Social Media Psychology
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Welcome to Trulyfit, the online fitness marketplace connecting pros and clients through fitness business software. This is the Trulyfit podcast, where we interview experts in fitness and health. I’m your host, Steve Washuta, co-founder of Trulyfit and author of Fitness Business 101.
Meet Dr. Blair Steel: Licensed Psychologist and Addiction Specialist
Steve Washuta: On today’s podcast I have Dr. Blair Steel. You can find her on Instagram at Dr. Blair PsyD. She’s a licensed clinical psychologist and addiction specialist. Today the majority of our conversation surrounds what I call social media psychology. We’re going to pull apart trendy terms like “narcissist” and “boundaries.” We’ll talk about labeling personalities, and we’ll get into dark psychology. If you haven’t run into this on your socials, you probably will eventually, since it’s all over mine. I think it’s important for us in the fitness and health industry to understand these terms. We should know what’s trending in the mental health realm, not just the physical health realm.
I also want to give a shout out to Raquel Hopkins, the capacity expert on Instagram. She provides mental health services as a coach and a therapist, and we play a short clip from her later in the episode. If you’re watching on YouTube you’ll see it. If you’re listening, you’ll still get the context for what Blair and I are discussing. You can find everything about Blair at Dr. Blair PsyD on Instagram. With no further ado, here’s Blair and I.
Dr. Blair Steel on Reinventing Her Career in Psychology
Steve Washuta: Dr. Blair, welcome to the Trulyfit podcast for the third or fourth time now. For those who haven’t heard you the first few times around, give a brief bio of who you are and what you do in the medical and health industry.
Blair Steel: Thank you for having me. It’s always fun to come back on these. I’m a licensed psychologist. I started my career focusing on addiction, so I’m an addiction specialist, and I worked for many years in treatment centers. Now I’m evolving as a person, and so is my profession. I do a lot of private practice now, and I’m starting to build a niche around women and women’s challenges, so stay tuned for that.
Steve Washuta: What do you mean by your profession evolving?
Blair Steel: It’s an interesting job in that our mess becomes our message. Whatever era or state we’re in, we tend to work well within it. As a mother about to turn 40, I’ve been noticing what’s different around me, so I want to keep evolving within my profession as I continue to grow.
Steve Washuta: I think that’s tough for people. They tie themselves to a particular job, or a niche inside a profession, as part of their identity. Maybe you’ve worked in the addiction space for a long time and your energy for it runs low. You get to a point where you think, “I’ve been doing this for seven or eight years, I know I can do more, but it’s just not what gets me out of bed anymore.” I think it’s hard, at least in the personal training industry, to say, “I don’t want to do this anymore, I want to do something a little different,” even if it’s still interconnected.
Why Women’s Health Is Still Missing From Medical Research
Blair Steel: Exactly. What I’ve been finding, particularly from working in treatment for alcohol use disorder, is that women specifically bring a whole other factor to the table: hormone fluctuations. I’ve noticed trends of relapse in substance use disorder tied to PMS that no one talks about. So I’ve been taking a field I’ve been in and laser-focusing on the less-talked-about, under-researched areas within it.
Steve Washuta: That reminds me of a study on testosterone levels in jails. Natural testosterone in incarcerated men runs 20 to 40% higher than the average male. Researchers believe that’s tied to the risky decision-making that landed them there in the first place. Interesting.
Blair Steel: That makes a lot of sense. It’s also interesting how women have been left out of medical research for the last 40 years. People assume that’s because men designed the studies to benefit themselves, but that’s not accurate. A huge part of the reason is that you need a control group. Because women cycle, it’s hard to account for that variation. Men are just easier to study since they don’t have those variations, so they make a more solid control group when you’re trying to measure whatever it is you’re researching. For all my ladies out there, we could step back from the feminist viewpoint for a second and just look at the biology of it. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still need to figure out how to work within that.
Steve Washuta: That’s interesting, it makes me feel a little better about it.
Steve Washuta: Yeah, maybe the science is more difficult, but that doesn’t mean it’s less important. It still needs focus at some point. So today the majority of our conversation is going to be around social media psychology. How would you define that?
What Is Social Media Psychology?
Steve Washuta: My quick definition would be psychology terms used specifically in the social media landscape that get misused in certain instances. They can feel trendy to the average person because people are able to slap easy labels on things without much thought.
