Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [65]
Along with the fantasy about boys are the core beliefs—called core schemas in cognitive therapy—we have about ourselves. So often, we come to believe some essential lie about ourselves: I am not lovable. I am not special. I am worthless. I don’t matter. These lies come about through various channels, such as growing up with parental abuse or neglect or addiction, or with a trauma such as rape. Or they come about because of situations with boys, or because of our personality type, or simply because of how our culture makes us feel as girls.
Paula, for instance, developed the core belief “I am not special” right after she went through puberty. She developed crushes on boys, but those boys kept choosing other girls to date. When one finally did choose her as his girlfriend, he decided he liked someone else after about a month. This is ordinary dating behavior among adolescents, but Paula felt as though it meant she were different from other girls, that she wasn’t special.
Combine those sorts of core beliefs with the fantasy of what a boy can provide, and it’s easy to see why a girl might get hung up on getting with boys. She can easily come to believe that a boy will save her from these terrible things she believes about herself. He can make them untrue. I encouraged Paula to notice when she had that thought about not being special, and then we worked together to examine the thought process that led her to that false belief. Over time, she began to recognize that there was little logic to it. Having this sort of awareness so young—fourteen years old—Paula has the potential to avoid heading down a loose-girl path.
MAKING NEW HABITS
Deb was in the perfect mind space for changing her behavior, for creating new habits. One of the dangers of loose-girl self-harming sexual activity is that your brain develops habits. In the same way that one might develop a psychological dependence on a glass of wine in the evening, or a few hits of marijuana to sleep, girls (and boys) can develop a psychological dependence on promiscuity (as with other process addictions). Deb, for instance, knew she was making bad choices. She knew she had a false fantasy, and she hardly believed in it anymore. But just knowing is sometimes not enough. Often the behavior is entrenched enough that we have to do things differently, too.
It’s important to note that often the predictable pattern feels good. Something about that drama and pain, something about getting to feel the feelings we usually tamp down, feels good. Think about any other sort of addictive pattern. Imagine you were a heroin addict. Imagine the ritualized process of calling your dealer, driving into that seedy part of town. The haggard people on the streets. Your heart beats wildly in your chest. You know that you will get that feeling again. Then after doing that drug, imagine how it feels to come down and feel desperate for more, how familiar it is. The process is almost comforting, even as you start to sweat and feel sick. You know it by heart. This is the same for the loose girl. She gets pleasure from the process, even as it feels like hell. Those familiar neurons fire, those same sections of the brain light up, the various neurochemicals begin their work. The loose girl must acknowledge this buzz as part of her necessary awareness.
In most therapies for substance abuse, the addict is told to commit to staying away from his or her triggers, and that absolutely applies to the loose girl. If she usually messes around with boys at parties and regrets it later, she should stay away from parties. If she gives blow jobs in the school stairwell, she should stay away from the stairwell. Not forever. Just until new habits can take hold.
There are a number of established studies about how behavior changes, and they all point to the idea