Reviving Ophelia (25 page)

Once girls begin to cut and burn themselves, they are likely to continue. Inflicting harm on the body becomes cathartic. In the absence of better coping strategies, hurting the self becomes a way to calm down. With time, the habit of inflicting harm on the self becomes more ingrained, so the sooner young women seek help the better.

What is the treatment? Ideally, we will change our culture so that young girls have less external stress to contend with in their lives. But for now, young women must learn better coping strategies and develop more internal and external resources to cope with stress.

Therapy can teach girls to identify early that they are in pain. They need to label their internal state as painful and then think about how to proceed. They must learn new ways to deal with intense misery and also new ways to process pain. Their stock way has been to hurt themselves. They must learn to recognize pain and help themselves.

Fortunately this tendency to inflict harm on the body when in psychic pain is quite curable. Young women can be taught to process pain by thinking and talking, instead of punishing themselves. Most young women respond quickly to guidance about how to stop this behavior and develop more adaptive ones. They stop the self-mutilating and begin to talk about the stresses they are under.

Tammy came in after her mother discovered her cutting her breasts. Alice had awakened around three and noticed a light on in Tammy’s bedroom. She went in to check on her and found her sitting on the bed surrounded by bloody newspapers, a razor in her hand. Alice woke Brian and they drove Tammy to the hospital. The doctor stitched up the deeper cuts and made an eight o’clock appointment for the family with me.

Alice and Brian were pale with fear and anxiety. Brian could narrate the events of the night. Alice couldn’t stop crying. Tammy’s face was red and puffy from tears, but she was not crying. Instead, she wouldn’t look at me or speak above a whisper.

In spite of the current crisis, this seemed a rather typical, traditional family. Brian was the minister of a small church and played saxophone in a jazz band on weekends. Alice was a music teacher and a stay-at-home mother. Tammy was the third of four children. The older two were in college and the youngest, a ten-year-old boy, was doing fine. There was a history of depression on Alice’s side of the family, but otherwise this family was unique for its lack of previous problems.

The family took long summer vacations every year. Often on Sunday nights they played music and sang together. Alice had served as a PTA president and a Girl Scout leader. Brian was a slightly absent-minded man who shut his eyes during the violent scenes in movies and fainted at his pre-wedding blood test.

Tammy, even with her puffy face, was a pretty girl with long blond hair and alabaster skin. She was dressed in a silk jacket, designer blue jeans and stylish green boots. Brian reported that she was a good student and an easy-going daughter. She made the honor roll every semester and was a twirler in the high school band. Like her parents, she loved music, sang in the church and school choirs and played flute with her school orchestra. Brian said, “She’s the best musician of all the kids.”

Alice added, “We’re in shock about this.”

I spoke to Tammy alone. “Do you know why you do this?” I asked gently.

Eyes averted, she said, “After a fight with my boyfriend.”

We talked about Martin, whom she had met her sophomore year at all-state music camp. Martin played bass for the biggest school in the state. He was everything a high school girl could desire—good-looking, athletic and popular.

Tammy said, “All the girls were after him. I was shocked that he picked me.”

“What’s the relationship been like?”

Tammy sighed. “We fight a lot. Martin is jealous.”

“What else?”

“He does things my parents wouldn’t like. He smokes pot and drinks.” She paused and looked at me suspiciously.

“Are you sexually involved with him?”

She nodded miserably.

“How do you feel about that?”

“I don’t know. I’m afraid of getting pregnant.”

She spoke softly but rapidly. “Martin’s really into sex. This New Year’s Eve, he had a party and rented porno videos for all the couples to watch. The guys liked it, but us girls were really embarrassed. We didn’t want to watch.”

“When did you have the fight that led to your cutting yourself?” Tammy brushed her hair off her face. “It was after the porno night. I think maybe the next weekend. We went to a party and I had a wine cooler. Martin was mad because I talked to a friend of his. He took me home early and pushed me out of the car. I fell down on our driveway and he just drove off. That’s the night I was so mad I didn’t know what to do.”

“Try to remember exactly how you felt.”

