Do You Have A Love/Hate Relationship With Your Electronic Devices?

Dr. Gold, Ph.D, LMHC, is a Licensed and Board Certified Clinical Mental Health counselor, with a Ph.D in psychology, clinical practice.  She’s in private practice at her home office in Fort Salonga, specializing in relationships. A sub
specialty is in integrating holistic methods with traditional ones. She is founding president of Happi Act for autism www.happiact.org www.happiact.org a non- profit organization. She can be reached drgold6@optimum.net

I do. I admit it.

I love the conveniences. If meeting somebody & one of us is running behind, its great to receive or send a text,” Be there in ten minutes.”

When I commuted to work in NYC, I had to wait in line for the telephone booth to make a call. Unthinkable today!

On the other hand, I remember when there was one way to contact people right away. You phoned them on their landline.  There was no voice mail. They either answered or they didn’t. If not, you called back later.  

Kind of simple. And nice.

Today I need a great memory to remember how to contact each person. 

(Not their real names…)
“Trevor,” reads his e-mails only once a week.  For timely matters, I must call him on his home phone (Scratch that. Just got recording. “Been disconnected.” Now it’s his cell only).

“Mary” prefers I call only her cell phone so her husband can’t overhear our conversations. 

“Dana” said her land line is currently not taking messages; I can still call her at home, but don’t leave a message there. 

Our cat sitter will pick up messages from her land line only, not cell.  

“Ariana” said, “Call me on either home phone or cell.” She’s a busy professional woman. Either way, I don’t reach her. With her, it’s e-mail only.

I’ve stopped leaving messages on cells; few people listen to them. 

We can’t control how others communicate, but we can give our preferences to them. For example, I’ve asked my private patients and students to please leave time-related messages such as appointment changes on my land line voice mail only. I give out my cell phone number to very few. I love my work, but need breaks. Having my blue tooth speaker in my car blast on every two minutes is not recharging my batteries. 

Your preferences might differ and that’s fine.

Preferences are not always chronologically related.  A 29 year old told me she asked her  friends, “instead of e mailing back and forth to set a lunch date, let’s just get on the phone and have a conversational.” YEA!

A 22 year old man told me, “I love my electronic devices but sometimes I wish I didn’t have them.”  EXACTLY!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to check my cell phone text messages and voice mails. Darn! I see my cell is dead. No problem. While it’s recharging, I’ll look at my computer e-mails, check my land line voice mails and sort through my postal mail. 

Not just bills, I hope.