Chapter five 
The World’s Biggest Support Group
OK, Tex, hold on!” Jim Shippey warns me by E-mail. “Supplemental Therapy is how I look at my use of the Internet. I currently maintain corresponding relationships with no fewer than six different women. Some are very casual, and some are very intimate. In general, the more intimate, the more helpful the experience. My therapist knows about my use of this medium, and he sees only positive results of the activity”
Jim is big, with big hands and a big handshake. He has dark curly hair and blue eyes, and seems confident, almost an extrovert. When I meet him outside the Floyd Heck Marvin Center at George Washington University, he greets me with a jovial “Hello, Professor.” Jim is being polite, or, seeing as how I have pointed out more than once that nobody calls me Professor, stubborn.
The area of our nation’s capital known as Foggy Bottom is between thunderstorms, so Jim grabs his bicycle helmet and we start looking for a dry place to talk. He doesn’t seem nervous at all, considering the fact that I am about to interview him about matters that are highly personal and potentially embarrassing. But adult males with notebooks aren’t what make Jim nervous. Women make him nervous, especially eligible women. He has, in his own words, always harbored “self-image, confidence” issues.
We settle down eventually at a group study table in the George Washington Library, and Jim, a twenty-eight-year-old returning undergraduate who was formerly a bookstore manager and security guard, fills me in. “When I first got here, George Washington University seemed a really daunting place. A lot of the students didn’t seem very open and friendly. I felt like I really wasn’t fitting in, so I took it upon myself to go and find counseling.”
It wasn’t what Jim found at the counseling center that eventually made life in Foggy Bottom tolerable, though. It was what he found at the computer center. Shortly after the semester began, Jim got a George Washington Information System student account. George Washington Information System shortens to GWIS, and the students like to call it Gee Whiz. Jim’s account included a good measure of Internet access, and he soon found himself exploring Usenet groups like alt.horror, alt.cereal, rec.arts.movies, and some of the sex groups.
He would read the postings and giggle or shake his head. Sometimes he would send messages back to the newsgroup. At other times he would respond directly to the person behind the message, using electronic mail. Sometimes someone somewhere would send return mail, and soon enough he was trading E-mail with a host of people on a host of topics, and some of these people were of the gender that tends to make Jim stutter and sweat.
“I saw it as an opportunity to communicate with women, to find out about women’s perspectives and views,” he told me. “I started looking at it as something more than just playing around.”
He told his therapist, who thought it sounded great, so Jim grew more diligent. For the summer, he found work at a Georgetown law firm, helping the lawyers sort out their filing system and trying to convince them to transfer their paper files to computer disks. After work almost every night, he would bicycle to campus, go to the Macintosh lab, and trade E-mail with women. Some nights he would spend three or four hours at this before putting his bike on the Metro and returning to his basement apartment across the Potomac.
A few of the women became regular correspondents, and he even told some of them about the problems that had driven him to seek therapy. He met a California woman on a horror discussion group, and they discussed books and movies, Stephen King stuff, until eventually the conversation grew more intimate. (Jim has asked me to call his California correspondent Judy, though that is not her real name.)
Before long, Jim and Judy were trading three or four messages a day. “I get off work, I come over here, I get on around seven, and depending on how busy she is, we trade mail for a couple of hours or so.” Judy is at work during these hours, thanks to the time difference.
“What do you talk about?” I ask.
“We talk about differences between men and women.”
“For instance?”
“Well, what’s a reasonable idea of gauging, you know, what is the sexual appetite, what are the interests, because men in dating are so often expected to be the aggressor, and therefore the one who should know about this stuff.”
There are moments during my meeting with Jim when I want to reach across the table and give him some friendly advice—Listen, if you wait to figure out women before you date them, you will be waiting a very long time—but I don’t. He is getting professional help. I am just an amateur.
“That was something that I was kind of hoping we would get into in more depth,” Jim continues, “but recently Judy has become a little reticent to speak about issues relating to sex, so I may not be finishing that line of discussion with her.”
He seems troubled. His voice has a catch, and it would appear that all is not well in his electronic relationship with Judy. I ask him if this is true.
