#i've done such a good job at deleting folks from my phone

[hillbillyoracle]

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[thistherapylife]

I know your mother had untreated BPD & that for awhile you had trouble interacting with people with BPD as a result & it was something you were afraid you wouldn't be able to work with. I'm curious how you got past that. I'm very open about the fact that I have BPD but have found that a lot of people will assume things about me because of it and I've had a couple friendships fall apart because of friends whose parents had untreated BPD. It's frustrating and hurtful because I'm in treatment (z 1)

& dealing with my issues. I highly value self-improvement. I actually find that it seems like I’m working harder on myself than many of the people who are judging me for my disorder. I really believe that speaking openly about mental health is how we remove stigma in the long-run. But in the short-term, I’m finding that people aren’t giving me the benefit of the doubt & are assuming things about me that just aren’t true. I’m wondering how you got past that, so I could get some insight? Thanks!

Oh boy. First, I think it’s very admirable that you are seeking help. It’s hard! And a that’s a lot. 

Chances are you are not going to like my answer. Because you are asking about the personal, I’m asking in the personal. Not in the professional world. Clinically, I was afraid I’d have too much counter transference and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to  separate my personal experience from my professional self. My answer might be hard to read. It contains explicit descriptions of child abuse and suicidal ideation. Again this is the time to get off the ride if you you are in a place where negative experiences with someone with untreated BPD or child abuse. Chances are I’m going to get a lot of hate mail (note: I’ll just delete it) but I hope that this random response is helpful. It makes me nervous to share all of this. It’s not easy for me but I’m trying.

It wasn’t a while. It was decades. Literally, I’ve made this shift in last 3-4 years. It’s new. If someone in my social circle disclosed they had BPD before we come friends, I don’t know if I would stick around which is the exact issue you are dealing with. I would have to overcome a lot of my own responses and it’s a fuck ton of work for me. 

Would my mom have been abusive if she hadn’t had BPD? I can’t answer that. I don’t know. But I know the two are entwined for her. The abusive elements of my childhood that have stuck with me the longest are all around the more typical symptoms of  BPD (fear of abandonment, feelings of emptiness, extreme emotional swings, explosive anger, paranoia, suicidality). I can’t express how bad it was. I can’t express how hard it is was. I couldn’t have emotions or desires. I can’t get comfort or have needs. {Proofreading this made me realize I slipped tenses. I’m leaving it in. It’s hard to talk about it} I wished for death early and often because my life was so painful and frightening. I felt like my mom was going to die and that it was my fault. Why wouldn’t I believe my mom right?  Her attitude and her interactions with me meant that other abuse wasn’t uncovered for years because who could I tell? It was chaotic and terrifying. I’d take her when she was hit me any day over years of psychological abuse. She’s threaten suicide. She left me places as punishment. She drove away when I “didn’t listen.” She told me my chronic pain didn’t exist.

Literally, I remember having a panic attack when I was in elementary school because I couldn’t stop myself from crying on the way home from school because there was no way for me to know what would happen. Would my mom blame me? Try and kill herself? Comfort me only to use the information later against? I got blamed for freezing her out and told that I could “Make your own damn food. I should make you walk home. You don’t know how lucky you have it. You know what? DON’T EVER COME TO ME FOR ANYTHING EVER AGAIN. I can’t believe I have such an ungrateful daughter. What did I ever do to deserve this awful child? You’d be happy if I killed myself. I don’t want to hear your response - I know how you feel. Leave me alone. Go live with your father”  By the morning, she greeted me like nothing had happened. I was no more than 10.

This is the smallest snippet of the first 14 years of my life. When I am in a social setting and start experiencing any of these things, my instinct is to run for the hills because I got out. I’m not getting back in. It takes a lot to swallow those protective instincts and make a different choice in my personal life especially when I’ve worked so hard for those boundaries and have to do a lot of this stuff professionally. I’ve had a ton of therapy. I feel like I’m a pretty good person who had long lasting, nurturing and loving relationships in a lot of different areas. But getting here was so much fucking work thanks to my history. I spent the first year of my relationship terrified to tell my partner when I was really upset with them. It’s still hard. 