Blair Steel: I think post-COVID there’s been a wonderful addition to mainstream language and media around mental health, reducing shame and increasing access for people who need it. Those are genuinely positive things, all of them. But what I’ve noticed in society is that corrections tend to become over-corrections. There’s a theme now of people using these terms as a way to stay stuck. They reach for a label rather than actually feeling what’s going on, using it more as a crutch. I’m not saying that’s true of all of it, but there’s certainly something happening here. I’d like to bring some humor to it today. Not that it’s all funny, but it’s interesting how far we can take things.
The IT Band Problem: A Fitness Industry Parallel
Steve Washuta: It’s innocent, and it happens in my industry too. Somebody hears a term they’ve never heard before, and suddenly they see everything through that lens. In my industry, the iliotibial band runs from the hip down to the lateral distal femur. It’s not quite a tendon, not quite a ligament, and it connects multiple things. I don’t want to get too deep into the science, but people will say every problem from your knee to your ankle to your lower back is “IT band syndrome,” that you need to roll it out or stretch it, because it’s the trendy thing. It does factor into a lot of injuries and issues, but often it’s not the culprit. Sometimes it’s just a secondary characteristic rather than the main issue, not the main thing. People tend to see everything through one lens once they learn about it, rather than stepping back for the bigger picture.
Blair Steel: That’s right. My goal today would be to look at some of these terms and put a pin on the ones that tend to be overused or misused. That’s not to invalidate that they’re real for what they actually are, but we’ve over-generalized quite a bit.
Why “Narcissist” Has Become Social Media’s Favorite Insult
Steve Washuta: Well, let’s start with the one that’s been trending everywhere: narcissist. I’ve seen various definitions of this. Sometimes you could even read the definition and think, “Holy shit, I’m a narcissist.” It’s vague, and it’s thrown around everywhere. I feel like people use it as the ultimate pejorative. They’re really just trying to fire shots at you. They don’t necessarily think you’re one, but they know it sends a signal, almost to the extent of calling someone a pervert, that same kind of sting.
Blair Steel: That’s right, it’s a conversation-ender, not a starter. That’s one of the more compelling reasons people reach for it, sorry if that sounds harsh, but it’s true. If you’re the victim of something, you don’t have to do anything differently. You don’t need to look at yourself; you can make it the other person’s issue and leave it there. That’s a huge part of it. We can talk about the difference between narcissistic traits and narcissistic personality disorder, which is pervasive: a true lack of empathy, a true inability or lack of interest in considering others’ feelings, plus grandiosity. I could go into the diagnostic criteria, but people with NPD are a whole other ball game. Even still, if we want to have some compassion, should we make someone else’s disorder about us? If that’s really where someone’s at, it likely comes from a harsh mix of negative life experiences that led them to build such a fortress.
When Wanting More Out of Life Isn’t Narcissism
Blair Steel: It’s tricky, but you’re right. If you look at narcissistic traits broadly, almost anyone could be considered to have them. Wanting to go to graduate school, build a career, or take anything to the next level could be called narcissistic.
Steve Washuta: We’ll have a podcast about it.
Blair Steel: I was giggling because now I’m staring at myself, thinking, “whoa, is that me?” But right, it’s also statistically much more common in men than in women, and I think that adds something to the dynamic here.
Narcissistic Traits vs. Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Steve Washuta: Maybe we can go through the actual diagnostic terms. What exactly distinguishes someone having narcissistic traits from someone acting selfishly in certain situations without being a selfish person overall?
Blair Steel: Right, context matters, we need context. The way someone behaves at work may not be the way they behave at home. We were just talking about how our kids have to hold it together all day, and when they get home they may just want to be messy. It really depends. Here’s one that comes up a lot in dating: maybe someone didn’t call you back and you’re devastated. Maybe he just doesn’t want to date you. That doesn’t make him a narcissist.
Steve Washuta: Or the opposite. A lot of people I see who are habitual daters aren’t narcissists. They have low self-esteem, and they can’t sustain relationships because they have nothing else to offer after the first few days.
Blair Steel: Right, and here’s the thing. The point of mental health is to make us stronger. It’s to build resilience, and to build our capacity to tolerate adversity, negative feedback, and things not going our way. That is the point. If we’re using it to throw labels instead of reflecting, then it isn’t working the way it’s intended. These tools become shields rather than paths to growth. Mental health awareness is at an all-time high, which is great, but some of these trends are making people worse, not better. Let’s talk about it. I have three that are top of mind.
