Reviving Ophelia (40 page)

Of course the problems of a dysfunctional culture are reflected in the lives of each family. Many men who grow up in a misogynistic culture abuse their wives and daughters. Many mothers offer their daughters passive, diminished models of femaleness. Some parents are cultural agents who are desperate for their daughters to be popular. But when so many families have trouble, it’s important to look at the cultural context. Rather than blame each family for the unhappiness of its daughters, we need to examine what it is in our culture that destroys the happiness of so many teenage girls.

Psychology has much to answer for in its treatment of families. We have offered parents conflicting and ever-changing advice. We have issued dire warnings of the harm they will do if they make mistakes in parenting, and we have assured them that they are inadequate to the task. Our tendency to blame parents, especially mothers, for their children’s problems has paralyzed many parents. They are so afraid of traumatizing their children that they cannot set clear and firm limits. They are so afraid of being dysfunctional that they stop functioning.

My work with adolescent girls helped me see families in a different light. Most of the parents I see clearly love their daughters and want what is best for them. They are their daughters’ shelter from the storm and their most valuable resource in times of need. I respect their willingness to seek help when they are in over their heads. I’m honored that they allow me, temporarily, to be part of their lives.

Good therapists work to shore up family bonds and to give hope to flagging families. We work to promote harmony and good humor and to increase tolerance and understanding between family members. Rather than searching for pathological labels, we encourage the development of those qualities that John DeFrain found in all healthy families: appreciation and affection, commitment, positive communication, time together, spiritual well-being and the ability to cope with stress and crises.

Therapists can be most helpful when we support parental efforts to keep adolescents safe and at the same time adolescents’ needs to grow and move into the larger world. We can help by teaching teenagers that they can individuate from their parents without separating from them. We can help girls discover positive ways to be independent. We can help by discussing the effects of mass culture on families. We need to politicize, not pathologize, families.

We need to change society if we are to produce healthy young women. But I can’t single-handedly change the culture, and neither can the families I see. I try to help families understand some of their daughters’ behavior as a reaction to a misogynistic culture and its manifestations at home, with friends, in school and in the larger community. We work together to assess the impact of the culture on the life of each family and to develop plans for damage control. It’s emergency rescue work.

Of course each family has its own history, its own unique problems and blind spots. And each family has its own unique strengths and coping mechanisms. I try to strengthen families and to give the daughters power and permission to be who they truly are.

Daughters can learn to recognize the forces that shape them and make conscious choices about what they will and won’t endure. They need “awakening therapy,” which is my term for consciousness-raising. This therapy helps girls become whole adults in a culture that encourages them to become forever the object of another’s gaze. It means teaching a new form of self-defense.

Even with these general ideas about therapy, I found adolescent girls to be difficult. It is harder to establish relationships with them, and they are more likely to quit therapy without notice. Mistakes with them seem more serious. They are much less forgiving than adult clients. Their surface behaviors are often designed to hide their deep-structure needs so that it is hard to find the real issues. Even accurate empathy is difficult. Their experiences are not like mine now, or even like mine when I was their age. When I try to connect based on common experience, I often fail.

Here’s how the work actually goes: On the first visit, girls radiate confusion and a lack of confidence. They move uneasily in their bodies. They flash me a kaleidoscope of emotions—fear, indifference, sadness, smugness, resignation and hope. They signal despair about their sexuality and loathing of their appearance. They are braced for rejection and ridicule. Questions about me form and re-form in their eyes: Do they dare discuss bad grades, bingeing, alcohol, sex, cutting themselves or suicidal thoughts? Will I be angry? Rejecting? Unable to understand? Or, worst of all, will I smugly supply answers? They look longingly at the door and smile at me in a way that says “I want you to like me, but don’t expect me to admit it.”

With girls this age, relationships are everything. No work can be done in the absence of mutual affection and regard. The first step in developing a relationship is helping the girl develop trust—for me, for the therapeutic relationship and for herself.

Girls have dozens of ways to test the therapist. The best way to pass these tests is to listen. Sincere, total, nonjudgmental listening happens all too rarely in any of our lifetimes. I ask open-ended questions. How do you feel about that? What do you think? What is important to you about this experience? What did you learn from this experience? Can you talk more about this?

I resist the urge to offer advice or too much sympathy. I help with sorting—what can and can’t the girl control? What opinions are hers, what opinions are others’? What is most important in a story? What is a small move in the right direction?

The most important question for every client is “Who are you?” I am not as interested in an answer as I am in teaching a process that the girl can use for the rest of her life. The process involves looking within to find a true core of self, acknowledging unique gifts, accepting all feelings, not just the socially acceptable ones, and making deep and firm decisions about values and meaning. The process includes knowing the difference between thinking and feeling, between immediate gratification and long-term goals, and between her own voice and the voices of others. The process includes discovering the personal impact of our cultural rules for women. It includes discussion about breaking those rules and formulating new, healthy guidelines for the self. The process teaches girls to chart a course based on the dictates of their true selves. The process is nonlinear, arduous and discouraging. It is also joyful, creative and full of surprises.

I often use the North Star as a metaphor. I tell clients, “You are in a boat that is being tossed around by the winds of the world. The voices of your parents, your teachers, your friends and the media can blow you east, then west, then back again. To stay on course you must follow your own North Star, your sense of who you truly are. Only by orienting north can you chart a course and maintain it, only by orienting north can you keep from being blown all over the sea.

