by VeritasCE » Mon Apr 30, 2018 12:17 am
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?