How to Manage Social Media Around Mother's Day
I appreciate how so many companies have an option to opt out of Mother’s Day emails. Our culture is moving toward greater awareness that days such as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can cause a lot of pain, as they tend to exacerbate the gap between the haves and the have nots. While the reasons vary, those of us recovering from abuse in the church might have a complicated relationship with this day.
My own relationship with Mother’s Day carries complex feelings. I came from a community that prized motherhood and groomed me toward this end. The fact I am not a mother and, therefore, am excluded from this day is an unwanted, subtle reminder that in the eyes of my former community, I failed at one of the greatest duties of womanhood.
Several years ago, I had to create boundaries with my own mother, as my work with survivors of Spiritual Abuse provided a new understanding of how my mother took part in the abuse in my family of origin. Since then, Mother’s Day has become a glaring reminder of loss. My mother still lives, but I’ve lost the illusion of a relationship I once had with her.
This day, along with many others throughout the year, are opportunities for me to create boundaries around social media as a way to care for myself. If you find yourself activated by photos with smiling families celebrating their matriarch, you are allowed to take care of yourself and take a break for a weekend.
On the holiday weekends I typically delete my Instagram app. I’ll extend the break through Monday or Tuesday, to avoid interaction with residual photos or people who posted late.
Holidays are also motivation to create boundaries with social media in general. Are there folks I follow whose content consistently activates me? Perhaps they post about causes I no longer support. Maybe they are still actively in relationship with one of my abusers, and I don’t have any guarantee that they won’t post a photo with this person. Maybe they don’t support my decision to speak out about abuse or share parts of my story publicly. These are all good reasons to rethink our social media relationship with these people.
Social media has options for addressing unwanted content of people we follow. We can restrict, mute, and unfollow people without them receiving any sort of notification.
We also have the agency to delete unhelpful comments or messages. We are the curators of any content that shows up on our feed. We can hide things we no longer find helpful.
And finally, if necessary, we can block people we find unsafe, so they no longer have access to anything we post.
If you choose to create boundaries around social media, even deleting your apps around particularly activating holidays, you have full agency to do so. Your mental health is more important than folks who might be disappointed if you haven’t posted in a while (helpful fact: very few people actually notice when you disappear from socials). Your mental health is more important than folks who might notice if you’ve blocked them. Setting boundaries around social media is for you and your health. Social media is yours to manage as you see fit, and you are not weak or selfish for managing it in such a way as to minimize activation.
Katherine Spearing is an author, trauma recovery coach, and founder of Tears of Eden. You can follow her on Instagram @katherinespearing