Is Social Media Making You Do Things That You Wouldn't Usually Do?

Earlier on, whilst I was reading a paper, I came across a story about someone who said that they became a sex addict thanks to social media. This person said that they had got sucked into a social media site and this caused them to go down a path that they wouldn’t have gone down otherwise.

This person had uploaded pictures of themselves and this caused them to receive a lot of feedback from the opposite gender. Some of these messages involved positive comments about their looks, while there were others that were far more direct.

A New Life

Before long, this person went one step further and started to meet some of the people that were sending them messages. I’m not sure how long this went on for, but this person said that they had slept with over one hundred people during this time.

What put an end to this behaviour was meeting someone who didn’t treat them very well. Although this wasn’t a good thing, what it did do is wake them up the fact that what they were doing wasn’t what they wanted to be doing.

One Outlook

One way of looking at this would be to say that social media was to blame and that, if this site that they used wasn’t available, this wouldn’t have happened. This person is then basically a victim and the social media site is the perpetrator.

Therefore, the sooner something is done about this site, the better the world will be. And, if this is what a social media site can do to a fully grown adult, what hope has a child got?

Another Outlook

The trouble with this viewpoint is that this person wasn’t merely a victim; they also played a part in what took place. This is not to say that social media sites are not designed to hook people in, to destroy their self-control, and to make them addicted to dopamine.

However, this person made it clear that they were not in a good place before they became addicted to sex. Not only that, they had had a history of dysfunctional relationships.

An Easy Target

If someone ends up becoming addicted to sex, it is not just going to be about experiencing physical pleasure. Along with this, there will be all of the feelings that they are able to avoid through behaving in this way and/or it can stop them from feeling numb.

What this story didn’t say is that this person had had a dysfunctional childhood, yet this is probably the case. Perhaps this was a time when they didn’t get the love, guidance or the role modelling that they needed to develop in the right way.

Final Thoughts

So regardless of whether someone ends up becoming addicted to meeting up with endless strangers for sex or getting ‘likes’, there is a strong chance that they were out of balance to start with. To place the responsibly completely on social media would be similar to pointing the finger at the mould that appears on cheese after it has been left out.

If someone finds that they have started to do something that goes against their own values, it will be important for them to take a step back and to look at what they need to change. It might not be possible for this to happen if they have been behaving this way for a while; in which case, they may need to reach out for professional assistance.