Dr. Blair Steel’s Top Three Social Media Psychology Red Flags
Blair Steel: The first one is turning labels into identity. Labels were meant to be for understanding, not for building a personality, but today people brand themselves with their diagnosis. “I have ADHD, so I can’t focus.” “I have an anxious attachment, so I can’t trust people.” Instead of working through things, people use the labels to justify staying the same. In some cases they even use them to weaponize their relationships.
Blair Steel: The second one, and I’ll keep saying it, is pathologizing normal life struggles. Not every challenge is trauma, not every difficult person is a narcissist, and not every workplace is toxic. Life is hard sometimes; that doesn’t automatically mean it’s harming you. When you pathologize normal struggles, you rob yourself of the ability to actually navigate them.
Blair Steel: And then the third one is an obsession with feeling seen, heard, and validated. At some point we stopped striving for growth and started chasing external validation. The need to be constantly seen, heard, and understood has become an emotional crutch. Here’s the truth: not everyone will understand you, and not everyone will validate you. That’s not a threat to your well-being. That obsession with external validation keeps people emotionally fragile instead of teaching them to stand firm in who they are, even when no one claps for them.
Blair Steel: I said three, but here’s a bonus: what the hell is even a “safe space”? Life doesn’t come with trigger warnings; growth requires friction. If you constantly need environments that cater to your emotions, you’re not building mental strength, you’re building dependence. True safety comes from knowing you can handle yourself in any space, not just the ones that feel good. Mental health should strengthen you, not weaken your ability to handle and engage with life.
How Attachment Styles Form, and Why Labeling Them Can Backfire
Steve Washuta: Going back to labels, the clip I played earlier from Raquel touched on people being put into personalities and then weaponized. It’s easy to act like you’re above it all. You throw a label at someone and use it to shut down the conversation.
Blair Steel: Right, and it’s also a way to keep yourself stuck. It’s like saying, “I have an avoidant attachment style, therefore I’m not going to try to build a healthy relationship, because I tend to dodge or run when things get scary or challenging.” We could talk about attachment styles more later; that’s definitely another trendy one. Just because it stems from our childhood doesn’t mean we can’t work on it or change. Over-identifying with something and owning it as part of your personality is tricky. It’s like people who lean on their astrological sign as an explanation for everything, saying “well, I’m an Aries, so of course I do this,” and moving on to the next thing. It’s similar, but now we’re doing it with mental health diagnoses, which misses the point.
Steve Washuta: This gets more into philosophy than psychology, but everything sort of interconnects. From a free-will standpoint, a lot of people dealing with this didn’t choose it. These personality traits were adaptations for psychological survival, and that’s part of why they are who they are.
Blair Steel: That’s exactly right. Picture a rainbow: even things like borderline personality disorder are adaptations. If the adults in a child’s life are inconsistent, hot-and-cold, and unpredictable, that child develops more of a push-pull attachment style. They want closeness but can’t fully trust it, for valid reasons, so they pull away. All of that develops to protect a child who has no control over their environment or the relationships they’re placed into.
From Adaptation to Maladaptation
Blair Steel: As you start coming down the other side of the rainbow, it’s worth asking whether that adaptation is still working for you, particularly once your environment has changed and you’ve grown and evolved. That’s actually why personality disorders can’t be diagnosed until adulthood; in childhood it’s just an adaptation. In adulthood it becomes a maladaptation: it works against you and can seriously impact your workplace and relationships. So yeah, a lot of this calls for compassion, both for ourselves and for other people.
Is My Workplace Actually Toxic? Pathologizing Normal Struggles
Steve Washuta: That leads into something else you touched on in the clip. How do you differentiate pathologizing normal life struggles from actual life struggles? Is my workplace actually toxic, or am I just being picky about a boss who’s asking me to do what any other boss would ask?
Blair Steel: That’s definitely something where we need resilience, not necessarily thick skin. There’s a point where we start expecting every space to cater to our needs or feel emotionally safe. I’m not saying some workplaces aren’t toxic; some genuinely are, and we hold space for that, that’s a real thing. But when it’s overused, it starts to feel like my sense of wholeness or security depends on external factors I don’t actually control. That’s not a place I want to live. If you’re in a job like that, you have two choices: learn to work within it, or find another one. It’s one or the other.