Jim nods. “We’ve been communicating so regularly that both of us have invested a lot of ourselves in it,” he explains. “It has reached a point where she is feeling rather uncomfortable, mainly because she is—” He pauses here, seems unsure whether or not to finish the sentence, but eventually does “—she is married. She’s married and she’s forty-two years old, and I guess when you start finding that you are getting support somewhere else that maybe ideally should be coming out of your marriage, then I guess you start questioning the underpinnings of the marriage, and that could be kind of scary.”
In my attempt to enter the electronic woods with an open mind, with Thoreau’s sense of discovery, I found one of the biggest surprises to be the extent to which folks like Jim Shippey are turning to this cold, distant, faceless electronic medium for human support and understanding. Therapeutic uses of the Internet are not only common, they are busting out all over. Consider this selected list of some current Usenet newsgroups:
alt.abuse.recovery
alt.recovery.addiction.sexual
alt.recovery.codependency
alt.recovery.religion
alt.support.anxiety-panic
alt.support.asthma
alt.support.big-folks
alt.support.depression
alt.support.diet
alt.support.epilepsy
alt.support.loneliness
alt.support.stuttering
alt.support.tall
And this list is not even close to complete. A number of other medical problems, from cancer to ringing ears to irritable bowel syndrome, have their own Usenet discussion groups, as do smokers, nonsmokers, and men who feel they have been screwed over in divorce court. These are some of the liveliest newsgroups on the Usenet menu, and often the most fascinating.
Moreover, literally thousands of other such groups, including a host of regularly scheduled Twelve Step meetings, exist just outside the Internet, on local bulletin board systems and on most of the major on-line access providers. America Online, for instance, has Monday meetings for infertility, chronic fatigue, and “Marital Blisters.” On Tuesday, there is an AA meeting, a support group for depression, one for eating disorders, a meeting of Adult Children of Alcoholics, and a forum for Panic Support. On Wednesday, there is a breastfeeding discussion, and groups for cerebral palsy sufferers, abuse survivors, and parents of gifted children. And finally, there are hundreds of electronic mailing lists dealing with these issues. (Mailing lists are similar to newsgroups, but instead of the messages being posted on a public bulletin board, those interested must subscribe, and subsequently all the public messages are E-mailed right to the subscriber’s in-box.)
If anything whatsoever is bothering you (Marital Blisters?), it is probably bothering someone else as well, and if you want to talk with someone about this problem, the Internet is fast becoming the place to do it.
On the other hand, if you don’t have problems (which is known as denial, and someone will be starting a group for that soon), or if you do have problems but don’t really want to talk about them, there is the option of eavesdropping. Reading groups such as alt.support.help-I’m-miserable can become an addiction of its own.
People, you see, share the most intimate topics imaginable on the Internet. Every time I think I’ve seen it all, I log on and find something even more surprising. Sickness, death, love, sex—all of these are regular themes. On the Net, like on television, the people are real, the problems are urgent, and you can quickly find yourself involved.
One day I ran across a young man’s poignant note about his suicidal girlfriend, his love for her, and his frustrated attempts to find her some form of help. “When she is well, she is the one for me, the one I’ve always wanted,” he wrote. “But when she’s depressed, I can’t imagine living with this woman, at least not for all time. How can I stop from losing her?” The outpouring of sympathy and what seemed to be actual, useful advice was immediate and sincere. I sent the guy a note myself. Heck, it was easy, and I felt pretty bad for him.
Reading these postings can be a bit like reading “Dear Abby,” only the advice is not censored, punches are seldom pulled, and there, hovering at your fingertips at all times, is a button on the keyboard that will let you jump in with your own two cents.
Try ignoring that button for more than a few days.
Go ahead, try it.
And finally, unlike “Dear Abby,” but a lot like Days of Our Lives, you can follow these people’s stories well beyond the initial request for advice. After the posters tell the whole world what is mostly none of our business, some of them disappear, but a good number come back a few weeks later to let us know how it all turned out. And then people respond again, they give fresh advice, they argue with one another, disagree on what should be done, they say “I told you so” over and over, until it hardly seems like the original poster’s life is his own.
Just like a family.
