really bad when i went through breakups because i would obsess about the ex-partners Facebook and that of all his friends. I deleted Facebook for some time and then when i got off the drugs i deactivated the entire account and started a new one which has like 30 people on it who are just my closest crew and family. I do find it useful for community groups, keeping up to date with my hobbies and interests so forth. I don't read comments, i don't scroll unless i'm feeling stressed out but then i also switch back and forth through my phone screens so it's not necessarily a Facebook thing.

I've done ######6 nuts things on Facebook in the past when i was manic like post a photo of me with fake blood all between my legs doing a leg spread wearing a velma dress up outfit. I have bipolar though too so mine went pretty hardcore at times.
Now i just don't want any attention from anyone unless it is a healthy relationship with my friends/family or my boyfriend chasing me around the house. And i'm happy with that