Steve Washuta: People like to complain, and there are always other options. Sometimes that means getting away from the issue. Sometimes it means counseling or help to get from point A to point B, which is harder. But I think sometimes people in a bad job or workplace should ask: what about everyone else who works there? If there are 14 other people and no one else is complaining, it might be time to be introspective.
Learning to Coexist Without Losing Yourself
Blair Steel: I do want to circle back. I know it’s not easy for people to just up and change jobs, and options aren’t always plentiful. But there’s something to be said for managing our expectations of others and figuring out how to coexist within a situation. That might mean finding an ally in the workplace, or understanding that a coworker’s behavior has nothing to do with you. If they blow past you in the hallway, you don’t need to spiral. Your self-worth shouldn’t depend on whether they greet you. We can be a little more sturdy in who we are. We can also be more mindful of how much we let other people affect our mood, our self-view, and how we see the world around us.
Steve Washuta: Yeah, and I think it’s sometimes difficult without really good friends or a really good partner who can reliably tell you if you’re full of it or telling the truth. If you’re dealing with a difficult coworker, a good friend might point out that you said the same thing about your last three jobs. So is it that you keep getting bad coworkers, or that your expectations of coworkers are too high?
Accountability Culture and the Rise of Boundaries
Blair Steel: One of the most amazing things these days is that people don’t get away with things like they used to; just ask certain people in the media right now. If there’s an actually toxic or sexually abusive situation happening, and that’s real, people are held more accountable, and there are proper channels through HR for real discrimination. That’s a positive thing. Just ask Diddy.
Steve Washuta: Exactly, well, I was going to bring up boundaries next. This isn’t controversial: I think he crossed some boundaries.
Blair Steel: He got away with it for a long time, but you don’t get away with things like that these days, and I like that. I think we’re held accountable across every service and industry now. If you’re doing something that’s not okay, it’s going to come out.
Steve Washuta: I think, for better or for worse, that’s largely thanks to social media. Take something more disturbing, like police officers doing improper things. It used to be that reporting it would hurt you long-term. Now you actually want to report it, because it’s going to go viral. People will catch it, they’ll get in trouble, and you’ll be left alone. Social media has helped make those scarier situations more visible, and scarier for the people doing wrong.
Blair Steel: That’s a great example of where power and retaliatory behavior can come in. Now there are body cams everywhere, and we’re all going to see it eventually.
What Boundaries Actually Are (and Aren’t)
Steve Washuta: Staying on the boundaries conversation, we touched on how kids at work now operate in different environments than before. I remember a funny story from one of my first jobs. As an intern, I was completely overloaded with work, and all I was doing was opening emails: new task, new task, new task. Eventually I sent a message up the ladder saying I’d only be opening emails at nine, one, and four. They sent back something like, “Go screw off, you’re an intern, you open your emails all day long.” Looking back, I was so low-level I probably should have sat down with someone instead of sending that email, and said, “Here’s what I’m thinking. If we can’t do this, can we do something else similar?” I do feel like the younger generation now draws boundaries faster than having the conversation first. They feel offended, and they draw a line.
Blair Steel: It’s important to talk about what boundaries are, but also what they’re not. A boundary isn’t an expectation that someone else does anything differently; it’s a statement of what I’m going to do, and only that. For example: if my mother-in-law wants to talk about parenting styles, a hot topic for us, I’m going to walk away if that comes up, rather than expecting her to drop the subject.
Boundaries Are About Your Own Actions, Not Everyone Else’s
Steve Washuta: Like at work if coworkers are talking politics. Or in casual situations where people bring up things you’d rather not discuss. You’re not trying to stop them from continuing, you’re just being clear about your own actions.
Blair Steel: Right, that’s the essence of it. When I talk to people about boundaries, it’s about their own preferences and their own deal-breakers, not anyone else’s. A good example is parenting: I’ll physically move my body between my daughters if they start hitting each other. That’s what I’m going to do. It’s not “if you do this, then I’ll do that,” which puts an expectation on someone else to behave differently. It’s very much about your side of the street. I think on social media, boundaries get twisted into “if you don’t respect my boundaries, I’m cutting you off.” That doesn’t feel right to me, especially when someone’s suggesting cutting off family members. You have to be careful and delicate around that.
A Simple Framework for Healthier Boundaries
Steve Washuta: I think that happens a lot now.