Tammy said, “I slipped into my room so Mom and Dad wouldn’t see me. I thought I was going crazy. There were scissors on my dresser and the idea of cutting myself came to me. I don’t even know how I did it. But later I had cuts on my arms and I felt better. I could go to sleep.”

She looked at me. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

I said, “I think you are scared.”

Tammy said, “After that first time, it happened again. Whenever Martin and I fought, I felt this need to cut myself. I couldn’t relax until I’d done it.”

“Has Martin ever hit you?”

Tammy said, “Don’t tell my parents this. He doesn’t mean to, but he’s hot-tempered. Afterwards, he’s really sorry.”

I called Alice and Brian in and said that I’d like to work alone with Tammy for a while. I explained that she’d developed a bad habit, which was to hurt herself physically when she was in emotional pain. Also, I added, we needed to explore her relationship with Martin.

Alice said, “Martin seems like a great guy.”

I thought to myself, This minister and his wife have no idea how complicated the world has become for their lovely flute-playing daughter. I was careful not to betray Tammy’s confidence, but I said, “Parents don’t always know what’s going on.”

Gail was very different from Tammy. She was younger and, to quote her, “trapped in the halls of a junior high.” She was dressed in a way that signaled “I am different” with her head half shaved and half purple punk. She had a nose ring, eight earrings, mostly of skulls and snakes, a tattoo of a dragon on her left arm and tiny tattoos on every finger. She wore a stained T-shirt with a FREE TIBET logo, black jeans torn at the knees and heavy boots.

She was the oldest daughter in a family of artists. The mother was a dancer and the father a sculptor. Gail’s family was financially poor but culturally enriched. They couldn’t afford trips, new cars or nice clothes for their daughters, but they could afford cheap tickets to the symphony, used books and therapy.

Gail’s parents, Stephen and Shelly, were warmhearted, quirky people who seemed baffled at being in a therapist’s office. Shelly’s first comment was to compliment my overflowing bookcase. She said, “I see you like Jung. So do I.”

I asked why the family was in my office. Gail looked out the window. Shelly and Stephen looked at each other. Stephen said, “We hate to tell on Gail. We made her come today.”

Shelly said, “We’ve been worried since she began junior high, but last Saturday night we discovered that she was burning herself with cigarettes. We decided we had to do something.”

“Before junior high, Gail was the star of the family,” Shelly continued. “She was such a joy. The school classified her as highly gifted, so she qualified for special tutors and programs at the university. Her artwork made it to the state fair.”

“She had everything going for her,” her father added. “She had friends and was the comedian of the school. She stayed up all night reading and then went to school the next day and did fine.”

Shelly said, “She was so competent and independent. We weren’t prepared for her to have trouble. We didn’t see it coming.”

I turned to Gail, who was reading my book titles with interest, and asked, “What happened with junior high?”

Gail spoke slowly and with great precision. “I hated being warehoused and sent from room to room at the sound of a bell. I felt like a cow in a feedlot. I got teased when I took gifted classes and bored in the regular classes. I liked art class, but I’d just get out my supplies and the bell would ring.”

“How about the other kids?” I asked.

“Do you know the slogan ‘Sex, drugs and rock and roll’ from the sixties?” I nodded and she continued. “In the nineties that’s ‘Masturbation, booze and Madonna.’ I don’t fit into that scene.”

Stephen said, “Gail changed from outgoing to a real loner. She didn’t like anyone. The phone stopped ringing for her.”

Gail continued, “Junior high wasn’t the worst thing. I was down about the environment. I couldn’t sleep at night because I was worried about oil spills and the rain forests. I couldn’t forget about Somalia, either, or Bosnia. It just seemed like the world was falling apart.”

I see these problems in other highly gifted girls. Often because they are so bright, adults expect them to be mature emotionally. And they aren’t. They react to global tragedies with the emotional intensity of adolescents. Though bright girls are perceptive enough to see through the empty values and shallow behavior of their peers, they have the social needs of adolescents. They feel utterly alone in their suffering. They have the intellectual abilities of adults in some areas and can understand world problems, and yet they have the political power of children.

