Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [136]
Of course the problems of a dysfunctional culture are reflected in the lives of each family. Many men who grow up in a misogynistic culture abuse their wives and daughters. Many mothers offer their daughters passive, diminished models of femaleness. Some parents are cultural agents who are desperate for their daughters to be popular. But when so many families have trouble, it’s important to look at the cultural context. Rather than blame each family for the unhappiness of its daughters, we need to examine what it is in our culture that destroys the happiness of so many teenage girls.
Psychology has much to answer for in its treatment of families. We have offered parents conflicting and ever-changing advice. We have issued dire warnings of the harm they will do if they make mistakes in parenting, and we have assured them that they are inadequate to the task. Our tendency to blame parents, especially mothers, for their children’s problems has paralyzed many parents. They are so afraid of traumatizing their children that they cannot set clear and firm limits. They are so afraid of being dysfunctional that they stop functioning.
My work with adolescent girls helped me see families in a different light. Most of the parents I see clearly love their daughters and want what is best for them. They are their daughters’ shelter from the storm and their most valuable resource in times of need. I respect their willingness to seek help when they are in over their heads. I’m honored that they allow me, temporarily, to be part of their lives.
Good therapists work to shore up family bonds and to give hope to flagging families. We work to promote harmony and good humor and to increase tolerance and understanding between family members. Rather than searching for pathological labels, we encourage the development of those qualities that John DeFrain found in all healthy families: appreciation and affection, commitment, positive communication, time together, spiritual well-being and the ability to cope with stress and crises.
Therapists can be most helpful when we support parental efforts to keep adolescents safe and at the same time adolescents’ needs to grow and move into the larger world. We can help by teaching teenagers that they can individuate from their parents without separating from them. We can help girls discover positive ways to be independent. We can help by discussing the effects of mass culture on families. We need to politicize, not pathologize, families.
We need to change society if we are to produce healthy young women. But I can’t single-handedly change the culture, and neither can the families I see. I try to help families understand some of their daughters’ behavior as a reaction to a misogynistic culture and its manifestations at home, with friends, in school and in the larger community. We work together to assess the impact of the culture on the life of each family and to develop plans for damage control. It’s emergency rescue work.
Of course each family has its own history, its own unique problems and blind spots. And each family has its own unique strengths and coping mechanisms. I try to strengthen families and to give the daughters power and permission to be who they truly are.
Daughters can learn to recognize the forces that shape them and make conscious choices about what they will and won’t endure. They need “awakening therapy,” which is my term for consciousness-raising. This therapy helps girls become whole adults in a culture that encourages them to become forever the object of another’s gaze. It means teaching a new form of self-defense.
Even with these general ideas about therapy, I found adolescent girls to be difficult. It is harder to establish relationships with them, and they are more likely to quit therapy without notice. Mistakes with them seem more serious. They are much less forgiving than adult clients. Their surface behaviors are often designed to hide their deep-structure needs so that it is hard to find the real issues. Even accurate empathy is difficult. Their experiences are not like