Off the top of my head, I have three friends with BPD, one I’ve known since I was 12, one I met two years ago and an online friend part of larger friend circle. I’m pretty close to the first (invites to the house, lunches, etc.) and the second is in between acquaintance and friend. Friend 1 is in recovery, Friend 2 is working on it (ish) and Friend 3 is at the earliest treatment stages. I still have very strong boundaries. I have to limit myself with anyone in my social circle who needs constant emotional or physical needs (obviously I’m not talking about recovering from a loss or a surgery or even a bad year for friends who have I been friends with for a long) because I can’t just give and give - Its work to maintain the close and loving friendships, the mentoring with young people I do, the other kids in my life, my partner AND still take care of myself. And I love my job you know? I have to have space for that and I don’t when I’m getting 3 am phone calls and texts. I don’t hate or judge the folks in those positions. I just can’t handle it in my personal life often. That is 100% on me NOT on them. None of the people mentioned above are abusive towards me. But sometimes I find myself very triggered and have to give myself space. I get that impulse that says that “this is dangerous and someone is trying to use you.” 

This is NOT to say that you, or anyone else, with BPD in treatment, don’t deserve lasting friendships. You do. You absolutely deserve supportive friends. And I bet your work your ever-loving bum off to make changes to your life. I bet you will find them. It just might not be with particular subset of people who have an untreated BPD parent. I can’t speak to anyone else’s experience of an untreated BPD mom - just me. But I can hypothesize that fear and history are a huge part of it. These prospective friends might not be in a place to hear that you are in a different place than their experience. They may be assuming that their historical experience is what will happen now and be afraid. It takes me a while to figure out and I’ve done a fuck ton of work. Everyone gets to make the choices that keep themselves safe. 

Please be gentle with yourself. Keep working, keep trying - you might want to explore some of the issues around the friendships and how to navigate that with your current therapist. 

[topicprinter]