Gail made the choices of many girls like herself. She avoided mainstream kids and gradually found a few of her own kind. She discovered the smoke-filled back room of the local coffeehouse where the alternative crowd gathered to talk. She made friends with gay men, with runaways, school dropouts and unhappy intellectuals like herself. She pierced her ears and then her nose. She went with her best friend to a tattoo parlor and had her dragon professionally done. Unfortunately, this crowd had its share of problems. Many were into drugs both as painkillers and experience producers. Soon Gail was smoking pot and dropping acid.

School, meanwhile, grew even more difficult. Gail was the only girl in her class with a nose ring and tattoos. Kids giggled and pointed at her when she walked past. By the time she was in ninth grade, she’d read more on the environment than her science teachers. The easy classes made her cynical about education. Her grades dropped. She skipped school and went to the park to smoke dope.

Stephen and Shelly knew that things weren’t going well and encouraged Gail to try therapy. She refused. Her best friend moved to California and Gail became a loner again. Last week they’d found her with the cigarette burns.

The next week I met with Gail alone. She wore the same boots and jeans with a T-shirt that said “Life sucks and then you die.” In spite of her odd appearance she struck me as beautiful and sensitive. I thought of the Allen Ginsberg line about “the drunken taxicab of absolute reality.” It had crashed into Gail in early adolescence.

I told her about reading The Diary of Anne Frank in my small town thirty years earlier. I said, “When I discovered the evil that people do to each other I wanted to die. I didn’t really want to be part of a species that produced the Nazis.”

Gail agreed with me and said she’d felt that way when she heard the public radio reports about women being raped in Bosnia. She felt that way when she read that Stalin killed even more people than Hitler, that the Khmer Rouge killed 6 million Cambodians and that the Serbs practiced ethnic cleansing. She said, “The Holocaust wasn’t an isolated event. It happens all over.”

I said, “What saved me was reading Whitman and Thoreau. Shortly after I read about Anne Frank, I discovered them. It was summer and I would take my Whitman and go to the woods. I would read and watch the wind in the trees. I sat on my back porch at sunset and read Walden. Thoreau is such a good antidote to superficial people and shallow ideas. He gives dignity to loneliness.”

Gail said, “Going to the park with my friend helped me, but now he’s gone.”

“Tell me about burning yourself.”

Gail said, “That happened automatically. I was smoking in my room and I felt helpless and angry. The next thing I knew I was burning my arm and it felt good. It felt clean. I was careful to burn only my upper arm, so I could hide the marks. Afterwards I felt calmer.”

“You were turning all your rage at the world against yourself,” I said. “You need a better way to express rage and to fight back.”

We talked about protest marches, recycling, boycotts. All of these seemed too abstract. Gail’s despair could be assuaged only by direct action. Even though she was young, I encouraged her to work at the soup kitchen for the homeless. She needed to make the world better for real people. Gail agreed to look into that. As she left, I handed her my worn copy of
Walden.

Gail came in for many months. Mostly I encouraged her to talk and write about her pain. As we became acquainted, she talked more about her current life. One of her gay friends was HIV-positive. A girlfriend of hers had been raped. Another friend was using drugs and getting sick.

She developed an emergency plan for those times when she was tempted to burn herself. She would pull out a notebook and write, write, write every painful, angry emotion she was feeling. She needed to get those emotions out of her body and onto a piece of paper.

Some of this writing she later shared with me. She wrote about the snobby girls at her school who teased the poor students. She wrote about the backstabbing and pettiness, the scramble for the right clothes and the right friends. She wrote about the poverty her hard-working parents had faced their entire lives. She wrote about the faces in Somalia, old people freezing in the Bosnian winter, homeless people and Rodney King.

She wrote until the craving to burn herself passed. Sometimes it didn’t and she asked one of her parents to hold her and comfort her until she could sleep. Sometimes she called me and I talked her down. And, of course, sometimes the craving was too strong and she gave in and hurt herself. But this happened less and less as she learned to talk and write about her problems.