Take a fellow named Steve, whose marriage fell apart in a particularly nasty (and lurid) way. He had been chronicling the downfall on soccouples, and when the worst happened, he went to the Net with this posting, which I’ve quoted with Steve’s permission, though a few key names have been changed.
From: Steve
Newsgroups: soc.couples
Subject: Caught Wife Cheating—the final straw
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 1994 08:04:52
This weekend really made the finality of my relationship with Nicole sink in. Sally told me her husband and my wife were at a campground nine miles from my house. I called the campground office to verify this, went there, and found their camp. Jim and Nicole left the front door open enough that when I walked by I could see them disrobed and entangled with each other.
I said something so Nicole knew I was there. I left and later she came to the house and admitted she has been committing adultery nonstop for several weeks. Her admission after all the lying only made the lying and the adultery more real in my mind. She said she wanted to be friends after we got divorced and tried to hug me. For the first time in my life I pushed a woman away from me as I felt complete disgust and revulsion of her and told her that I am not even interested in remaining friends.
We discussed getting together to write up a property settlement and she informed me she plans to use her attorney after all.
I can hardly wait to get all of this behind me and forget the past decade of knowing her. The future has to be brighter!
Steve
Many, many people responded, of course, with all manner of advice, including the decidedly unromantic but practical Dennis, who said:
Steve, I would strongly suggest hiring your own attorney, even if all he/she has to do is review the proposed settlement. Nicole is nowhere near as emotionally damaged as you are, and could use this very strong advantage against you. Take it from someone who lost *everything*, including my son.
Steve took the advice, it seems, because he posted the following philosophical message one day later:
From: Steve
Newsgroups: soc.couples
Subject: Re: Caught Wife Cheating—the final straw
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 1994 08:21:30
Hi,
Nicole and I both have our own attorneys now. To make things simpler however, she came back to the house last night and worked with me on listing our joint and separate property and dividing it up. We had no problem deciding how to divide the property. We just have to settle on what happens when we sell our house and we’re done.
What seemed different to me though last night is that Nicole seems like a complete stranger to me. She is not the woman I met ten years ago. This entire affair has altered her perspective on life to one of being a flighty free individual precisely at the point in my life where I feel more settled down than ever.
It seems that maybe men and women grow in opposite directions. When I was younger, I did not really like being settled and younger women often focus heavily on settling down and raising a family. It seems that by the time we are into mid 30s and 40s that men get much more settled down and women are more assertive and adventurous in their lives.
When I was 20 years old, I really had a LOT of confidence that I knew what life was all about and that I could succeed. At 40 years old, I don’t know anymore. I don’t have a clue what life is all about, I feel lost. It seems to me there is only one thing worth living for-GIVING AS MUCH LOVE IN THIS WORLD AS POSSIBLE.
And people responded to this one, too, of course. A fellow (also named Steve) had this to say:
You are starting on the right path. Many of us were concerned because you would not let go of your first wife even though all of the signs were there; however, you are learning and you are human. You are not the first to live through this and you won’t be the last (unfortunately). Good luck and give yourself a break.
Tim, though, was not quite so gentle. He wrote:
You sound like you could use a good dose of counseling. There are books about divorce recovery that are helpful … I’ll have to find a title and post it. You know, I may sound a little unfeeling to say this, but “GIVING AS MUCH LOVE IN THIS WORLD AS POSSIBLE” is not the one thing worth living for. In fact, if your only purpose in life is to “give love” you sound a little … codependent or something?
Codependent? Internet exchanges like this could make each and every one of us codependent in roughly the time it takes to say “emotional enmeshment.” Read enough on the various support groups and you’ll have trouble sleeping nights. (Or you’ll sleep better, with the warm feeling that your own problems seem awfully light by comparison.)
The thread “Caught Wife Cheating—the final straw” went on for well over a week until most every angle was seemingly exhausted, and then the soccouples regulars moved on to other bits of domestic intrigue.
But, really, is this is just electronic exhibitionism, or does it actually work? Do the support groups support? Do people feel better, tackle their real or perceived problems, get well?
I posted my questions to a handful of the more popular support groups, and the response was rapid, vast (at least fifty people E-mailed me back in about two days), and overwhelmingly positive.
