I am really struggling and I need your help. I am 65 years old. Does that make me middle age or old? I have been told old and I am really not bothered by that. Having lost dear family
members who never made it to 65, I am blessed and grateful that I keep getting older and older, even if my back hurts occasionally. What I struggle with is wanting to share my fantastic book Feeling Better Beat Depression and Improve Relationships with Interpersonal Psychotherapy with the world and not liking social media. It is not that I have a lot against twitter, facebook, instagram, tic toc (which used to be musically) -I hope you are suitably impressed that I know that-it is that I have a short attention span, am not highly skilled with social media and don’t want to bore me or anyone else with repetitive daily information.
The reason I and my colleague, Ron Frey wrote the book, was that we wanted to share a
valuable highly recommended model of therapy called Interpersonal Psychotherapy IPT with as many people as possible. IPT was created in the 1960’s by Drs. Klerman and Weissman for the treatment of depression. It has been adapted to treat eating disorders, PTSD, post partum depression, medical illnesses and concurrent depression , bipolar disorder, etc. It is provided to adolescents, adults, geriatric clients, individually, to couples, families and groups. It is based on the premise that if you have good meaningful constructive relationships you will feel better and that is what happens in this short term (8-12 weeks) counselling model. You deal with reducing stress and improving your relationships. The client also knows exactly what they did to feel better so they can keep using those skills over and over again. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy CBT is well known. Its founder was a charismatic individual who promoted this model very effectively. IPT did not have that. Ron and I have been training and supervising clinicians for 20 years and want people to have access to this therapy.
Back to social media. Apparently in order to spread the word I need to tweet, blog, post, etc.
as frequently (daily) as possible. I don’t have that much to say. I could say the same thing over and over again maybe in a few different ways but I would bore myself and I assume anyone who would read/see my stuff. I hate daily positive affirmations and cute slogans-they just annoy me. I also feel bombarded by so much information that after looking for something to “repost” I stop reading after a few repetitive articles.
I don’t like to take pics of myself in my workout clothes as that is my usual attire even though I really don’t like to think I am vain-its that 20 extra pounds that bugs me, not the 5 extra pounds I would not mind photographing or complaining about. I tried to do an Instagram story but you have to hold down the “button” while you hold the phone at a distance to video yourself. This was not an easy task for me, almost like doing up a long zipper by yourself on the back of your dress or putting on a bracelet with a clasp with one hand.
I guess I could hire someone to do it for me, but I keep thinking I can do it myself and I never
quite get it done. Maybe I could just talk about my book and the model and the occasional
interesting idea I have or come across, and complain daily about social media. Would that get me followers or subs-subscribers as my 9 year old grandson told me?
Well I am going to give this the old college try and ask you for lots of advice as to what you
would be interested in and how I can make friends and influence people in this new social
media world. Any other middle/old age people out there feel like me? Maybe we can form an online group, if I knew how to set that up.