Blair Steel: It calls for more sophistication around it. I like to draw a picture for people to put it into perspective: three stick figures. The first has a rigid boundary, like they’re in a box. I think that’s where social media has taken it, and it sounds like a lonely space to me. We’re interconnected whether we like it or not, and we need relationships. The person in the middle has no boundaries at all, saying yes to everything, and ends up overwhelmed and resentful. Imagine if, in your workplace example, you’d met with your manager and said, “This doesn’t seem efficient, how can we work together to make this work?” It probably would have landed differently. The goal is really the third figure: a kind of perforated boundary, where you know where you stand on things. It’s like saying, “here are my boundaries, this is where I stand on X, Y, and Z.” A new person coming in is met with a different message: “Because I value myself and have self-worth, I want to make sure this is a good situation for me. But there’s definitely a path in.”
Blair Steel: There’s often an over-correction, particularly with women. We were programmed to be everything for everyone, to take care of everyone else, and if we had needs, it was often framed as complaining, so you learned not to bring it up. That certainly didn’t serve people well for many years. But if we over-correct the other way, that doesn’t help either. Finding the balance in between is the sweet spot.
Setting Different Boundaries With Different People
Steve Washuta: Do you think it’s wrong, or how would you deal with the situation, if you set those boundaries differently for different people? Say hypothetically you have a good friend, Diana, who lives across the street. And someone else who’s maybe not as good a friend, Sally, who lives down the street too. You’re okay with Diana stopping by any time, but not okay with Sally knocking on the door unannounced. How does someone frame that in their mind and feel okay with it, or is that not okay?
Blair Steel: Yeah, I think that’s okay. We don’t have to explain ourselves as much as we think we do. If you tell a friend, “this is what works for me, please call or text ahead of time so I can give you the green light,” and they don’t respect that, it says something about the dynamic of the relationship. Maybe it was born out of self-abandonment and people-pleasing on my part, if I let someone consistently overstep what I clearly stated. You can absolutely state a boundary that way. I actually did this recently with a neighbor: “Please text ahead of time,” because my kids are chilling, and if a bunch of kids show up unannounced, or we have homework to do, that doesn’t work for me. It went fine, but I think it makes people squirm.
Steve Washuta: It probably takes practice to get comfortable with that.
Why Setting Boundaries Feels Uncomfortable at First
Blair Steel: It does. Especially if you were more of a people-pleasing type, it’s not always received well when you start saying no. It can come out sideways at first if you’re still getting used to it. I think it’s like a muscle: the more you do it, the stronger you get. But finally mustering the courage to say no or decline an invitation, the people in your life might respond with, “What’s gotten into you?” There’s a real hump to get over. It’s hard to make change at baseline, and we usually need to feel tension to motivate it. If you’re changing a behavior that’s always gotten you positive reinforcement, like people-pleasing, where you’re seen as a great employee who “does the most,” you initially get negative reinforcement instead once you start to change it. You really have to push through that.
Steve Washuta: It might feel almost inauthentic at first, like you’re searching for your voice for that kind of statement because you’ve never done it before, like, “Is this even me saying this?”
Blair Steel: Or you might approach it apologetically at first, with nervous energy: “I’m so sorry, I hate to say this.” But what’s beautiful is that once you start doing this, you become more truly seen than you’ve ever been. Your relationships improve. People with poor boundaries tend to hold a lot of resentment and loneliness. They can even be dishonest in a way, because they’re saying yes when they mean no. When it’s real and authentic, it’s a beautiful journey. But when a boundary is used as a shield, a way to make no changes myself while expecting you to change, that’s when we’ve missed the mark. That’s what tends to get misconstrued on social media.
Dark Psychology and Manipulation Tactics
Steve Washuta: Well said. Have you heard the term “dark psychology”? It was a trendy TikTok term, I think, something to do with communication tactics that are psychology-based but used for negative reasons.
Blair Steel: I hadn’t heard of it before, and I’m not on TikTok, but I’m sure it’s out there, that doesn’t surprise me. The dark web is a murky little reservoir, and there’s a lot of manipulation out there.
Steve Washuta: One example she talked about was telling someone a “secret” to get them to trust you, even though it’s not a real secret. It comes off to me as more of a sales tactic than something evil or conniving, almost like tactics a bad salesperson would use, not necessarily a manipulative partner or friend. It’s very salesy to me.
