Dr Viktoriya Magid

06/13/2026

A healthy society seeks to bring people togther rather than divide them. Read my new article in Charleston City paper, “How we can stop dividing ourselves”.

👉 https://charlestoncitypaper.com/2026/06/12/magid-how-we-can-stop-dividing-ourselves

06/12/2026

A healthy society seeks to bring people togther rather than divide them. Read my new article in Charleston City paper, “How we can stop dividing ourselves”.

👉 https://charlestoncitypaper.com/2026/06/12/magid-how-we-can-stop-dividing-ourselves

Since the formation of the earliest human communities, it has been evolutionarily advantageous to distinguish between “us” and “them” to protect our own and remain wary of potential threats.

06/10/2026

Self-betrayal is the quickest path to resentment. We often mistake total self-sacrifice for the ultimate expression of love, but it is actually a slow-acting poison for any relationship.

George Bernard Shaw famously observed: If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

When you erase your own needs to accommodate others, you are not just losing yourself; you are building a mountain of silent expectations that no one can possibly meet. Love requires a foundation of individual integrity, not the destruction of one person for the sake of another.

Shaw, the only person to win both a Nobel Prize in Literature and an Oscar, spent his long life challenging social norms and the hypocrisy of traditional morality. He understood that a person who cannot stand up for themselves eventually becomes a burden of bitterness to those they claim to care for.

True affection survives only where boundaries are respected.

05/30/2026

https://viktoriyamagidphd.substack.com/p/when-everything-is-trauma-nothing

*** A few weeks ago, I got called into my 14-year-old son’s school.

“He has bullied another child,” I was told, “and will be suspended for three days.”

I was aghast and confused. My son—who, like a typical 14-year-old, is certainly not perfect—is not a bully.

“What happened, may I ask?” I asked the teacher.

“He called another student a name,” I was told.

“A name?” I was puzzled.

I learned some more details, none of which constituted bullying, and attempted to argue my case. I was told that the school had a zero-tolerance policy for name-calling and that the child—another 14-year-old boy—now felt “unsafe” attending school. His parents, I was informed, were upset.

Unsafe?

These boys had spent four years in the same classroom. Yes, my son is a very tall white kid who can seem intimidating, but bullying is not what he’s about, and it certainly wasn’t what this was.

As I told this story to friends and other parents, many could relate. In our efforts to correct and protect our children from the kinds of abuse that our generation—and many generations before us—were subjected to unchecked, we may have gone too far.

Name-calling is now bullying. Asking someone to repeat a word because their accent wasn’t clear is discrimination. Patting a girl on her lower back the same way you would a guy friend in public is sexual harassment. Calling someone out for dishonesty or disloyalty is social aggression.

The “victims” of these “assaults,” therefore, need protection—from parents, teachers, and administrators—and are expected to carry the “trauma” of these events with them.

Some research suggests that this mindset may contribute to anxiety and depression in young people, while reinforcing a belief that the world is fundamentally unsafe and that they require constant protection from others. Children who are shielded from ordinary social conflict may grow up with a tendency to see themselves as victims, always looking for someone to blame. Many struggle to adjust to college and workplace environments. They may quit more easily and demonstrate a lower capacity to persevere through difficult situations.

We do our children a disservice when we intervene in every social interaction they dislike, amplifying its significance and projecting our own childhood experiences and unresolved wounds onto them.

***Read the rest of this story and how it ended on Substack***

When Everything Is Trauma, Nothing Is: The Hidden Cost of Overprotecting Our Children

05/30/2026

A few weeks ago, I got called into my 14-year-old son’s school.

“He has bullied another child,” I was told, “and will be suspended for three days.”

I was aghast and confused. My son—who, like a typical 14-year-old, is certainly not perfect—is not a bully.

“What happened, may I ask?” I asked the teacher.

“He called another student a name,” I was told.

“A name?” I was puzzled.

I learned some more details, none of which constituted bullying, and attempted to argue my case. I was told that the school had a zero-tolerance policy for name-calling and that the child—another 14-year-old boy—now felt “unsafe” attending school. His parents, I was informed, were upset.

Unsafe?

These boys had spent four years in the same classroom. Yes, my son is a very tall white kid who can seem intimidating, but bullying is not what he’s about, and it certainly wasn’t what this was.

As I told this story to friends and other parents, many could relate. In our efforts to correct and protect our children from the kinds of abuse that our generation—and many generations before us—were subjected to unchecked, we may have gone too far.

Name-calling is now bullying. Asking someone to repeat a word because their accent wasn’t clear is discrimination. Patting a girl on her lower back the same way you would a guy friend in public is sexual harassment. Calling someone out for dishonesty or disloyalty is social aggression.

The “victims” of these “assaults,” therefore, need protection—from parents, teachers, and administrators—and are expected to carry the “trauma” of these events with them.

Some research suggests that this mindset may contribute to anxiety and depression in young people, while reinforcing a belief that the world is fundamentally unsafe and that they require constant protection from others. Children who are shielded from ordinary social conflict may grow up with a tendency to see themselves as victims, always looking for someone to blame. Many struggle to adjust to college and workplace environments. They may quit more easily and demonstrate a lower capacity to persevere through difficult situations.

We do our children a disservice when we intervene in every social interaction they dislike, amplifying its significance and projecting our own childhood experiences and unresolved wounds onto them.

***read the rest of my new piece on Substack***

When Everything Is Trauma, Nothing Is: The Hidden Cost of Overprotecting Our Children

05/29/2026

Perfection can’t be defined. And if you follow the concept all the way down to its root, you’ll realize that it means a certain type of death. A frozen, still-life, void of movement and growth.

The pursuit of a flawless existence is the ultimate trap of the modern age. We spend our lives chasing an ideal that was manufactured in a boardroom to ensure we never feel like enough.

Perfection is insane. The entire tyranny of the perfect body, the perfect family, the perfect life is literally a commercial narrative. It has nothing to do with being human.

These are the words of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. Known for his deep love of monsters and the grotesque, del Toro has built an entire cinematic career on the idea that true beauty lies in the broken and the misunderstood. He famously curates a massive collection of horror memorabilia in his personal museum, Bleak House, viewing these monstrous forms as more honest representations of the human soul than any airbrushed advertisement.

To be human is to be asymmetrical, inconsistent, and temporary. When we accept our own jagged edges, we stop being consumers and start being creators.

When did you last allow yourself to be unapologetically imperfect?

05/23/2026

Modern life teaches people to fear solitude as if being alone automatically means being incomplete. Constant noise, social validation, and endless distraction have become ways of escaping the self. Many individuals spend years surrounded by people while remaining strangers to their own inner world.

Yet solitude has always played a strange role in human growth. Away from social performance and external expectations, people are often forced to confront their insecurities, desires, contradictions, and emotional truths. What society calls loneliness can sometimes become the beginning of self-understanding.

05/23/2026

We were meant to move! Move all day, much of the day. Dancing - used to be a way to move energy, to celebrate, to grieve, to gather and bond.

If you’re feeling anxious- dance!