“True freedom has more to do with following the North Star than with going whichever way the wind blows. Sometimes it seems like freedom is blowing with the winds of the day, but that kind of freedom is really an illusion. It turns your boat in circles. Freedom is sailing toward your dreams.”

Even in the Midwest, where we have no large lakes, many girls have sailed. And particularly in the Midwest, girls love images of the sea. They like the images of stars, sky, roaring waters and themselves in a small, beautiful boat. But most girls also feel uncertain how to apply this metaphor to their own lives. They ask plaintively, “How do I know who I really am or what I truly want?”

I encourage girls to find a quiet place and ask themselves the following questions:

I encourage girls to keep diaries and to write poetry and autobiographies. Girls this age love to write. Their journals are places where they can be honest and whole. In their writing, they can clarify, conceptualize and evaluate their experiences. Writing their thoughts and feelings strengthens their sense of self. Their journals are a place where their point of view on the universe matters.

We talk about the disappointments of early adolescence—the betrayals by friends, the discovery that one is not beautiful by cultural standards, the feeling that one’s smartness is a liability, the pressure to be popular instead of honest and feminine instead of whole.

I encourage girls to search within themselves for their deepest values and beliefs. Once they have discovered their own true selves, I encourage them to trust that self as the source of meaning and direction in their lives. That sense of self becomes their North Star that helps them stay on course. I encourage them to stay focused and goal-oriented, to steer toward their own self-defined sense of who they are.

Maturity involves being honest and true to oneself, making decisions based on a conscious internal process, assuming responsibility for one’s decisions, having healthy relationships with others and developing one’s own true gifts. It involves thinking about one’s environment and deciding what one will and won’t accept.

I encourage girls to observe our culture with the eyes of an anthropologist in a strange new society. What customs and rituals do they observe? What kinds of women and men are respected in this culture? What body shapes are considered ideal? How are the sex roles assigned? What are sanctions for breaking rules? It’s only after they understand the rules that they can intelligently resist them.

I teach girls certain skills. The first and most basic is centering. I recommend that they find a quiet place where they can sit alone daily for ten to fifteen minutes. I encourage them to sit in this place, relax their muscles and breathe deeply. Then they are to focus on their own thoughts and feelings about the day. They are not to judge these thoughts or feelings or even direct them, only to observe them and respect them. They have much to learn from their own internal reactions to their lives.

Another basic skill is the ability to separate thinking from feeling. This is something that all healthy adults must be able to do. It’s particularly difficult for teenagers because their feelings are so intense. They are given to emotional reasoning, which is the belief that if something feels so, it must be so. In the sessions, as we process events, I ask, “How do you feel about this? What do you think about this?” Over time, girls learn that these are two different processes and that both should be respected when making a decision.

Making conscious choices is also part of defining a self. I encourage girls to take responsibility for their own lives. Decisions need to be made slowly and carefully. Parents, boyfriends and peers may influence their decisions, but the final decisions are their own. The bottom-line question is: “Does this decision keep you on the course you want to be on?” At first the choices seem small. Who shall I go out with this weekend? Shall I forgive a friend who hurt my feelings? Later the choices include decisions about family, schools, careers, sexuality and intimate relationships.

Making and holding boundaries is closely related to making conscious choices. Girls learn to make and enforce boundaries. At the most basic level, this means they decide who touches their bodies. It also means they set limits about their time, their activities and their companions. They can say, “No, I will not do that.” They can make position statements that are firm statements of what they will and will not do.

Closely related to boundary-making is the skill of defining relationships. Many girls are “empathy sick.” That is, they know more about others’ feelings than their own. Girls need to think about what kinds of relationships are in their best interest and to structure their relationships in accord with their ideas.

This is difficult for girls because they are socialized to let others do the defining. Girls are uncomfortable identifying and stating their needs, especially with boys and adults. They worry about not being nice or appearing selfish. However, success in this area is exhilarating. With this skill, they become the object of their own lives again. Once they have experienced the satisfaction of defining relationships, they are eager to continue to develop this skill.

Another vital skill is managing pain. All the craziness in the world comes from people trying to escape suffering. All mixed-up behavior comes from unprocessed pain. People drink, hit their mates and children, gamble, cut themselves with razors and even kill themselves in an attempt to escape pain. I teach girls to sit with their pain, to listen to it for messages about their lives, to acknowledge and describe it rather than to run from it. They learn to write about pain, to talk about it, to express it through exercise, art, dance or music. Life in the 1990s is so stressful that all girls need predictable ways to calm themselves. If they don’t have positive ways, such as exercise, reading, hobbies or meditation, they will have negative ways, such as eating, drinking, drugs or self-mutilation.

Most girls need help modulating their emotional reactions. I encourage them to rate their stress on a one-to-ten scale. I challenge extreme statements. A girl who comes in saying “This is the worst day of my life” likely needs help reframing her day’s experiences. One of my favorite questions for this reframing is: “What did you learn from your experience?”

Girls are socialized to look to the world for praise and rewards, and this keeps them other-oriented and reactive. They are also vulnerable to depression if they happen to be in an environment where they are not validated. I teach them to look within themselves for validation. I ask them to record victories and bring these in to share with me. Victories are actions that are in keeping with their long-term goals. Once a girl learns to validate herself, she is less vulnerable to the world’s opinion. She can orient toward true North.