Is everyone online mad at me?
Meg Josephson on how the internet enables people-pleasing.
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I sometimes wonder if I’m innately an anxious person or if my phone made me that way. As I wrote a few months ago, “With so many metrics about myself available for me to check at all times, perfection has never felt more achievable. I’ve never felt worse.” But why does perfection feel so necessary in the first place? Ask Meg Josephson.
You might remember Meg from 2023, when we deemed her the “one good TikTok therapist.” Her new book Are You Mad At Me?, out August 5, expands on her broader work with people-pleasing, including the “fawn” response (responding to perceived threats by appeasing the other party). It’s also deeply intertwined with social media.
The internet has added a whole new layer to communication, introducing uniquely modern anxieties along the way. Why haven’t they texted back? Why did they “like” my response instead of “hearting” it? Why did they view my Instagram Story but not say anything? Do my friends even like me at all?
In this interview, Meg and I talk about the root of these technology-induced doubts, the behavior that enables them, and the seemingly simple trick for fixing them that’s easier said than done.
I want to start with a quote from the book that really resonated with me in terms of how anxiety is affected by social media: “There are so many ways to tell someone you’re thinking of them and because of that, there are also so many opportunities to feel forgotten.”
I could have done a whole chapter on that.
Why don't you first tell me about the book itself and how it came to you, especially this specific subject of people being mad at you?
People-pleasing as a topic is out there, but I was really interested in this feeling beneath it, which is, “Are you mad at me? Am I in trouble? Did I do something wrong?” And I start the book in my first therapist’s office saying, “Why do I always think people are mad at me?” And it's a feeling I see in my private practice with clients, and it's a feeling that's been really familiar to me my whole life but I didn't always have the language for it. I grew up in a pretty volatile environment. There was addiction and a lot of rage and I was just always really on edge around my dad's moods. And I didn't realize that that was not normal, or I didn't realize that other people didn't feel that way.
As I became a therapist and dove into the world of trauma healing, this language around the fawn response was really the framework that made things make sense to me. In order to feel safe, I need to be on high alert. I need to be doing more. I need to be trying harder. I need to be hypertuned to what people think of me.
Why do you think people worrying that other people are mad at them is such a common anxiety?
If we're thinking of it from a childhood lens, I think it's the easiest safety pattern to adapt. If we think about the four threat responses, fight or flight, which a lot of us know; freeze; and fawn, fawn is the only threat response where we're so rewarded for it. “There's a good girl, you're so easy, you're so mature for your age, you're the glue of this family.” We're so validated being hyper-attuned to what people think of us and changing ourselves to fit that expectation.
And also it's rooted in craving external validation. And so it keeps the cycle going. We're craving validation. We get it. Okay, great. I need to keep doing that and lose myself to please other people. It feels safe to be good. It feels safe to be seen as perfect and likable. But then there's also this digital element that makes it prevalent now which, to the quote that you point out, there are so many ways to connect and so many ways to feel forgotten. There are so many sources of external validation. And because of that, when we're not getting that validation, we know that they could give it to us. So why aren't they? Are they mad at me?
What are some of the ways the fawn response and reassurance seeking show up online?
Definitely the expectation, just internally, if we're posting a story and my friend saw it. Why didn't she like it? It's like if we were in a room with someone and we were giving a presentation and they were just sitting there. It's like, wait, why aren't you giving me feedback? We're in a digital age where so much feedback is available to us, we feel disappointed when we're not getting the dopamine that we're anticipating. That feels so bad to the body.
I don't know if you watch The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, in the second season one of the moms presents at the CMAs. She goes on Instagram the next day and is like, “Wow, all of my friends are fake because I posted an Instagram from the CMAs and none of them acknowledged it.” And even though in the group chat, when she told them it was happening, they all were like, “we're so happy for you,” because they didn't all comment a compliment on her post about it, it instigated this doubt of, Maybe they weren't actually happy because why didn't they validate me online?
That's a perfect example. She had an expectation or a need that she wasn't expressing. Her friends maybe didn't know that that was her expectation, that they would all be commenting. I've seen this discourse a lot online of like, your friends are bad if they're not commenting on all of your stuff. I don't know if you feel this way as a fellow writer and online creator, but I never think that about my friends. I'm like, I post as my job. You would have to be posting so many times, commenting so many times a week.
Oh yeah. I have this newsletter. I have the ICYMI podcast. It's like, consuming all of those things would be so much to ask of them.
It's so much to ask. And so I think it's this unsaid expectation that a lot of us have that leads to disappointment. But it also speaks to this spotlight effect that I talk about in the chapter “Nothing Is Personal.” We expect that people are thinking about us as much as we think they're thinking of us, and for better or worse, they aren't. And in some ways, that's great because they're not noticing the cringe moments as much as we think they are. And then maybe they're not commenting on your posts because they're just scrolling. They're sitting on the couch, winding down, vegging out, and that's their downtime.
And the thing with social media too is there's this additional layer of self. There’s the, “What do they think of me?” And then there's, “What do people think about the me that I'm presenting?” The me that I'm presenting is essentially… my perception of it is entirely viewed through the lens of what I imagine other people are thinking of me.
That's how our minds are. We are egocentric people, not because that means we're egotistical. We have an ego. That's just how the mind is. And we judge ourselves through the eyes of other people, but what we end up doing is we project stories, our insecurities, we assume that they're thinking that about us. And the irony is sometimes it can become self-fulfilling. If the insecurity was like, “No one will take me seriously.” And then we're shrinking ourselves, we're being small, maybe people won't because we're shrinking. So it's a really vicious cycle.
Another uniquely digital anxiety I want to talk about is ghosting.
Abandonment is a lot easier now. In online spaces you can feel connected to someone in a way that we didn't used to be able to do, and you can immediately feel dropped by them. Whether that's because they unfollowed you or they stopped liking your stuff, they left a message, they didn't open it. There's so many ways to reach out and to not have the person reach back.
A lot of it for me comes down to trust in yourself. You have to get good with yourself in order to be okay that one time a post of your got this many likes but the next one got less. Rather than feeling hurt by that or like it means anything, you need to get to a point where you intrinsically believe that something is good, and your opinion of that thing isn’t swayed by likes or other outside validation.
It's hard because our bodies, again, are anticipating it. If something does really well, our bodies like, “Okay, new baseline. This is what I expect from everything.” When we don't get that, it's natural and makes sense to have this sort of let down because we didn't get that reward. And that's where the conscious mind comes in of like, can I separate that feeling from being tied to my worth as a person?
In terms of what we can do to cope: Do we just need to come to terms with the fact that online communication is different?
I think a pause is truly the people-pleaser’s best friend. There's a lot of urgency around people-pleasing. It's like, “I need to respond to this person right away” or “I need to get reassurance from this person right away.” Put the phone down, slow down in yourself before seeking that reassurance. It really is about soothing ourselves through the discomfort of not always getting that validation, as opposed to immediately seeking it.
Are You Mad at Me? is out August 5 and available for pre-order now.