Reviving Ophelia (39 page)

Cassie is as tongue-tied with boys she likes as I was, and she is even more confused about proper behavior. The values she learned at home and at church are at odds with the values broadcast by the media. She’s been raised to love and value herself in a society where an enormous pornography industry reduces women to body parts. She’s been taught by movies and television that sophisticated people are sexually free and spontaneous, and at the same time she’s been warned that casual sex can kill. And she’s been raped.

Cassie knows girls who had sex with boys they hardly knew. She knows a girl whose reason for having sex was “to get it over with.” Another classmate had sex because her two best girlfriends had had sex and she didn’t want to feel left out. More touching and sexual harassment happens in the halls of her school than did in the halls of mine. Girls are referred to as bitches, whores and sluts.

Cassie has been desensitized to violence. She’s watched television specials on incest and sexual assaults and seen thousands of murders on the screen. She’s seen
Fatal Attraction
and
Halloween II.
Since Jeffrey Dahmer, she knows what necrophilia is. She wasn’t traumatized by
The Diary of Anne Frank.

Cassie can’t walk alone after dark. Her family locks doors and bicycles. She carries Mace in her purse and a whistle on her car keys. She doesn’t speak to men she doesn’t know. When she is late, her parents are immediately alarmed. Of course there were girls who were traumatized in the fifties, and there are girls who lead protected lives in the 1990s, but the proportions have changed significantly. We feel it in our bones.

I am not claiming that our childhoods are representative of the childhoods of all other females in America. In some ways Cassie and I have both had unusual childhoods. I grew up in a rural, isolated area with much less exposure to television than the average child of the times. My mother was a doctor instead of a homemaker. Compared to other girls, Cassie lives in a city that is safer than most and has a family with more money. Even with the rape, Cassie’s situation is by no means a worst-case scenario. She lives in a middle-class environment, not an inner city. Her parents aren’t psychotic, abusive or drug-addicted.

Also, I am not claiming that I lived in the good old days and that Cassie lives in the wicked present. I don’t want to glorify or to “Donna Reedify” the fifties, which were not a golden age. They were the years of Joe McCarthy and Jim Crow. How things looked was more important than how things really were. There was a great deal of sexual, religious and racial intolerance. Many families had shameful secrets, and if revealed, they led to public disgrace rather than community help.

I left my town as soon as I could, and as an adult, I have been much happier in a larger, less structured environment. Many of my friends come from small towns, and particularly the smart women among them have horror stories of not fitting in.

What I am claiming is that our stories have something to say about the way the world has stayed the same and the way it has changed for adolescent girls. We had in common that our bodies changed and those changes caused us anxiety. With puberty, we both struggled to relate to girls and boys in new ways. We struggled to be attractive and to understand our own sexual urges. We were awkward around boys and hurt by girls. As we struggled to grow up and define ourselves as adults, we both distanced ourselves from our parents and felt some loneliness as a result. As we searched for our identities, we grew confused and sad. Both of us had times when we were moody, secretive, inarticulate and introspective.

But while some of our experiences are similar, many are radically different. Cassie’s community is a global one, mine was a small town. Her parents were divorcing, mine stayed together. She lives in a society more stratified by money and more driven by addictions. -She’s been exposed to more television, movies and music. She lives in a more sexualized world.

Things that shocked us in the 1950s make us yawn now. The world has changed from one in which people blushed at the term “chicken breast” to one in which a movie such as
Pretty Woman
is not embarrassing. We’ve gone from a world with no locks on the doors to one of bolt locks and handguns. The issues that I struggled with as a college student—when I should have sex, should I drink, smoke or hang out with bad company—now must be considered in early adolescence.

Neither the 1950s nor the 1990s offered us environments that totally met our needs. My childhood was structured and safe, but the costs of that security were limited tolerance of diversity, rigid rules about proper behavior and lack of privacy. As one man from a small town said, “I don’t need to worry about running my own business because there are so many other people who are minding it for me.” Although my community provided many surrogate parents and clear rules about right and wrong, this structure was often used to enforce rigid social and class codes and to keep people in their place.

Cassie lives in a town that’s less rigid about roles and more supportive of autonomy, but she has little protected space. Cassie is freer in some ways than I was. She has more options. But ironically, in some ways, she’s less free. She cannot move freely in the halls of her school because of security precautions. Everyone she meets is not part of a community of connected people. She can’t walk alone looking at the Milky Way on a summer night.

The ideal community would somehow be able to combine the sense of belonging that small towns offer with the freedom to be oneself that small towns sometimes inhibit. Utopia for teenage girls would be a place in which they are safe and free, able to grow and develop in an atmosphere of tolerance and diversity and protected by adults who have their best interest at heart.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED FROM LISTENING

Fourteen-year-old Brandi was marched into my office by her mother, a tired-looking factory worker from a nearby town who insisted she come for at least one session. While Brandi rolled her eyes and grunted, her mother explained that Brandi had been sexually assaulted by an alcoholic neighbor.

Brandi interrupted her mother to say that the assault was “no big deal.” She said that other things bothered her a lot more than the stupid neighbor. She complained of her mother’s nagging about chores and her father’s strict curfews on school nights. She said her biggest problem was that her parents treated her like a little kid and she was sick of it.

I suggested that it might help to talk about the assault. She said, “Maybe some girls, but I’m not the type who spills my guts to just anyone.”

To my surprise Brandi rescheduled after that first session. The next time she came alone with her stuffed panda. She curled up on my couch and told me the real story.

