written and filmed by Linda Lin, RCC RCAT
For those who enjoy longer-form content to pair with my newsletters and blog posts, I've just launched a YouTube channel where I'll be talking through topics I'm exploring and sharing in a different format.
Since 2019, something feels like it has shifted societally and relationally. Not to dampen the mood, but it feels important to name. In the therapy room, we’ve been witnessing deep feelings of nihilism, resentment, and disconnection. There’s been so much ghosting instead of closure or generative feedback, and more counter-relational ways of coping that seem rooted in fear.
We seem to be moving toward a culture where loneliness is managed through posting rather than personally reaching out. There’s such a fear of being alone, or of worst-case-scenario loneliness, yet many people still feel profoundly lonely within their relationships and communities.
Relationships, limerence, and the search for belonging and community already feel difficult to navigate. And now there are new Instagram features (like previewing stories without ‘seeing it'; create multiple story audiences, story rewatch insights…) rolling out that honestly scare the shit out of us. What do you mean there’s a paid version of IG where you can make a story appear like it’s for all your followers, while actually singling it out for the one person you’ve lost sleep over?
With so much of our lives happening digitally, passively, there’s a growing disorientation, grief, and a kind of anguish around how we relate to each other, and whether the versions of ourselves that knew how to belong still exist.
In this post and video, we're sitting with a question: how do we return to being genuinely relational? Things like tolerating feedback, knowing when to set boundaries, and being willing to move through the messiness and discomfort that real relationships ask of us.
This past month, I held many conversations with peers, friends, colleagues exploring relational patterns we're seeing in the therapy room and beyond, bringing in discourse on artificial intelligence and relationships. These talks sparked both grief and a sense of relief in me. Grief and relief in finally having a container to hold and express these reactions, a similar feeling to a canvas sturdy enough to carry all the layers we want to express.
“Avoidance is a way to stay close to the fantasy while staying far from the truth. You want a peak, the how-to, but you don’t want to be the one who does it (first).” – Care from Erotics of Liberation
What is the thing that never gets said?
Something interesting about this era we're in, whether we like it or not, is how both artificial intelligence and digital proximity can offer a kind of artificial sense of security. Artificial intelligence is a prediction model, generating responses based on patterns of what is likely. With AI, there's comfort in the idea that there is always an answer. But when we use it as a mediator in relational conflict, or as a response to feel like we are desired and right about something… the response it generates is shaped by the context we give it, drawn from patterns in its training and what's publicly available, rather than from immediacy.
Immediacy is when we practice naming what the air feels like between us, right now. When we speak to the pattern of how we're relating: what's alive in the room, what's being carried but not said. It's making space to address the space between: the tension, the coldness, the defensiveness, the avoidance.
What opens from immediacy is a spectrum of feelings, warmth, closeness, connection, care. The willingness to name what's hard is what makes room for what's tender.
That awareness, reciprocity and attunement, and courage to take something so subtle seriously, is what builds trust between people.
In the relational realm, when things feel uncertain and we don't have the spoons to meet that uncertainty, a deep fear can surface. A fear of rejection, of not being wanted, of being truly seen in a vulnerable way. We start to experience emotional mind games, where it becomes unclear who holds the ball and whose court we're in.
This spills into how we sense belonging too, and how we numb out or sidestep responsibility when relationships get strained. In an era of artificial proximity, how do we resist that pull toward desensitization? How do we stay genuinely open to each other when so much of our connection is simulated? Can we choose to stay more intentionally, more carefully, and keep building something real even when it gets hard?
As our team member Natasha puts it, it takes less than two minutes to reply to a friend, and we can do it from anywhere: in bed, on a walk, or on the toilet. It just takes some getting used to.
The challenge is how we stay in the here-and-now and trust our own knowing. I want to offer a gentle nudge: we carry so much more context than we give ourselves credit for, and the brain builds neuroplasticity when we challenge it to hold nuance, as we do when we navigate relational concerns.
Thanks for tuning in, friend ✮⋆˙
