Early puberty actually slows down many aspects of girls’ development. Early development and the more difficult culture of the 1990s increase the stress on adolescents. Girls who have recently learned to bake cookies and swan-dive aren’t ready to handle offers for diet pills. Girls who are reading about Pippi Longstocking aren’t ready for the sexual harassment they’ll encounter in school. Girls who love to practice piano and visit their grandmothers aren’t ready for the shunning by cliques. And at the same time girls must face events prematurely, they are encouraged by our culture to move away from parents and depend on friends for guidance. No wonder they suffer and make so many mistakes.
Girls stay in adolescence longer now. In the fifties and sixties, most teens left home as soon as they graduated from high school, never to return. Increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s young adults do not want to leave home, or they leave home for a while and return to live with their parents in their twenties. Partly children stay because of economics, partly they stay because home seems a safe haven in an increasingly dangerous world. Now adolescence may begin around age ten and may last until around age twenty-two. It can take twelve years to make it through the crucible.
There is an enormous gap between the surface structure of behaviors and the deep structure of meaning. Surface structure is what is visible to the naked eye—awkwardness, energy, anger, moodiness and restlessness. Deep structure is the internal work—the struggle to find a self, the attempt to integrate the past and present and to find a place in the larger culture. Surface behaviors convey little of the struggle within and in fact are often designed to obscure that struggle.
By definition, the deep-structure questions are not articulated clearly to adults. Rather, the surface questions are coded to speak to larger issues. “Can I dye my hair purple?” may mean “Will you allow me to develop as a creative person?” “Can I watch R movies?” may mean “Am I someone who can handle sexual experiences?” “Can I go to a different church?” may mean “Do I have the freedom to explore my own spirituality?”
The deep-structure questions are processed in a serpentine manner with friends. Endlessly girls discuss the smallest details of conversations and events—who wore what, who said what, did he smile at her, did she look mad when I did that? The surface is endlessly combed for information about the depths.
This deep structure-surface structure split is one reason why girls experience so much failure in relationships. Communication is confused and confusing. Relationships between friends are so coded that misunderstandings abound. Parents who attend to the surface structure often miss the point.
Because the deep-structure work is so serious, the surface behavior is often tension-releasing, a way of dispelling internal energy that must escape somehow. This marked difference in behaviors reminds me of my first few years as a therapist. I spent long days being serious, talking about problems and analyzing situations. Then after work I craved goofing off with my kids, telling stupid jokes and watching W.C. Fields movies. The harder my day, the more I wanted comic relief. Teenage girls are doing therapy all day too, only it’s inside their own heads. They need the time off whenever they can get it.
When I work with adolescent girls I try to understand what their surface behavior is telling me about their deep-structure issues. I try to ascertain when their behavior is connected to their true selves and when it is the result of pressure to be a false self. Which thinking should I respect and nurture? Which should I challenge?
PHYSICAL SELVES
The body is changing in size, shape and hormonal structure. Just as pregnant women focus on their bodies, so adolescent girls focus on their changing bodies. They feel, look and move differently. These changes must be absorbed, the new body must become part of the self.
The preoccupation with bodies at this age cannot be overstated. The body is a compelling mystery, a constant focus of attention. At thirteen, I thought more about my acne than I did about God or world peace. At thirteen, many girls spend more time in front of a mirror than they do on their studies. Small flaws become obsessions. Bad hair can ruin a day. A broken fingernail can feel tragic.
Generally girls have strong bodies when they enter puberty. But these bodies soften and spread out in ways that our culture calls fat. Just at the point that their bodies are becoming rounder, girls are told that thin is beautiful, even imperative. Girls hate the required gym classes in which other girls talk about their fat thighs and stomachs. One girl told me of showering next to an eighty-five-pound dancer who was on a radical diet. For the first time in her life she looked at her body and was displeased. One client talked about wishing she could cut off the roll of fat around her waist. Another thought her behind was “hideous.”
Geena was a chubby clarinet player who liked to read and play chess. She was more interested in computers than makeup and in stuffed animals than designer clothes. She walked to her first day of junior high with her pencils sharpened and her notebooks neatly labeled. She was ready to learn Spanish and algebra and to audition for the school orchestra. She came home sullen and shaken. The boy who had his locker next to hers had smashed into her with his locker door and sneered, “Move your fat ass.”
That night she told her mother, “I hate my looks. I need to go on a diet.”
Her mother thought, Is that what this boy saw? When he looked at my musical, idealistic Geena, did he see only her behind?
Girls feel an enormous pressure to be beautiful and are aware of constant evaluations of their appearance. In an art exhibit on the theme of women and appearance, Wendy Bantam put it this way: “Every day in the life of a woman is a walking Miss America Contest.” Sadly, girls lose if they are either too plain or too pretty. Our cultural stereotypes of the beautiful include negative ideas about their brains—think of the blonde jokes. Girls who are too attractive are seen primarily as sex objects. Their appearance overdetermines their identity. They know that boys like to be seen with them, but doubt that they are liked for reasons other than their packaging. Being beautiful can be a Pyrrhic victory. The battle for popularity is won, but the war for respect as a whole person is lost.
Girls who are plain are left out of social life and miss the developmental experiences they most need at this stage of their lives. They internalize our culture’s scorn of the plain.
The luckiest girls are neither too plain nor too beautiful. They will eventually date, and they’ll be more likely to date boys who genuinely like them. They’ll have an identity based on other factors, such as sense of humor, intelligence or strength of character. But they don’t feel lucky in junior high. A college girl told me, “In junior high I wanted to kill myself because I was too tall. I could not conceive of happiness at that height.” Another told of watching a cute blonde in her eighth-grade class flirt with boys. “The same boys who tripped over themselves to open doors for her would look away if I walked by.”
