The “that you can’t routinely leave” part seems more important than the “small town” part, to me—it’s a special case of the more general observation that the harder it is to leave a situation, the more likely it is for that situation to become problematic.
You might find it useful to use Second Life as a venue for practicing social skills, if you don’t have RL opportunities to do so. It’s not perfect—the userbase is skewed toward technophiles, with a disproportionate number of auties, so the range of conversational topics is different from RL-normal, and you can’t learn to read or emit body language usefully there (though with voice chat you can practice with tone of voice at least), but it’s more RL-like than most kinds of online interaction, especially in terms of meeting new people.
Wow, I didn’t know small towns were “toxic environments” that were the death knell for social skills. Next time, mention that sooner.
The “that you can’t routinely leave” part seems more important than the “small town” part, to me—it’s a special case of the more general observation that the harder it is to leave a situation, the more likely it is for that situation to become problematic.
You might find it useful to use Second Life as a venue for practicing social skills, if you don’t have RL opportunities to do so. It’s not perfect—the userbase is skewed toward technophiles, with a disproportionate number of auties, so the range of conversational topics is different from RL-normal, and you can’t learn to read or emit body language usefully there (though with voice chat you can practice with tone of voice at least), but it’s more RL-like than most kinds of online interaction, especially in terms of meeting new people.