And back to blogging (or how I shut down my private practice and resumed the act of using social media as an extension of my Social Work practice), and what the implications of that are.

One of the first parts of personal collateral damage during the immediate COVID-19 pandemic was my private practice. New York State allows those licensed at the LMSW to function (within the scope of their practice) to hold a private practice. I enjoyed that privilege, while also having a wonderful public practice. However, I found it both 1) untenable and 2) unethical to move into telehealth and to be, in essence, in competition with my Public Practice agency. My private practice, while not clinical, should not ever have the possibility of being construed as such. That left not much choice. However, in these times, we have to make the rightest choice, and since we have to socially distance, the rightest choice was to close up shop, and so the choice was made.

When I was first hired at my agency, our CEO let us know at our new hire orientation that the best practice was to lock down and close off our social media. I – vocally – raised my hand and shared that I had professional profiles set up as extensions of my practice and that my Social Work practice extended to the internet, and that I didn’t really plan on closing off that aspect of myself. My CEO warned me that if this was the case, that I would be held responsible for what I said and did online. I shared that I was, quite literally, fine with that. I’m very much okay with being held to account for my words. That remains as true today, as it does almost two years ago now when I started with the agency where I have developed and built and nurtured my public practice.

This does not mean that I don’t have a private social media presence – I have a very well detailed social media policy about just that. It’s for a lot of really good reasons, among them guidance from the University at Buffalo School of Social Work, and the National Association of Social Workers on the use of Technology. It’s also because I like to have a good work/life balance, and I don’t want articles on Trauma-Informed Care to come up when I’m looking at my Gamer/Gaming handle (#ThatGaymerLifeTho). Guess what? I’m okay with being held to account for my words there. Words and actions matter.

I have been a prolific journaler my whole life, and many of those entries are here, saved from the great LiveJournal/Russia-gate (they are behind a protective wall because they would be inappropriate to share at this juncture in my life). I was inspired by visiting Freud’s office on my last trip to Vienna (one of my second homes). Not that I view myself as Freud (or make the comparison) but I was moved by his boldness and bravery in the combination of the personal and private of his writings being displayed together, and it convinced me to move past part of my own propensity to compartmentalize all aspects of my life. That said, writings will be shared as appropriate, and it’s in my will that upon my passing all of my writings will be made open/unrestricted in the hopes that some poor grad student will come along, and among the academese and the flotsam and jetsam and remember that all of us are just people.

So the implications are now that, I continue – as I always have been – to be responsible for myself, my actions (my behavior, my responses to others’ behavior), and my words online and in person, and now I feel a sense of obligation to write, and to produce, and and to generate information that is useful. I also feel the obligation to use this as a sort of…virtual office…not in any way to see patients, or to provide “advice” (which Solution Focused Brief Therapists don’t do, as a rule, and no good therapist should do period)…but as a place to be virtually accessible to colleagues….a Salon for ideas.

To that end, I now have the benefit to returning to using this space not for marketing, but as a vessel to think, to ponder, to consider, to write, to ideate, to share, to postulate, to hypotheize, to think, and to be; so with the death of my private practice, welcome to the rebirth of my digital social work presence.

Welcome, please make yourself comfortable, and take a moment to connect with your breath. You are safe here. You belong here. No matter where you are on your life’s journey, I am happy that you’ve decided to join me here.