Social media can be a great way to connect with potential clients but it can also be a place that is filled with hostility. This stops many therapists from either setting up a page or from posting on it.

Some of the worries I've heard about from therapists include saying "the wrong thing", being publicly corrected, receiving criticism and being subject to a "pile on". So in this first of a series of episodes around social media boundaries, I explore how you can make your therapy page feel safer for you to use.

Drawing on my own experience of managing online communities and navigating difficult interactions, I share how you can protect your wellbeing and those of your followers - so that you can feel more confident to reach people via your page.

Takeaways

• Why social media platforms thrive on outrage
• What to do when a comment or interaction leaves you feeling shamed and upset
• Why it's important to regulate before responding
• Creating boundaries around comments, messages and engagement
• Deciding on what atmosphere you want for your page
• Why some interactions don't deserve a response
• Choosing spaces that are the right fit for you
• How boundaries can help you feel more comfortable and confident online

I also share some ideas for social media posts for July 2026, including themes around body image, friendship, loneliness, grief and summer family life.

For information about my training courses, please click HERE and you can find out more information about Therapy Growth Group HERE

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My website: josephinehughes.com

The information contained in Good Enough Counsellors is provided for information purposes only. The contents of this podcast are not intended to amount to advice and you should not rely on any of the contents of this podcast. Professional advice should be obtained before taking or refraining from taking any action as a result of the contents of this podcast.

Josephine Hughes disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on any of the contents of this podcast.

My husband has just said to me that social media is like an abusive partner.

It knows exactly how to manipulate you.

It's trained to know what's really going to wind you up.

All it's interested in is keeping you on the platform to sell you stuff.

If that's the case, how can we as therapists safely go on social media to reach clients and still look after ourselves?

Welcome to Good Enough Counsellors, the podcast for growing a private practice without the pressure to be perfect.

I'm Josephine Hughes, counsellor and creator of Therapy Growth Group, helping you get the clients you want and create the practice of your dreams.

When I was trying to think about what to include in this episode, I was actually on social media.

And I've listened to a really good podcast recently on a subject that I'm very interested in and someone has written an opposing viewpoint and published it in quite a right wing site.

And because Facebook knows that I'm interested in this particular subject, it put this in front of me and I must have spent at least 20 to 30 minutes reading through the comments, thinking about what I was going to say, composing an answer, writing an answer out, deleting the answer, and on it went until eventually I thought to myself, what am I doing?

Because I don't want to engage on a right wing site.

It's not my politics and all I'm doing is I'm feeding the algorithm, I'm feeding the rage machine and that's what a lot of social media is about.

So at that point when I came to my senses, I didn't post anything and I walked away.

I wonder if you've ever been in that situation where you've read something that really winds you up and you really want to reply to it.

And it might be that it's in a counselling forum, for example, and you might find yourself getting involved in a discussion with people or it might be something just generally that's out there.

But I've certainly been in the situation where I've felt all hot and bothered and I want to say something and then I get involved in an argument and it doesn't really help anybody because I'm not going to persuade them and they're probably not going to persuade me either.

As my daughter says, you know these Gen Z's who are so much more computer literate than a boomer mum and mum, you're never going to persuade someone, never going to change someone's mind on the Internet.

And I think that's sort of quite a helpful thing to remember at Other times, other things that have happened is I might say something without really thinking about it and then I get into terrible trouble for it because I maybe haven't thought it through.

And then what can happen?

And I think this is what quite often can happen in counselling forums, because, you know, we're quite sensitive people and we read something and we might answer it quickly, someone else might pick up on it and get upset by it and answer us and suddenly we find ourselves in front of our colleagues and we get that sort of terrible feeling of shame.

What are we doing?

And you feel as though you're the most ignorant person in the world and you haven't been aware of perhaps a different way of looking at it, or you just said it quickly and people have responded and you' think, oh, that's not really what I meant.

And it's so difficult to untangle it.

And those sorts of interactions just make us want to slink away and never post anything again.

And this is not in ancient history for me.

This has happened to me really recently and it's part of what made me think about doing this episode.

Because I think what can happen is when these sorts of things come up on social media, it can really put you off using it.

And I do hear from people who are in my group and they often say things like, I'm a lurker and I'm frightened of saying the wrong thing.

And I think, particularly recently, I think perhaps the way social media is used has got worse, perhaps it has changed.

But certainly within my Good Enough counsellors group, I feel that before the pandemic there wasn't as much outrage, really.

And now we have to be really careful.

People feel a lot less able to share online, I think, and they're really worried about people jumping on them.

And I always try and maintain a supportive space in my counseling group because I think if that's not there for people, they're not going to feel safe enough to share.

But it's actually really difficult to do that.

And I think a lot of people feel really scared about posting.

