Girl-on-girl aggression

Hey everyone. Okay, so it's been about a year since I've been on PC, but I used to come around here quite often. Since the last time I was on, I started nursing school and just finished my first semester with a 4.0, which I am incredibly proud of. Given that, this time last year, I barely felt mentally capable of holding down a job (I really didn't think I was going to go back to school), it is something that I'm proud of. So, I posted that on Facebook: "Just finished my first semester with a 4.0! I'll drink to that!" Lots of likes, lots of comments from friends, but I feel some animosity from some of my classmates. A few are blatantly ignoring messages/texts right now that I know they've received.

I have a lot of experience in the medical field which is not the norm in my nursing program--many are medical newbies. I try very hard not to be an obnoxious know-it-all. I only state my knowledge if I'm directly asked. I encourage my fellow students But I know that some of the other girls (my program is 99% women) feel that I'm a "know-it-all," regardless.

So...I'm frustrated. I know that I'm not the only woman to experience girl-on-girl microaggression. While I had lots of friends, we were all pretty geeky--I was never the popular girl in high school and the "in" crowd tended to treat me as though I was invisible. I get that at work as well--I work in a small ER where the staff was tight-knit before I came along, and a few there make it clear that they just aren't interested in making friends with me. I feel like, in any group I join, I tend to be a little polarizing. Like, a few people will really like me, but many really will not. Like I said, I know I'm not the only woman to deal with this from other women, but I am not as equipped to let it roll off my shoulders. What are your thoughts? I consider myself to be kind, reasonably happy (though, at times, moody), quite geeky, intelligent, fun, adventurous, outspoken, and strong-minded. Am I just an acquired taste?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

Yes, I've experienced it. The only thing that ever worked for me was learning how to better let it roll off my back by using therapies like REBT and CBT. I realized I had cognitive distortions and irrational beliefs that everybody must like me and everybody must treat me well and if I'm nice to people they should be nice to me back -- on and on. I didn't even realize it until I studied cognitive distortions.

http://forums.psychcentral.com/psych...bout-them.html

I'm sort of an opinionated, determined -- some say stubborn -- know-it-all kind of person. I research and study damn hard and if other people don't like that about me, too damn bad. Some people do find that quality in me annoying beyond words. I can't really blame them. I know how to study and research and, seeing that I'm older, I have a lot of broad life experience -- like your medical experience -- that other people don't have. I don't know how to fix an engine or play music or fly an airplane, but I can catheterize a blocked bladder, pollard a tree, cook a gourmet meal over a campfire, make a 5 layer wedding cake, install dry wall, get published in an academic journal, talk to winos in the street, dine at the governor's mansion, unblock a clogged drain, calm a panicked animal, test sex workers for HIV, grow an organic orchard and piss off about a thousand people in the process because, you know, people just hate a show-off.

I'm not much willing to change my personality or hide my light under a bushel basket in order to please other people. I realized that I had been unconsciously demanding that other people change to please me and not ever hurt my feelings or do things that made me feel bad. That was really the whole problem.

It sounds as if you might be doing something similar. You're making "should' statements in your mind about how you think your classmates should act toward you and then catastrophizing it into micro-aggression when they act differently than you want them to.

You did great with your grades, it's a wonderful achievement and I'd be feeling happy and proud, too, if I was standing in your shoes. You have every right to feel proud and to post your accomplishment on FB. Well done!

If other people don't want to celebrate with you or congratulate you or even talk to you for a while because they didn't do as well, please stop looking at it as micro-aggression. People just don't like being reminded that someone else did better than they did.

If their actions are micro-aggression, then your action of posting your grades to show how well you did in comparison to your classmates is micro-aggression, too. But it wasn't. You accomplished something. You have the right to celebrate without being called an aggressor. And they have the right to sulk without being called aggressors.

You are not a victim of micro-aggression just because your classmates refuse to celebrate your accomplishments, anymore than they are victims because you did so well.

Enjoy your success. You deserve to feel good about it. Please don't turn this lovely accomplishment into something unpleasant for yourself just because your less successful classmates want to sit in the corner and sulk for a while. They may be feeling rather low about themselves if they didn't do as well as you did. That is not your fault. You did not aggress against them by studying hard and doing well.

Sometimes we just have to accept that other people have feelings too and those feelings may not be in sync with our own, especially if our light is shining bright and theirs happens to be on the dimmer switch at the moment.

I wish you continued success with your studies.

Hey, thanks for the reply! I definitely see what you're saying, and I think I've even been guilty of sulking when someone has done better than I. And I know that I have plenty of cognitive distortions at any given time.

I don't think I felt that I wanted classmates to celebrate with or congratulate me--it doesn't matter if they acknowledge what I do academically or not; that post was for my friends and loved ones. I think what frustrates me is the, "Well. She just thinks she's so smart" types of comments that get thrown around here and there during the semester. It doesn't only happen to me. One of the guys in my class mentioned a snarky comment he received because, during a test review, he happened to be answering quite a few of the questions correctly. He was like, "I've been a medical assistant for ten years, yes. But I studied! I worked hard to learn that material!" Like...are you really mad at us because we have experience? Or are you mad at us because we study and know the material? Or are you just mad? Because none of those things are anything I'm going to do anything about.

Anyway, thanks again for the message. Spoke to some of the nurses at work today, and I'm feeling much better about the situation in general.

Great topic. It's called "relational aggression", as you may know. Needs a lot more attention IMHO. I've "suffered", too, being a geeky female more focused on tasks, science, etc.

So, what do we do? Accept ourselves, even if/when others don't. That's the geeky/"logical" answer isn't it? But I have been very badly hurt by people who didn't like me or who wanted to derail what I thought, and said directly, was the most important thing to do. So I think we "geeks" need to understand how that works, somehow. It doesn't come naturally to me and right now I don't have much of a clue, just that the topic needs a lot more attention IMHO.

I don't use facebook for that reason, instead I keep a blog.
There are a lot of jealous people in the world and that is their issue, not yours.