Prosecuting The Victim, Gender Biases, and The Psychological Impact of Injustice

Chapter 19: Getting Through Georgia Tech and Learning Social Skills

Having discussed in the last chapter the challenges I faced upon arrival in the big city and beginning college at Georgia Tech, I want to talk a bit more about the other challenges that go along with making it as a student at Georgia Tech and/or graduating. We are all entitled to bragging rights if we make it at Georgia Tech. 

This information is important in understanding part of my character, intellect, judgment, planning, and time management skills in life. Science is important as a guiding principle to rational reasoning even in the human services field. 

During that first week of classes, I visited the Counseling and Career Planning Center at Georgia Tech. I wanted to learn how to overcome shyness... I wanted to make connections, make friends and build relationships. 

I wanted to learn how to build romantic relationships as well. I was an adult. I was attracted to females and I wanted to have a girlfriend... to get married someday.

Any time I have doubts about my competency in life, I think back to what I accomplished at Georgia Tech. While it might seem like just an academic challenge there is more to it than that. Pacing is important!

To stay sane, I tried, like others, to take Friday afternoon through Sunday mornings off from classes and forget all about the homework assignments, the concepts being taught, the formulas, the calculations and just put it out of my mind. The best analogy was to think of pacing yourself for a marathon or some other endurance exercise. Only this exercise was mental - an ongoing exercise of your brain. When I say I was trying to stay sane, I mean we needed balance in our lives - entertainment, enjoyment.

The dangers of excessive stress and lack of balance in life...

I will tell anyone to this day that the more stressful your life is the more you MUST take time to include non-stressful leisure activities, time with friends and family, and so on. Balance. Self-care! Some people speak of burnout. I think a new term is necessary to describe what happens under excessive stress. This is something that I will discover many years later.

Anyway, at Georgia Tech, I was exercising my logical brain more than anything else with science, math, and engineering classes.

I did have a  chance to take some psychology classes and this was so valuable in helping me discover myself and where I would go in life. 

You might wonder what I was doing on the weekends since I said that I tried to keep my mind off the assignments, formulas, and classes from the moment I left class on Friday until I woke around 11 AM or noon on Sunday.

First off, during the week when I was in classes, not every class was overwhelmingly stressful, and I was making friends. Around lunchtime, I would enjoy a meal at one of the restaurants just across from campus. Sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. Some of my friends were from the fraternity house but they weren't all guys. Girls would come by on the weekends and meet people and become friends.

We studied together many times or did our homework together. I'm talking about people from the frat house but also some of us taking a class would meet somewhere to study or work on the homework together. It wasn't uncommon to be up until 11 PM or later with studies/homework during the week.

Then we come to Friday and the last class. There might be a party at the frat house, or I'd go for dinner with friends and then just hang out with others. I was living there by my second year. It's hard to put my finger on it but I didn't quite feel like I fit in as a frat brother despite living there. I never spoke at the weekly meetings or held a role. Maybe it was all in my mind.

I don't remember my roommate Thomas acting like one of the guys. It's only in retrospect that I realize that I was more self-conscious of my sense of not fitting in at times than noticing that I wasn't any different than a few other members. I wasn't noticeably shy. I had plenty of friends and made friends fairly easily.

On Saturdays, I liked to take the MARTA – Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority – a subway that would run to places in the metro area away from downtown Atlanta. There was a mall on the north line that ran up Peachtree Street – Lennox Mall with a movie theater. It was my escape to see a movie. It took my mind off other stressors such as the demands of classwork.

I often was doing this alone – going to the movies on Saturday... even into my senior year when I was much more outgoing. I guess I enjoyed the escape and while I very much wanted to be around people, it was hard. The party scene or meeting new people. It wasn't very hard, but I was still learning skills and working on my fears.

In the sessions with my counselor – my psychologist - I learned ways to speak to people and to listen. For example, I learned about "free information" – the weather, something a person might be wearing, a shared experience like something from class. Then to keep the conversation going, I learned about active listening. That could mean summarizing what someone just said, rephrasing it in different words to confirm that you understand... asking follow-up questions and the best ones are open-ended.

I also learned a technique for dealing with social anxiety. Suppose I want to meet someone or just be more friendly. I was challenging my fears as opposed to not trying or telling myself something will go wrong. I learned a three-column technique based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques. This is something I did all week actually. I had a pad of paper, a pen, or a pencil all the time.

I would imagine scenarios and ask myself "what is it that I fear if I acted instead of avoiding what I feared." It wasn't actually those words that I asked but there were so many examples that no single example can capture the essence of the fears. I mean if the fear is that I approach someone I don't know and say something foolish or incoherent, then avoiding the action avoids the negative emotions that might show up in the form of a racing heart.

That is just one of the countless examples and probably not a good one. Anyway, in column one, I write our automatic thought. He/she won't like me. She won't be interested in ME! Then in the middle column, I write the name of the "cognitive distortions that I can recognize. Maybe, for example, I am "predicting the future" which is a cognitive distortion, or I am "discounting the positive" – positive aspects of myself. There are common cognitive distortions that people use. In the third column, I wrote challenging statements. Depending on the situation, I might write about evidence of how I am liked by the friends that I have.

This is something I did every week, frequently, for years. See what I mean when I say that picking any one example might not convey the breadth of potential negative thoughts. To be clear, this happens to all kinds of people not just shy people. I was trying so hard. A simple way to figure out what the automatic thought was is to think about asking oneself, "what's the worst thing that can happen?"

Despite all the improvements I made, I never met girls directly at the parties at the fraternity house. However, I became friends with girls who started hanging out at the fraternity house often because they were girlfriends of one of the frat brothers. I have no idea how my friend Thomas met his later wife since he was geeky, not very outgoing at parties. Like me, Thomas never danced.

The point I am trying to make is that I was afraid of rejection. I guess it is important to recognize that not everyone has such similar fears. 

The way males are presented as acting on shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is that they don't care so much about being rejected or disliked. If they want something they go after it. They respond and react to their physical urges and desires. It's almost like they feel like they can take what they want if they really want it. If they have been nice and have done this and that for their date they expect something in return. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be chosen as someone's first choice in life. 

I never discussed the results of my desire to learn how to develop romantic relationships... to date or meet a girl. After all, as an adult, I was thinking about someday having a family. 

Let's talk a bit about that. Let me describe a few things about my efforts in this area.