And if you're scared about posting to counsellors, then how much more scary is it going to be to post to the general public who maybe really have no idea about counselling and might find it mystifying or difficult?

And people say to me that they might post something about being a counsellor and a member of the general public comes back and says, well, why are you charging for that?

It should be for free.

And I know people feel differently.

Some people find it scarier to post in front of councillors than to the general public.

And it might feel, oh, no one knows me out there, so it's all right to post out there.

But for other people, they might feel safer in a closed space like a counseling group.

And posting out in the big wide world just feels really scary.

But I think for many of us, what it is is it's that fear of going wrong and that fear of being publicly shamed in front of other people.

And as I said, quite often social media feeds on outrage.

So it may well be that if you're someone who say inclusive, it might put your stuff in front of people who aren't inclusive.

And how do you handle that?

So that's what we're going to talk a little bit about today so that you can feel a little bit safer when you're out there on social media, so.

So that you can reach more clients.

If you're someone who's been thinking about social media but feels really scared because you think, how am I going to handle those sorts of comments?

How am I going to handle myself on social media?

This episode is for you.

And it is genuinely definitely from my lived experience.

So what I really wanted to talk about, though, is sort of having identified that feeling that I'm sure many of you will know what I mean, those moments when you think, oh, goodness, I shouldn't have said that, or, you know, why did I say that?

Or even, I don't dare say this because I'm going to get into terrible trouble.

You know, how can we handle ourselves and what can we do?

And really what I think it's all about is, I think it's about boundaries.

It's all around boundaries.

And one of the things that we talk about with our clients all the time is that when you get to that place where you feel accepting of yourself, that can often help you to put boundaries in place.

And if you imagined that, you know, social media is an abusive partner, or that some of the people on social media are similar to abusive partners, you know that moment when you see clients change and they don't get so wound up anymore by their partner, or they find a way of deflecting it or changing it, and suddenly those old things that used to wind you up, that you wind your clients up, it's just different because you've moved to that place of self acceptance or the clients move to that place of self acceptance.

And that's what I'm talking about.

We want to be in that place where you just think, I'm okay, you're okay.

And that means that I can set my boundaries around social media.

And I think it's really important to say at this point a couple of things, drawing on Brene Brown, where she talks about, when you've been shamed, it's really difficult to cope with and I think at that point it's a really good idea.

If you have had a comment where someone said something, if it's in a counselling forum, you could literally just walk away and give yourself time.

If it's something on your page, I'd suggest doing something like just hiding the comment, which you can do just by pressing the hide button that's on your social media page.

This is if you're on Facebook, for example, and giving yourself time, I would say that's the first thing to do, is to give yourself time and let that nervous system settle down again.

See if you can regulate yourself and.

And obviously, one of the ways that you can really get regulated is by talking about it to someone, someone who you know is really going to support you with compassion.

And that's often what I do.

I've got trusted people I can talk to and sometimes the answer is just to laugh together and say F them.

That helps me a lot sometimes.

Other times I've even been known to talk about it to AI and just run it through, because AI can be quite compassionate towards you as well and recognise how you might be feeling.

And I found that sometimes has helped me as well because I do handle quite a lot of negative social media interactions and I'll explain why in a moment.

But I'd say, you know, really, there's a couple of ways you can do this.

For example, through someone supportive, a partner, a colleague, someone who, you know, you can just really talk to.

It could be your supervisor, for example, someone that you can turn to who just really gets you and understands you and knows that you didn't set out with the intention of causing a huge row.

You didn't set out with the intention of insulting anybody or saying the wrong thing.

You didn't set out to exclude people.

This is where I get into trouble.

You know, you set out with the best of intentions and sometimes you perhaps don't know deeply enough and you've got to learn, or perhaps you've just said it the wrong way and people have heard it a particular way and it's being able to find that compassion for yourself.

And quite often when we're in that place of shame, we need someone to help us with that.

So having someone supportive there for you can be really helpful.

This is something I do with my therapy growth group members as well.

You know, I provide people with that space so they can come and share in that supportive space with others who are so kind.

Because I've got lots of lovely, kind people in my group and you can share this sort of stuff, and it's okay just to be able to get a bit of reassurance.

So I'd say the first thing to do is take a breath and then see what you can do to regulate yourself before you take any other action.

But there's three different things I thought I would talk about in order to help you, and I'm just going to illustrate them with a little story as well.

As many of you know, I'm actively involved in supporting transgender people.

One of the things I do is manage the comments section of a trans friendly Facebook group.

And as you can imagine, trans friendly pages don't always appeal to some Facebook users.

Remember what I said about social media operating on rage?

So Facebook may well put our stuff in front of people who are supportive of trans rights, but equally, it might put it in front of people who really dislike trans rights.

So we do get a fair amount of people coming onto our page and saying things to us that aren't very nice and, frankly, aren't very nice to the other people who are using the page.