“When you are down and out,” wrote Sam, a regular reader of alt.support.depression, “you don’t want to go out, you don’t want to meet others, you just want to be by yourself. The impersonalness of computers allows you to both reach out and hear others and be alone in a safe place.”
Mary-Anne, posting from Massachusetts, wrote, “If I’m one fat woman posting in, say, ne.singles [New England singles], and someone decides to verbally abuse me on account of my weight, I am alone. If I’m one among many fat people posting in, say, alt.support.big-folks, then anyone who abuses me will get argued with. The fact that people with the same sympathy gather together make a group a safer place.”
The notion of a safe place was a recurring theme—a newsgroup of this sort is electronically insulated, it is usually full of like-minded people, and like-minded people are more likely to agree with you than jump all over your case. This can be important when someone is hesitant about discussing a personal issue. Catherine from Philadelphia, for instance, pointed out the important support found in groups dealing with gay, lesbian, and bisexual concerns. (One of these is socmotss, which means “members of the same sex” and has nothing to do with clever french sayings.)
“When I was first coming out to myself as a bisexual, I started reading the gay news group,” Catherine wrote. “It was an absolute godsend. Without anyone being able to see me, I was able to listen in on a big discussion between all kinds of gay people. Some were very out and in your face, others were just coming to terms with the idea of being gay. It was an amazingly positive experience to be able to hear my ‘peers’ say that they had had feelings just like mine, and to hear them defend all of us from the homophobes.”
My decidedly unscientific survey yielded unanimous agreement that the various support groups make people feel better, safer, less alone. But are they getting good advice? Can everyday people on the Net, most of them not trained professionals, really offer proper counsel?
I asked an expert, John M. Grohol, an on-line advocate for mental health issues, founder of many of the Usenet support groups, and comoderator of sci.psychology.research. “The first thing you learn in graduate school,” he warned me, “is that professionals do not give out advice. When someone walks into a therapist’s office, they’ve already heard all the advice—they don’t want any more! Having said that, from all the advice I’ve seen posted, I believe most of it is well-intentioned, generally sound, and full of common sense.”
But ultimately, I asked him, is what happens on these groups really useful? Or is it just a temporary fix, a chance for people to spill their guts on-line and feel better for a few days?
“People’s own issues are their own and they aren’t likely to be solved by a few messages on a support group,” Grohol said. “It may, however, help them get started on feeling more comfortable talking about such things to their family, friends, and therapist. Support groups—even in the real world—aren’t meant to replace therapy, but are meant as an adjunct to therapy?
He noted finally that, according to the most recent research, those who actually post to a newsgroup make up only a very small percentage of those who actually read the newsgroup, in the 3-5 percent range. “In other words, most people are ‘using’ the support newsgroups silently, without ever posting. They’re getting their support through just reading other people’s messages. This,” Grohol explained, “is a common effect found in real support and therapy groups as well.”
Jim Shippey, the George Washington University student who has trouble with the opposite gender, is going beyond just reading support groups, however—he is actively using the Net for therapeutic reasons, working through his “issues” in a deliberate manner.
“On the Net,” he says to me, “it all has to go out from your words, and it’s sort of an equalizer that way. You can actually talk to someone about a sensitive issue, without being too invasive.”
He seems to prefer electronic mail to posting on the public newsgroups, and this probably makes good sense, since the problem he is tackling involves one-on-one shyness.
“I’ve saved a lot of posts from certain people with a certain romanticized idea that, you know, back in the last century there have been some great relationships of correspondence which took place with nothing but pen and paper. What you see now is that the same sort of thing occurs over electronic mail, but instead of the matter of years or decades, you’re talking about months. You can exchange four or five times in a given evening perhaps. It’s accelerated.”
Jim sent me copies of some of the E-mail messages he has shared with Judy so that I could get the flavor of what was discussed. What struck me was how different his personality seemed when expressed with electrons. Jim spoke slowly, carefully, cautiously with me in person, but he was downright florid on the E-mail page.
