Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [13]
The summer before ninth grade she and Chelsea went to an unsupervised party. A guy she knew from the Olympics of the Mind team was there. Tim had been innocent and clean-cut in sixth grade. Now he was a sophomore with long hair pulled back in a headband and a sarcastic sense of humor.
Tim’s friend had invited ten girls and nine guys. He opened his parents’ liquor cabinet and poured creme de menthe for the girls and scotch for the guys. Cayenne hated the cough-syrupy taste of liqueur, but because she was nervous, she drank it. Tim came over and sat by Cayenne. He complimented her shirt and joked about all the geeks at the party. He poured refills. Tim’s friend put on a Madonna tape and turned off all the lights.
Cayenne was nervous and excited. Tim put his arm around her and kissed her on the forehead. They whispered for a while, then began to make out. All the other kids were doing the same thing or more. Some moved off into other rooms.
Cayenne told me, “I knew this would be the night. I was scared, but ready. I was surprised by how fast things happened. We had sex in the first hour of the party.”
After that night she and Tim called each other for the next month. They talked about school, music and movies—never sex. They lived in different parts of town and couldn’t figure out how to meet each other. Twice they made elaborate plans that fell through. After a while both became interested in kids at their own schools and they drifted apart.
I asked her how she felt about Tim now. Cayenne rubbed her forehead. “I wish it had been more romantic.”
Cayenne was a typical therapy client. She had had a reasonably happy childhood. With puberty, the changes and challenges in her life overwhelmed her, at least temporarily. Her grades fell, she dropped out of sports and relinquished her dream of being a doctor. As she moved from the relatively protected space of an elementary school into the more complex world of junior high, all her relationships grew turbulent. She had decisions to make about adult issues such as alcohol and sex. While she was figuring things out, she contracted herpes.
When I first worked with girls like Cayenne, I was lost myself. I had been educated by male psychologists in the 1970s. With the exception of Carol Gilligan’s work, almost all theory about teenagers had been authored by men such as Lawrence Kohlberg and E. H. Erikson, who had mainly studied boys.
I found girls to be obsessed with complicated and intense relationships. They felt obligated and resentful, loving and angry, close and distant, all at the same time with the same people. Sexuality, romance and intimacy were all jumbled together and needed sorting. Their symptoms seemed connected to their age and their common experiences. Certain themes, such as concern with weight, fear of rejection and the need for perfection, seemed rooted in cultural expectations for women rather than in the “pathology” of each individual girl. Girls struggled with mixed messages: Be beautiful, but beauty is only skin deep. Be sexy, but not sexual. Be honest, but don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Be independent, but be nice. Be smart, but not so smart that you threaten boys.
Adolescent girls presented me with all kinds of problems that my education and experience didn’t help me solve. When I stubbornly tried traditional methods of psychotherapy, they didn’t work. Girls dropped out of therapy, or even worse, they came in obediently, chatted obligingly and accomplished nothing. Because they were my most difficult cases, I thought a great deal about my adolescent clients. I wanted to conceptualize their problems in a way that actually led to positive action, and I tried to connect their surface behaviors with their deeper struggles. I found help from the writings of Alice Miller.