Growing Out of the Habit and the Vocabulary
Blair Steel: Yeah, that sounds crappy. When I think back to my teens and 20s, it was so easy to say, “Yeah, Mom, I’m going here,” while actually going somewhere else, without a second thought or a care in the world. As I’ve grown, maybe as my prefrontal cortex has developed, the burden of holding a secret or a lie just sounds exhausting, it sounds like a lot of work. I don’t encourage it. I’m sure teens today have a lot of information but not a lot of wisdom, which is an interesting place to be. A lot of what we’re talking about is people taking psychology terms and reshaping them into whatever they think they mean, without really engaging with how the term is actually used. It becomes vernacular that maybe shouldn’t be brought into the psychology realm at all.
Steve Washuta: That’s a great point. There’s a lot of information available, but when the wisdom to apply it isn’t there, it doesn’t work. You need both to work in concert, and that doesn’t seem to be the case here. What other trendy terms or conversations do you see in your industry that make you think, “I hope this stops”?
Dr. Blair Steel Breaks Down Attachment Styles
Blair Steel: I love attachment styles, I wanted to bring that up. I see it a lot in dating, where people feel hurt and disappointed a lot, and really seek to find a way to make it about the other person. A big one is the “avoidant attachment style.” Just because someone didn’t return your call or text doesn’t mean we need to pathologize their ability to form a healthy relationship. For a quick 101: a secure attachment style is basically like having parents who provided safety. They let you go off and do your own thing, and were always there for comfort when you came back. There’s a lot of trust there, in yourself and in your parent. That’s the ideal. With an anxious attachment style, your parents may have done everything for you and wrapped you in an emotional bubble, so you might need a lot of reassurance and validation.
Blair Steel: Back in the day, if someone acted that way, we used to just call them “annoying.” I’m cracking jokes here, and I don’t want to sound callous to the real parts of this. But when it’s misused, some people are just annoying, not “anxiously attached.” If it’s flipped, the avoidant partner calling the other person “anxious attachment” can also be spun in a way that’s not accurate. It’s important, particularly if you keep attracting the same type of person and it keeps not working, to ask what it is about you. What is it that attracts, or is attracted to, that type? That’s such a valuable window into yourself, rather than pointing the finger. I think that’s the purpose of understanding these things: to reflect, not to hide behind them.
From Insight to Enabling: When Understanding Becomes an Excuse
Steve Washuta: And one would think, if the pain is strong enough, for lack of a better term, you eventually make the correction, like anything else.
Blair Steel: That’s right, sitting in the tension is when we actually make change happen. Another term you hear a lot is “enabling,” being an enabler. What that actually means is crossing into someone else’s lane and removing some of the tension from their own consequences, like bailing someone out or making excuses for their behavior. If you really want someone else to change, but you keep cleaning up their mess for them, they won’t feel the tension that would actually motivate them to change.
Are Attachment Labels Applied Fairly to Men and Women?
Steve Washuta: Do you see these attachment-style labels being applied equally to both genders, or is that not the case?
Blair Steel: I see it more often as a standard pattern of women labeling men. Is that where your head went?
Steve Washuta: That’s what I assumed, that when these labels get thrown around online, it skews more pejorative and more women-to-men, rather than how you’d apply it clinically, from an actual mental health standpoint. From your standpoint working with clients, sitting down with actual patients, do you feel like certain attachment styles are more gender-specific? Or would you use these labels for both men and women equally?
Blair Steel: Working clinically with someone, sure, it can be helpful to notice someone’s patterns regardless of gender. But as a clinician working privately with a person or a couple, I’m really motivated to go beyond the label and focus on what we can do today. We’re all adults who can actively work toward making changes within ourselves, in how we communicate and how we approach people. That kind of work can fully disarm an attachment pattern or relationship style entirely. Say there are two people in a relationship and one is trying to change while the other isn’t. That’s what I want to talk about, not “you’re this because of that, and you’re this because of that.” That kind of blame game isn’t productive whatsoever.
The Therapy Fallacy: Why Insight Alone Doesn’t Heal
Steve Washuta: You could do that through something like evolutionary psychology instead, saying “this is just millions of years of adaptation,” and never actually analyze or fix anything, instead of looking at the individual.
Blair Steel: Right, it’s just another way to intellectualize and stay numb to it. I’ve written before about the “therapy fallacy,” the idea that once I figure this out, I’ll heal from it. I wish that were true. Once we map out the path and where we want to go, that’s an important step. But the real healing comes from taking it beyond the intellectualizing, bringing it below the neck, and actually feeling the discomfort and sitting within it. That’s where healing actually comes from, not avoiding our feelings or constantly trying to feel better, but working to actually be better.