Appearance was important when I was in junior high, but it’s even more important today. Girls who lived in smaller communities were judged more holistically—for their character, family background, behavior and talents. Now, when more girls live in cities full of strangers, they are judged exclusively by their appearance. Often the only information teenagers have about each other is how they look.
The right look has always mattered, but now it’s harder to obtain. Designer clothes, leather jackets, name-brand tennis shoes and expensive makeup shut more girls out of the competition. The standards of beauty are more stringent. Miss Americas have become taller and slimmer over the years. In 1951, Miss Sweden was 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed 151 pounds. In 1983, Miss Sweden was 5 feet 9 inches tall and 109 pounds. While beautiful women are slimmer, average women are heavier than they were in the 1950s. Thus the discrepancy between the real and the ideal is greater. This discrepancy creates our plague of eating disorders.
What is culturally accepted as beautiful is achieved only with great artince—photo croppings, camera angles and composite bodies are necessary to get the pictures we now see of beautiful women. Even the stars cannot meet our cultural ideals without great cost. Dolly Parton dieted until she looked ill. Jamie Lee Curtis, who worked months to get in shape for the movie
Perfect,
felt her body was not right for the part. Jane Fonda and Princess Di have both had eating disorders.
I’m struck by how intense and damaging these issues are every time I speak in a high school or college class. I ask, “How many of you know someone with an eating disorder?” Usually every hand goes up. After my talk girls come up to ask about their friends, their sisters or themselves. They all have horror stories of girls who are miserable because they don’t quite meet our cultural ideals.
With early adolescence, girls surrender their relaxed attitudes about their bodies and take up the burden of self-criticism. Just at the point their hips are becoming rounder and they are gaining fat cells, they see magazines and movies or hear remarks by peers that suggest to them that their bodies are all wrong. Many girls scorn their true bodies and work for a false body. They allow the culture to define who they should be. They diet, exercise compulsively and wear makeup and expensive clothes. Charlotte thought of her body as something other people would examine and judge. How her body appeared to others, not how it felt to her, was what mattered.
A girl who remains true to herself will accept her body as hers and resist others’ attempts to evaluate and define her by her appearance. She’s much more likely to think of her body in terms of function than form. What does her body do for her? Lori, for example, was proud of her body’s ability to dance and swim. Her self-esteem didn’t revolve around her appearance. She eschewed diets and time spent in front of a mirror. Interestingly, even as her friends primped and dieted, they envied her her casual attitudes about beauty. Lori cared more about being than seeming. She was lucky because, as De Beauvoir writes, “to lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.”
EMOTIONAL SELVES
A friend once told me that the best way to understand teenagers was to think of them as constantly on
LSD.
It was good advice. People on acid are intense, changeable, internal, often cryptic or uncommunicative and, of course, dealing with a different reality. That’s all true for adolescent girls.
The emotional system is immature in early adolescence. Emotions are extreme and changeable. Small events can trigger enormous reactions. A negative comment about appearance or a bad mark on a test can hurl a teenager into despair. Not only are feelings chaotic, but girls often lose perspective. Girls have tried to kill themselves because they were grounded for a weekend or didn’t get asked to the prom.
Despair and anger are the hardest emotions to deal with, but other emotions are equally intense. Just as sorrow is unmodulated, so is joy. A snowstorm or a new dress can produce bliss. There’s still a childlike capacity to be swept away. One girl told me of wandering about in woods reading poetry and feeling in touch with the central core of the universe. She was elated by the sunlight dappling the leaves, the smells of wild plum blossoms, the blueness of the sky and the trills of mead-owlarks. The feeling of the moment is all that exists.
I teach girls to rate their stress as a way to modulate their emotions. I’ll say, “If one is a broken shoestring and ten is a terminal brain tumor, rate things that upset you on this one-to-ten scale.” Then I’ll ask, “What would you rate your argument with your boyfriend today?” The girl will say, “A fifteen.”
The instability of feelings leads to unpredictable behavior in adolescents. A wildly energetic teen will be frenetic one moment and lethargic the next. A sentence or a look from a parent can start a crying spell or World War III. A girl who is incredibly focused when it’s time to plan a skit for prom night is totally disorganized about her social studies project due the same day.
It’s hard for adults to keep up with the changes and intensity of adolescent emotions. When Sara was in junior high I called her after school. Some days she was full of laughter and confidence. (“School rocks my world.”) Other days she needed crisis intervention over the phone. (“It sucks to be me.”)
Girls’ emotional immaturity makes it hard for them to hold on to their true selves as they experience the incredible pressures of adolescence in the 1990s. They are whipped about by their emotions and misled by them. At a developmental time when even small events are overwhelming, big events such as date rape or a friend who tests positive for the HIV virus can be cataclysmic.
Girls deal with intense emotions in ways that are true or false to the self. A girl who operates out of her false self will be overwhelmed by her emotional experiences and do what she can to stop having these painful emotions. She may do this by denial of her feelings or by projection onto others. Charlotte did this by running away, by using alcohol and drugs and by losing herself in a relationship in which she thought only of her boyfriend’s feelings. When girls fail to acknowledge their own feelings, they further the development of a false self. Only by staying connected to their emotions and by slowly working through the turbulence can young women emerge from adolescence strong and whole.
Lori is still remarkably stable emotionally. I predict that she may have a rough time ahead, and that like most girls she may feel anxiety, confusion and despair. But I suspect she will manage to acknowledge these emotional experiences. She’ll be able to rage, cry, talk and write about her emotions. She’ll process them and gradually sort them out. Lori will emerge from adolescence somewhat tattered emotionally but intact. She will be an authentic person who owns all her emotional experiences. She’ll possess what Alice Miller calls “vibrancy.”