What is this?
We are a British Columbia-based nonprofit organization. We emerged in response to the alienation parents and families increasingly face as they watch digital technology, in particular smartphones + social media and the cultish movements they’ve created.
a space devoted to connection | a space that explores the impact of digital technology on our relationships | a space to explore the revolution social media has forced us into | a place to explore responses to dehumanisation
Our society has shifted in fundamental ways and we have not valued or accommodated child development in our societal shifts. We have failed to support the natural lines of attachment children need to development in a healthy fashion. Children now face competing attachments - a host of attachments such as educators and the education profession, queer culture in the classroom, ecoterrorism on popular media, and peers now compete with parents. Parents now face the systemic alienation of their children, funded by the oligarchs and their charitable foundations, and enforced by the state in many places across North America.
This is a labour of love and act of resistance.
The problem + solution is people need connection and smartphones disconnect from whilst they plug us into the hive mind. Humans are social animals. Each time revolutionary technology sweeps through our lives we find ourselves compelled to renegotiate our individual connection to the societal hive mind. For themselves by themselves. Never mind trying to project a bunch of narratives onto your kid. This is about you and your broken parent heart. And a primal connection that’s being ruptured by society and state. Parents are not the oppressors, they are not the baddies. Parents are people who are trying to figure out the best and safest ways to connect with their kids.
Missing From Me supports parents living with the trauma of alienation from their severely mentally ill, addicted, or cult-indoctrinated child. We have scrupulously observed and analysed the sociopolitical landscape and we notice a disturbing trend, not only within internet culture, also within the education system itself, toward parent blaming and parental alienation. We are a group of parents and allied professionals who have come together to advocate for the sanctity of the parent-child bond through research and public awareness and liaising with relevant stakeholders.
Missing From Me exists to promote + protect respect for the sanctity of the parent-child relationship, for the family as the unit of society, and respect for the human biological dignity of the individual. A rich body of intellectual work guides our work, including polyvagal + somatic therapy clinical science, family systems + attachment science, compassionate inquiry, and spiritual literacy + practise.
Our primary aim is to support families and individuals living through the alienation that smartphone + social media culture bring. Our secondary aim is to promote evidence based awareness of the importance of the child-parent bond and to formulate strategies to promote + protect + and strengthen the connection. Missing From Me is an independent, Vancouver-based society working across Canada, The United States and beyond to support families and individuals thru the digital revolution.
Boring Housekeeping Stuff
You will begin receiving posts in your email and you will receive them in your inbox if you have the Substack app — please get the app so you can see and respond to Notes when we finally go live with Notes. Notes is like smart centrist Twitter. The content is available to all however we are reader supported so please purchase a paid subscription if you can to support our work, which goes beyond the publication to providing support for parents living the hell of alienation from their mentally ill or severely addicted or cult-indoctrinated child.
Why Substack? Rukhsana discovered Substack around 3 years ago and she kept coming back to Substack and kept choosing Substack again and again for her intellectual content because it behaves the way she likes a company to behave - espousing values she cherishes. Watching the company embrace freedom of intellectual expression time and again, watching the leadership show us all who they are in response to the recent Twitter mantrum — these things have gone a long way to foster connection for Rukhsana and other writers and also for independent journalists. Part of moving through the world of humans with self awareness involves knowing what we consume, that means knowing the companies we do business with and the spaces we chose to occupy. The container Missing From Me chooses can add meaning or detract from it and that matters to us in the way we connect with our audience. To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
