Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [28]
This tendency to overgeneralize makes it difficult to reason with adolescent girls. Because they know of one example, they’ll argue, “Everyone else gets to stay out till two,” or “Everyone I know gets a new car for their sixteenth birthday.” They’ll believe that because the girl next door gets a ride to school, every girl in the universe gets a ride to school. They aren’t being manipulative as much as they earnestly believe that one case represents the whole.
Teenage girls have what one psychologist called the “imaginary audience syndrome.” They think they are being watched by others who are preoccupied with the smallest details of their lives. For example, a niece was most upset that her mother wanted to take binoculars to her soccer game. She told her mom, “All the other kids will know you are watching my every move.” A friend told me how anxious her daughter was when she wore jeans and a sweatshirt to her daughter’s school conference. A twelve-year-old told me how embarrassing it was to go to performances with her mother, who had a way of clapping with hands high in the air. Sometimes when her mother was particularly pleased, she shouted bravo. My client said, “I can’t believe she does this. Everyone in the place knows she’s a total dork.”
Teenage girls engage in emotional reasoning, which is the belief that if you feel something is true, it must be true. If a teenager feels like a nerd, she is a nerd. If she feels her parents are unfair, they are unfair. If she feels she’ll get invited to homecoming, then she will be invited. There is limited ability to sort facts from feelings. Thinking is still magical in the sense that thinking something makes it so.
Young girls are egocentric in their thinking. That is, they are unable to focus on anyone’s experience but their own. Parents often experience this egocentrism as selfishness. But it’s not a character flaw, only a developmental stage. Parents complain that their daughters do only a few chores and yet claim, “I do all the work around here.” A mother reports that her daughter expects her to spend hours chauffeuring to save the daughter a few minutes of walking.
At one time I would have said that teenage girls think they are invulnerable. And I could have cited many examples, such as girls refusing to wear seat belts or to deal with the possibilities of pregnancy. I still see glimpses of that sense of invulnerability. For example, one of my clients who volunteered at a rehabilitation center came in with stories of head-injured patients. One day, after a particularly sad story about a boy her age, I blurted out, “Well, at least now you are wearing your seat belt.” She gave me a surprised look and said, “Not really. I won’t get in a wreck.”
But I do see this sense of invulnerability much less frequently. It is shattered by trauma in the lives of girls or their friends. Most twelve-year-olds know they can be hurt. They read the papers and watch television. Psychiatrist Robert Coles writes that children in some parts of America are more frightened than children in Lebanon or Northern Ireland. Girls talk more about death, have more violent dreams, more spooky fantasies and more fears about the future. As one client put it, “With all these shootings, all the people will disappear.”
It’s important not to oversimplify this topic. Some children feel much safer than others. Lori, for example, with her lovely neighborhood and stable family, feels much safer than Charlotte, with her history of trauma. Even traumatized children sometimes forget to be scared, while protected children have nightmares about being shot. But experience largely determines whether or not a girl feels invulnerable. Becoming conscious of the dangerous world can happen overnight or be a gradual process. The same girl can be of two minds depending on the week. One week she’ll