Social Media, Addiction, and the Search for Community
Steve Washuta: As someone who has focused on addiction, at least for a period of time, do you think social media helps in that space, or does it exacerbate the issue? How should someone, whether a counselor or a person themselves, navigate whether it’s hurting or helping their recovery?
Blair Steel: It completely depends. Social media itself is designed to be addictive. You get quick bursts of dopamine that drop off fast, so by nature it’s worthy of that comparison. There are pros and cons. The pros: community is awesome. Addiction and recovery can be a really lonely, isolating space. Seeing millions of people who’ve gone through the same thing and gotten better, or who are still sitting in it and struggling, can make you feel like you’re not alone. That’s beautiful. It’s also great for self-care tips.
Blair Steel: The cons: I’ve seen that taken way too far, needing to do eighteen things every morning between a cold plunge and peptides and this and that before you can even function like a human being. That can become excessive, because we’re taking something outside ourselves to make ourselves feel better. Fitness is certainly a healthier route than most. But if we’re still avoiding things, and still ending up in the same place we don’t want to be, then it’s just another version of the same pattern. We should be actively working to not just feel better, but to actually be better, in a way that doesn’t require external validation. My change should be sacred to me because it feels aligned with how I want to be, not because I need anyone to notice it.
Community vs. Comparison: The Double-Edged Sword of Social Media
Steve Washuta: Going back to community, I do think it’s really important in that space and many others, for people dealing with addiction, depression, or anything similar. The online space has opened that up in a positive way, letting people hear each other’s stories and connect virtually in ways that weren’t possible before. So I think it’s a net positive for that community. But I actually think it’s a net negative for the average person who isn’t looking for community. Someone who considered themselves happy and successful, who didn’t have real issues with their life, ends up doom-scrolling and thinking everyone else has it better than they do.
Blair Steel: I would, I would absolutely agree with that.
Fitness Influencers, Fake Photos, and Public Accountability
Steve Washuta: I see that a lot as a problem, and obviously it’s huge in the fitness industry specifically. There’s a guy, his name evades me, who has a whole IG account calling out people who doctor their photos, and he’s very good at it. He’s a professional photographer, so he can tell, not just by eye but by inspecting the digitized data behind an image, whether a photo is original or not. He’s essentially saying, “I’m not going to allow this fitness-industry fake bullshit anymore, I’m calling you out.” It doesn’t matter if you have four million followers like Kim Kardashian, or just four hundred. If you’re faking your photos, this guy is coming after you.
Steve Washuta: You could apologize and admit you fake your photos, but if you lie about it, he doubles down. The message is basically, “let’s keep this real.” Some of these people are in amazing shape, at 7% body fat, competitive bodybuilders even, but they’ll still tuck their waist or exaggerate their biceps. It’s not helpful for the average person to think that’s what real, attainable bodies look like. I think it’s good that there are people on the other side pushing back and holding folks accountable.
Blair Steel: Talk about holding people accountable. I feel like a lot of industries are held accountable in ways they never were before, and I like that bubble bursting.
Steve Washuta: It can go the wrong way too, though, the overcorrection you mentioned earlier. You don’t want people chasing validation by calling others out as their whole personality, because that just makes someone an angry, jaded person.
Blair Steel: I think it’s a hard way to make friends, that’s for sure.
Where to Find Dr. Blair Steel
Steve Washuta: This has been a fantastic conversation, Blair. Why don’t you let everyone know where they can find more about you and what you do? What should people do if they want to reach out to you personally or professionally?
Blair Steel: You can find me on Instagram at Dr. Blair PsyD, that’s also my website, drblairpsyd.com. Thank you so much for having me, this is always a blast for me.
Steve Washuta: I’ll put the IG handle and the website in the description. Dr. Blair Steel, thanks for joining the Trulyfit podcast.
Blair Steel: Thank you so much for having me on again.
Thanks for joining us on the Trulyfit podcast. Please subscribe, rate, and review on your listening platform. Feel free to email us at social@trulyfit.app, we’d love to hear from you. Thanks again.
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If you want to hear more from Dr. Blair Steel on boundaries and family dynamics, check out this blog: Modern Parenting: Dr. Blair Steel.
