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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….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….
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 tern 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…. Mistakes with them seem more serious…. 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….
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….
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….
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?….
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….
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 you own North Star, your sense of who you truly are. 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.”….
I encourage girls to find a quiet place and ask themselves the following questions:
How do I feel right now?
What do I think?
What are my values?
How would I describe myself to myself?
How do I see myself in the future?
What kind of work do I like?
What kind of leisure do I like?
When do I feel most myself?
How have I changed since I entered puberty?
What kinds of people do I respect?
How am I similar to and different from my mother?
How am I similar to and different from my father?
What goals do I have for myself as a person?
What are my strengths and weaknesses?
What would I be proud of on my deathbed?
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 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…. 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…. 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?” ….
Making and holding boundaries is closely related to making conscious choices. Girls learn to make and enforce boundaries….
Closely related to boundary-making is the skill of defining relationships. Many girls are “empathy sick.” That is, they know more about others’ feeling 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….
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…. 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….
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….
Time travel is another survival skill. All of us have bad days, lost days, Sometimes on those days it helps to go into the past and remember happy times or times when problems were much worse. Sometimes traveling to the future helps. It reminds a girl that she is on course toward her long-term goals and that certain experiences will not last forever….
Finally I teach the joys of altruism. Many adolescent girls are self-absorbed. It’s not a character flaw, it’s a developmental stage. Nonetheless, it makes them unhappy and limits their understanding of the world. I encourage girls to find some ways to help people on a regular basis. Volunteer work, good deeds for neighbors and political action help girls move into the larger world. They feel good about their contributions an they rapidly become less self-absorbed.…
But all these girls are at the same developmental stage and moving into the same culture. They must figure out ways to be independent from their parents and stay emotionally connected to them. They must discover ways to achieve and still be loved. They must discover moral and meaningful ways to express their sexuality in a culture that bombards them with plastic, pathetic models of sexuality. They must learn to respect themselves in a culture in which attractiveness is women’s most defining characteristic. They must become adults in a culture in which the feminine is defined as docile, weak and other-oriented….
Working with adolescent girls has changed me. I’m more humble and more patient, less sure of success than I am with adults. I am more respectful of families and aware of the difficulties that they encounter when girls are in adolescence. I’m more focused on our mass culture and the damage it does young women. I’m angrier. I’m more determined to help girls fight back and to work for cultural change.
After a lifetime of work, Freud claimed that he didn’t know what women wanted. I think his ignorance came from his failure to analyze the cultural context in which women lived. Margaret Fuller was able to define what women need in a way that stands the test of time: “What a woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded to unfold such powers as are given to her.”
The Bible and meaningful books 