And it's quite simple.

We've just got a policy that this is a page for people who are supportive of our cause, and it's for transgender people.

If you're gender critical, you're entitled to your beliefs, but you're not entitled to leave them on our page.

It's as simple as that.

We want to keep it a safe space for transgender people, and so we remove offensive comments.

The reason I'm telling you this is because it's an illustration of the fact that you can decide what your page is about.

It's your page, it's your property.

You can say what you want on your page, and you can manage the atmosphere of the page as well.

And you can manage it in several different ways.

You can delete comments, you can block people, you can hide comments.

It's okay for you to do that.

Now, I don't want to frighten you, because it depends which type of specialism you have and the sorts of things you're writing on your page.

You might not get any offensive comments at all.

But if you do post about something, for example, on the LGBTQ subjects, that might be more contentious and it might attract the wrong sort of comments.

So I'd really like to say to you, it's entirely up to you what you allow on your page, and you can, if you want, create a little policy about it, and you could have that as a pinned post on your page.

There's also settings that you can use.

So, for example, you can have a setting that doesn't allow profanity.

And that just means that if anybody comes onto your page and swears, their comment just doesn't appear.

Now, the second thing I just wanted to talk about was an experience I had recently and again to do with.

With my transgender activism, is that I got a really unpleasant message into my inbox, and I'd been out.

I'd had a lovely day out.

It was a Saturday, and we'd been out shopping, and we were coming home after having a nice meal, and I just saw there was a message in my inbox, and it was a really unpleasant message.

And it.

It really did sort of upset me.

It upset me on that Saturday evening.

I felt upset about it on the Sunday.

And of course, you know, part of that was about me checking my messages during the weekend.

But also as well, what I realized later is that I could actually have controlled that better.

And I've changed my messaging settings now.

So whereas before, anybody who messaged me would just come straight into my inbox, now I can do message requests.

And so I don't have to see people.

I can just block them before they've even got into my inbox.

If I want that particular one, yeah, I block them, and that's it.

That's the end of it.

You know, sometimes the.

You sort of feel as though you should reply as though you owe people an answer or you owe them an explanation, but really you don't.

And I think it's really helpful at this point to remember as well, with a lot of the same, the comments that a lot of the time, they aren't even real people.

They're just bots.

And again, this is something I've learned from my younger children.

But, yeah, a lot of the time they're just bots.

You just delete them.

They're just trying to stir up trouble, and they're trying to convince people that there's far more discord and unrest and people who hate than there actually really are.

So a lot of these hateful comments, they're not even by real people.

And I think they do try and persuade us that the world is a worse place than we think it is when we see all those comments.

So another of the Rules my children give me is mum.

Don't read the comments.

And that was the problem with the story I told at the start, was reading the comments and it's sort of like, no, the comments here are not going to be good for me.

Don't read them.

And that's another little boundary you can put in place if you are following something that's a bit contentious online.

So, yeah, change your messaging sessions if you need to, because quite simply, you don't have to have people in your inbox abusing you.

No, it's just, you don't have to do it, you don't have to put up with it, you don't need to respond to it.

You don't owe them anything.

If that's the way they're going to treat you, you don't owe them anything.

So the other sort of little thing I wanted to talk about as well is thinking about the spaces that might be appropriate for you.

And this sort of happened to me fairly recently is I said something that was a little bit just off the cuff and I said it in a space that's quite a sensitive space.

And as a result of that, I did get some.

Some pushback really, as to what I'd said.

And it did leave me in that place of feeling incredibly shamed, actually, again, because that feeling of I should know better, you know, I've had to be publicly corrected and generally it just left me in that place of thinking, oh, you know, why do I even bother?

Blah, blah, blah.

But actually, what I realized, part of the problem was, is that sometimes spaces just aren't the right spaces for you.

And this was a space where people were perhaps needing more support, whereas I sort of came in with my ideas and that wasn't what people needed.

They didn't actually need that.

And I realised that that's okay.

You know, people can have spaces that they need and I can have spaces that I need.

And for me, I've got other spaces that I can go to where perhaps I feel as though I'm a better fit.

And that's all right.

It's okay to find a space that suits me, just as it's okay for other people to find a space that suits them.

And it doesn't mean that either of us are wrong.

It's just we've got different needs and that's okay.

And I know for me that being in the right space for me means I don't get distracted, I don't get into so many arguments, I'm not online arguing with people all the time, honestly, I promise you.

But you know, you can get sort of pulled in and get upset by stuff and it's okay to curate what spaces I'm in.

I don't have to be a part of everything.

And it's okay for them to be there and for me to be me, because it helps me, it helps me conserve my energy, it helps me to.

I really use my energy in helpful things for me and for other people and likewise for them.