I have a few projects / small businesses I run and I've had issues staying consistent on their social media channels. This has to an extent held back some of the projects after good initial growth. A part of that is getting through the honeymoon period and staying motivated but I think there's a few other things I was doing that started to act as a barrier to consistency.Some people seem to thrive on social media and enjoy using it both personally and for their business. They’re predisposed to reaching for their camera or their phone, they’re energised by the effort and attention instead of being drained by it. If that sounds like you, you probably don’t need to read this post! Social media just feels more like work to me. It just doesn't come naturally.That’s compounded by the fact that I value privacy and being present in the moment over sharing publicly in my personal life.. values which are becoming more and more out of place in this modern world. If I could delete all my social media, live comfortably, and surf every day, I would! But that doesn’t gel with running a small business or the way I do live my life so I have to find a balance.So having said that, this post is as much about ways I’ve found to help me stay consistent on my business’s social media channels as it is about ways to avoid it consuming your life and time.What’s the goal of your social media marketingIt’s for your business right? The goal is to make money. You need your audience to buy your products or service.Buuuut, social media is playing the long game. The number one function of social media for a business is to build a relationship with its audience. And it’s hard to build a relationship if you’re always trying to sell them something.You want your audience to have a good feeling about your brand and get to know and trust you, so that when they need or are in a position to buy what you’re selling then they will come to you.Why social media consistency is important for your businessYou are trying to cultivate relationships. I’m sure you have that friend or acquaintance who you don’t hear from for months on end and then hear from out of the blue and they ask you for something.. how do you feel about that person at that moment? That is why social media consistency is important above all else. Don’t make your business that person.Your audience is bombarded by advertisements and information all the time. There are other businesses and distractions always fighting for your audience’s attention. Keeping on top of social media keeps you in the front of your audience’s minds.There’s an old adage in marketing called the Rule of 7 which states that a business has to reach its customers seven times before they’ll take action and buy. The number isn’t important but the idea that you have to have consistent positive contact with your potential customers is.To stay consistent is to stay relevant, and to present as reliable. So, without further ado, here are some things I’ve learned.Don’t put too much pressure on yourself for quality and perfectionA big problem I had with my social accounts for my surf photography business is that I set the bar for content too high. I was only posting images that I was ready to print and sell. It was a vicious cycle because I’d feel like I’d created an expectation in my audience for the type and quality of content that I would post and I felt pressure to live up to it.This meant I wouldn’t post photos taken with my phone or other content I could create and share quickly and easily, even though I’m sure those kinds of posts would have contributed to the goal of building a relationship with my audience.I still want to post quality content, but I’ve realised that that can come in different forms. This lets me relax and have fun with it a lot more.Only use as many social media channels as you can handleThere are so many platforms. In an ideal world, your business would be present and active on them all to make sure you reach aaaall your potential customers. But if it’s just you behind the scenes, it’s not realistic. Social media can be a full-time job and you’ve other business tasks to focus on, never mind actually having personal time too!It’s made worse if you have multiple projects. I run surfpreneur.co, a surf photography business, I’m a surf and SUP instructor, and I do a couple other things.. At first, I was determined to have separate social accounts for all my projects. That quickly adds up. Am I going to run three Instagram and Twitter accounts, two Facebook business pages, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat…? Absolutely not! It’s overwhelming.I’m lucky that most of the things I do online are related and can be grouped together in a ‘personal brand’, so I’ve recently changed my strategy to mainly running only one Facebook business page and one Instagram account. I’d rather be able to focus on one or two channels and give them the attention and effort they need than to spread myself thin over multiple channels and end up neglecting them all.Instagram is most relevant to my core audience. I’d be quite happy just using it.Make coming up with post ideas a breezeEver get the feeling that you should post something but you don’t know what so you give it a few seconds thought and then put it back on the to-do list to be ignored for another day? I do the easy stuff on the list first and then procrastinate instead of doing the difficult tasks. But I still feel like I’ve accomplished something! You know..It’s all about making it easy. I have a list of different post types for my social channels that I can mix up and have a constant variety of different post ideas. For example, my Instagram account’s list is:Prints on the wall / customer photosQuality water photographsLifestyle phone photos (behind the scenes)GoPro clips of surfingPhotos taken of me surfingI combine having a list of different post types with keeping an eye on competitors and industry leaders in my niche for inspiration on how they use social media. I’m never stuck for ideas!It’s also a good idea to keep a couple posts in reserve so if you’re having a slow week (normally for me when there are no waves), you’ll still have something to post.Make it as easy as possible to make a postIf you make posting on social media easy you’re more likely to actually do it. We’ve all got our phones on us all the time, so if you’re not setting a restrictively high bar on quality you can have a convenient and quick process from idea to post.For phone photos, I do a quick edit on my phone using Snapseed and then post directly to Instagram. I’ll do the same for Facebook. I have a Twitter account but it’s not my favourite platform by a long way so I’ve set up a Zapier process to automate posting my Instagram posts to Twitter. I don’t think this is ideal but if it means I post more and spend less time on social media then I’ll take it! I can still make posts unique to Twitter if I have a post that suits that platform better (like blog posts!).You can make use of other online tools to make the process easier as well depending on your needs. I’ve used Buffer in the past and I found it helpful for scheduling posts on multiple platforms in advance.Once your post is done, it’s doneI can’t help it. When I post something I’ll check over and over on how it’s being received. Likes, comments, shares. Refresh. Likes, comments, shares. I’m trying hard not to do this.It’s worth remembering that when it’s done it’s done. It’s just one social post in a constant stream of thousands of posts all over the world. There are apparently 500 million Tweets sent each day or 6000 every second.I like to think of Twitter as a big theatre completely filled with people all screaming their opinions out and ignoring everyone else.Just let it go and get on with something else!Keep a schedule / content calendarThis is something I’ve not yet committed to for social media as my channels are more in the vein of a ‘personal brand’. I’m getting away with posting whenever I have shareable content from the various things I do. But it would allow the right kind of small business to set aside a little time every week or month to schedule all their social posts at once. That would be a significant timesaver and almost guarantee consistency.Consider hiring someone to helpAt the end of the day, you can spend as much or as little time on social media as you like. But to do it well, spending more time intelligently is the way forward. If your business or project is making money it’s worth considering the cost of the time you spend updating your social media channels. Could you spend your time better elsewhere? It could well be worth hiring a freelancer to do some or all the work for you. But then you’d have to give up some control..As small business owners, we often have a perfectionist, almost obsessive, personality type. We do all the work and make everything happen ourselves. We are extremely invested in our own success. Combine that with social media and you have a dangerous combination when it comes to mental health. Find a balance that suits you.Here’s an interesting piece from Forbes about social media fatigue in small business owners.This was originally a blog post which you can read in full here if you are interested: https://surfpreneur.co/stay-consistent-social-media-marketing/Anyway, thanks for reading. I hope you've found this helpful. This is a problem I'm always battling with as I'm not really a social media person. I see it as a necessary evil as opposed to a guilty pleasure or anything like that.I'd love to hear different opinions on how you folks deal with social media fatigue or burnout and stay consistent? Cheers!