RAISING HOPES, CONCERNS
In 2010 today, we have sites such as Myspace,Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and more. Social networking has been the biggest and fastest growing way to build your business and maintain your relationships worldwide. It has given people another outlet to help them grow personally as well and even act as a support team for those that truly need it. But with every great invention or idea, it has his down falls. All too often these days you read articles and hear stories of another couple calling it quits because someone is spending too much to “facebooking” or “myspacing.”
Social networking has become more and more popular, with the easy to access relationship at our finger tips both day and night. The problem is that social networking can also lead to a slipper slop of addictions.
Jennine Estes was featured in Social Work Magazine, a national magazine for the professional social work field. Below are a few of the quotes from the magazine of the therapist addressing how social networking is important for therapists to understand and working with recovery.
Social networking, while built on the premise of helping someone form scores of new relationships online, may erode the real-life relationships with family and friends that are necessary for people in recovery, says Jennine Estes, MFT, a California-based therapist. For example, couples may be torn apart when one partner allows an online relationship to become sexual.
“Most of our society is driving toward having the ‘easy button,’” she says. “They expect working through recovery will be an easy process but in fact the opposite is true. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time for most people.”
She encourages professionals to get involved in social networking activities so they can see firsthand how the technology works and consider the implications.