They've got a place where they can refresh their energy as well.

It's just our needs are a bit different and that's perfectly okay too.

So I'd really like to encourage you that it's okay for you to choose, it's okay for you to be you and to choose the spaces that you want to be in on social media.

And you might be thinking to yourself, well, how does this apply to me actually marketing myself?

And I think the thing is, is that if you can learn to handle social media in a way that really suits you, where you feel safe and fairly happy navigating social media, that will give you the courage to do your own work on social media, to reach out to people.

So I'd really like to say, say that I think setting boundaries on social media actually really helps you.

It helps you to feel safer, it helps you to foster trusting relationships with people, it helps you to connect with people.

So having boundaries and having things in place, you don't owe people everything.

You can be you and you can choose what suits you in terms of social media because I really think that it's so much easier to be on social media when you've got boundaries.

And this is the first of a little series that I'm going to do on social media boundaries.

So we're just talking about some of the things that you can put in place.

But I'll come back and talk about other social media boundaries over the next few months.

But now I quickly want to.

To turn to ideas for July for your social media.

And here's just a few ideas because July is obviously when we begin to go on holidays.

It might be a bit quieter online during the summer.

And what can you, what can you do, what can you say and how can you engage people on your page when perhaps people are more out in the garden and outside and perhaps not looking for so much as social media?

Well, I've got a couple of ideas.

The first is thinking about body image because this is the time where many of us wear less than usual.

We aren't covered up with our woolly jumpers.

And so we might become aware of maybe, like me the other day, you put a skirt on and thought, oh, blimey, that's a bit tighter than it was last year.

And we've got a couple of days that I think you could possibly talk about body image.

There's that the 5th of July is bikini day and the 19th of July is ice cream day.

So if you've got.

If you're working with people who've maybe not very happy with their body image, those could be days where you could talk about body image.

Now, something else that might happen is, you know, we break up from school.

If you've got smaller kids, all the kids are going to be at home.

So there may be family tensions.

And just thinking around family tensions, obviously the World Cup's going on and as we know, abusive situations can arise more when you've got major football tournaments going on.

So it might be quite a good time to be thinking about talking about recognizing the signs of abuse.

For example, we've also got on the 29th of July, rain day, so keep an eye on the weather.

And if it looks like it's going to be rainy on that day, you might want to talk about coping with bored children.

You know, how you can look after yourself during the summer holidays.

Something else that can happen is that people might feel a bit lonelier, they're out of their normal routine.

And we've got cheer up, the lonely day on the 11th and on the 30th, it's the international Day of Friendship.

And actually, friendship is quite a nice sort of summary theme that you could bring in because it might be a time where you're seeing more of friends.

So you could do sort of positive post about how great it is to spend time with friends and how good it is for your mental health.

Or you might want to talk about loneliness and how hard it can be during the summer to see other people out and about with their friends when you haven't got friends.

So sort of different angles that you could take there.

And then last but not least is thinking about grief, because as we know, grief doesn't wait until the winter.

People can be suffering from grief at any time of year.

And this month is actually bereaved Parents Awareness Month.

So July, if you work in the field of infant loss or childhood hospices, I think there's Childhood Hospice week is actually in June.

But thinking just generally around ill children, that might be something that you can focus on during the month.

And for those of you who work with pets, then it's Pet remembrance Day on the 5th of July.

So just a few ideas there for things that you might do with grief and if none of those appeal, the 18th of July is World Listening Day.

The 24th is Samaritan's Awareness Day, so that could be a day where you talk about suicide.

And there's also a couple of pride days like a non binary awareness day.

I haven't got that date in front of me, but it does happen in July.

So hopefully those will give you a few ideas for your social media.

Remember that this is something that I spend quite a bit of time on each month producing for Therapy Growth Group.

I've got an idea for every day of the month, so different ways that you could use one of those awareness days for every day of the month and that's freely available to members of Therapy Growth Group.

So I hope that's helped.

I hope I haven't frightened you too much about social media.

Obviously I've been been using it for a long time now and that's given me more confidence in using it.

But I think if you can have a think to yourself about your social media, what you want your pages to look like, what sort of atmosphere do you want your pages to have and then set your sights on creating that space, what will you allow and won't allow?

And you, as I said, you could set that up.

And don't be frightened about deleting comments because half the time they're robots anyway and if you block them they'll never be able to find you again anyway.

So you can stay safe on social media using your boundaries.

Thanks for listening and I will be back next week with a lovely interview.

Bye for now.

Thanks for listening.

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And for more information about how I can help you develop your private practice, please Visit my website, JosephineHughes.com if you found this episode helpful, I'd love it if you could share it with a fellow therapist or leave a review on your podcast app.

And in closing, I'd love to remind you that every single step you make gets you closer to your dreams.

I really believe you can do it.