Here, for instance, is part of an E-mail note Jim sent in May, when Judy was about to leave for a camping trip:
Date: Tue, 3 May 1994 15:41:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: James Shippey
To: Judy
Subject: Re: Long hugs
This will be the last of my electronic legacy until you get back. I have definitely developed a dependence on your kindness, insight, wisdom, intelligence, sensuality, objectivity, subjectivity, sensitivity, awareness, humor, experience, perspective, spark, imagination, warmth, intimacy, concern, caring, affection, praise, plaudits, and everything else which constitute the whole of you, Judy. How I will want to share my experience with you!
Now help me with this: I am a female *charmer*? I beg you to explain what you can see in me as far as that goes. I wish to be courteous and ingratiating with most women, and yet so few care for my manner. It seems to be the old saw about why nice guys finish last. I knew a guy, a fast crowd guy, who was an absolute monstrosity towards his girlfriends (although I never saw him get physically violent with them, as it probably would of ended with him and me getting violent [maybe he feared that!]), and invariably he was the heartbreaker. Why do women long for that? And back to me: isn’t what I offer a more pleasing option?
As far as to where I learned my behavior, all I can say is that it wasn’t from my parents! That’s where I learned my capacity to hate ........ sorry to say. That’s a byproduct of an ugly divorce.
And now I bid you bon voyage! I hope that you get held more than you expect this week. The outdoors can be rugged and challenging, but they also can be very romantic. A wonderfully strong hug and a kiss on the cheek to send you off, and write *as soon as you get back*!!!!! We’re going to have to start comparing notes on THE STAND!
Have a Great Vacation, you fabulous woman, you!
-Jim
And when she got back:
Date: Thu, 12 May 1994 17:02:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: James Shippey
To: Judy
Subject: You have returned!
Happy, happy, joy joy! I’m so glad that you are back! How was your trip? Was it great to get to know your husband all over again or was it same ol’, same ol’? Did you give Jack London a run for his money?
It would seem that Jim has his problem licked, the problem of talking openly with the opposite sex, at least as long as he stays in the Macintosh lab, but there is that other Big Question everyone must be asking by now:
Is this leading anywhere? Can Jim transfer his newly found Internet charm and grace to flesh-and-blood situations?
The jury on that one seems still to be out. Jim did have a blind date over the summer, but only one, and though his friend Judy gave him some good advice—the female, she told him, is probably even more anxious than the male—“Ultimately,” Jim tells me, “it wasn’t the greatest time of my life. We met, and we talked, and I’m glad. It was a good thing to do.”
They just didn’t hit it off, however.
I ask Jim if his letter-writing relationships were giving him any greater confidence around women, real women, the women he sees every day at work and in class, or if he was perhaps just retreating deeper into an electronic cocoon.
“In the short term, it has been a replacement,” he answers. “In the longer run, I am gaining more information, and it has led to some socializing outside of the computer lab, and that has been good.”
But the sentence trails off. He doesn’t seem so sure of that answer, he doesn’t seem to have much confidence in his own words. Will he try another blind date?
He laughs. “Sure, but how soon I can’t say?
“You spend a lot of time on-line, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
He smiles, shrugs his big shoulders. “It’s fun, it’s entertaining. It’s cheap.”
The Net is all those things, and again, I do not dispute that these digital relationships can be helpful. That is the positive side.
The negative?
Well, maybe there is a point where hiding behind the screen becomes a crutch. Trading E-mail is a sort of relationship, but it is not a full relationship—not even close. I worry about a day when we all communicate this way, choosing our words maybe too carefully, just as carefully choosing our natures and dispositions, our on-line names, and even our genders, based less on who we are than on what we wish to project.
I worry whether we will become something less than warts-and-all human beings and something more like fast-typing press agents, spin doctors for our own personae. What if electronic communication was all we had left, just words on a screen, cryptic electronic addresses that could just as easily be across the hall as across the world?
I like to imagine myself like the hero of some corny science fiction story, the guy who sneaks out of his high-rise one day against all regulations, ducking the video surveillance, dismantling the motion detectors, just to meet with a flesh-and-blood friend behind the nuclear power building, just to stand close to another human being for a moment, to breathe on someone, to feel that someone breathe back at me.
We are not all of us as pretty as Mel Gibson, maybe, but when I show my true face, I assume that means the underbite, the slightly crooked glasses, and that bit of my hair that always seems to stick up in back
That’s me, too.
Like it or not.