 

Shana sat on the couch between her two psychologist parents. She was dressed in jeans and a
Jurassic Park
T-shirt and looked much younger than her thirteen years. Her father, a big bearlike man in a tweed jacket, explained that Shana wouldn’t go to school. At first she played sick, but later she just wouldn’t go. They couldn’t understand why—her grades were good, she had friends and, as far as they knew, nothing traumatic had happened.

Shana’s mother, a tall, confident woman whose research in addictions I had followed, wondered about depression. Her father had killed himself and one of her brothers had been diagnosed with bipolar depression. She noticed that Shana stayed up nights, slept all day and had no appetite.

I asked Shana why she wasn’t going to school.

She thought for a moment and said, “I feel like I’ll suffocate or stop breathing if I go in that building.”

 

Jana sipped a blue Slurpee as she told me about her problems at home.

“I hate my mother. She’s such a witch. Sometimes I think if I have to live with her the next four years till I graduate from high school I’ll go crazy.”

I asked what her mother did that made her so crazy.

“She tries to control my life. She makes me clean my room and go to church on Sunday. She forces me to eat meals.”

Pausing, Jana looked slightly chagrined. “It doesn’t sound that bad when I tell you. But trust me, if you lived with my mother, you’d want to puke.”

 

My undergraduate work in anthropology has always played a role in my work with people. I was taught to understand people within the context of their culture. I learned to ask, “What is the culture expecting of them? What is their script?” In graduate school in psychology, my training was psychodynamic. On internship I was introduced to systems theory.

I’ve learned from many great teachers and from my own experience. Human beings can do three things—think, feel and behave—and I try to make an impact in all three areas. I would call myself a relationship-oriented cognitive behaviorist. I’m influenced by the humanistic psychologists and also by social learning theorists.

I believe that talking to a listener with an accepting, empathic and nonjudgmental stance is healing. When I first meet a client I search for things about her that I can respect and ways in which I can empathize with her situation. I think it’s impossible to help unless I can find these things. I don’t believe that analysis of the past is always necessary. I like ordinary language. In general I don’t like victim talk, self-pity or blaming. I think psychotherapy should empower people, help them be more in control of their lives and enhance their relationships with others.

I try to be what psychologist Don Meichenbaum calls “a purveyor of hope.” I’m pragmatic, relativistic and collaborative. I don’t like negative labels, diagnoses or the medical model. I am drawn to therapists who view families in more positive ways. I like the work of Jay Haley, Harriet Lerner, Claudia Bepko and Jo-Ann Krestan. I respect Michael White and David Epston, who believe that clients come to therapists with “problem-saturated stories.” It’s the therapist’s job to help clients tell more powerful and optimistic stories about themselves. White and Epston stress that the client isn’t the problem, the problem is the problem, and they prefer what they call “solution talk” to “problem talk.”

They believe that many families are in trouble because they tell problem-saturated stories about themselves. They warn that often mental-health professionals contribute to these stories by asking questions about failure and conflict and ignoring areas in which the family is strong and healthy. White and Epston empower families by helping them tell new stories about their own functioning. I like their ideas because they take the pathology and shame out of therapy. Working as they do generates options, optimism, trust and collaboration.

My general goals for all clients are to increase their authenticity, openness to experience, competence, flexible thinking and realistic appraisal of their environment. I want to help clients see things in new ways and develop richer, more rewarding relationships. Psychotherapy is one of many processes by which people can examine their lives intelligently. It’s a way to have a consultant on solving human problems. It can be good for everyone; it helps people steer, not drift, through life. Examined lives are indeed more worth living. The ideal life is calm, fun and responsible. Like Freud, I believe in the value of love and work.

Working with adolescent girls and their parents pushed me to reexamine my training about families. Much of the writing in our field views families as a primary source of pathology and pain. The language of psychology reflects this bias—words about distance are positive (independence, individuation and autonomy), whereas words about closeness are negative (dependency and enmeshment). Indeed, psychologists are so prone to pathologize families that one definition of a normal family is “a family that has not yet been evaluated by a psychologist.”

 

Years ago Miranda and her parents came to my office. Three months earlier she had been diagnosed as bulimic and referred to a treatment center eight hours away from her hometown. While Miranda was in this program, her parents secured a second mortgage on their home to pay for her treatment. They called her daily and drove to the faraway center every weekend for family therapy. After three months and $120,000, Miranda still had her eating disorder and her parents had been diagnosed as co-dependent.

My first question to Miranda was, “What did you learn in your stay at the hospital?”

She answered proudly, “That I come from a dysfunctional family.”

I thought of her parents—Dad was a physical therapist and Mom a librarian in a small community. They weren’t alcoholics or abusive. They took family vacations every summer and put money into a college fund. They played board games, read Miranda bedtime stories and attended her school programs. And now, with Miranda in trouble, they had incurred enormous debts to pay for her treatment. For all their efforts and money, they had been labeled pathological.

Miranda, like almost all teens, was quick to agree with this label. It’s easy to convince teenagers that their parents don’t understand them and that their families are dysfunctional. Since the beginning of time, teenagers have felt their parents were uniquely unreasonable. When a professional corroborates their opinions, they feel vindicated, at least for the moment.

But in the long term, it hurts most teens to undercut their parents. My goal with Miranda was to restore some balance to her concept of her family. When I suggested that her parents deserved some credit for the efforts they’d made to help her, Miranda seemed confused at first, then visibly relieved.

Psychology’s negative view of families began with Freud. He believed that character was fully formed within the family in early childhood. Because of the pathology of the parents, he felt that the character structure of most children was flawed. The goal of analysis was to save the client from the damage done by the family. It is a common view today. Many popular psychology books suggest that if the reader isn’t happy, it’s because of a dysfunctional family. These books ignore the crime rate, the poverty and the sleazy values of the mass culture and our drug- and alcohol-fueled life-styles.