Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [50]
They worried about Rosemary all last year. Then the previous Saturday night she had stayed with a boy in a hotel room after a Jellyfish concert. She lied and claimed to be at a sleep-over with girlfriends.
I agreed to visit with Rosemary. She was petite, with dark hair and dramatic eyes. She wore designer jeans and Nikes to the session and carried a paperback copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook. She immediately told me that she wanted my help in getting her parents to lighten up.
I was careful to listen rather than talk. I knew that any advice would sound parental, and hence unacceptable. I asked about her concerns. She was worried about her weight and her physical flaws. She felt she needed to lose ten pounds; her left profile was “hideous” and her skin too splotchy. She had tried dieting but hated it. She felt crabby and depressed and eventually would cave in and eat.
I gently introduced the concept of lookism. Rosemary felt her friends were lookist and so was she. She was frightened of not being pretty enough. She said, “Wherever I go, I look around and there’s always someone prettier than me. That drives me nuts.”
We talked about how sexualized and unnatural models looked and about the way women were depicted on MTV and in the movies. A part of Rosemary hated the pressure and another part was obsessed with looking right. A part of her scorned lookism and a part of her evaluated everyone on the basis of appearance.
We talked about how her life had changed since elementary school. Rosemary had been happier then. She smiled when she talked about baseball and drawing with her dad. She had loved her parents and felt close to them then, but now she didn’t. “They don’t understand what I’m going through. They always give me stupid advice. They don’t want their little baby girl to grow up.”
Rosemary felt close to her friends, but she admitted that friendships were difficult. She worried about betrayal and rejections. The social scene changed from day to day. She felt uneasy standing up for herself with boys. She did things she didn’t agree with to fit into the popular crowd.
We talked about her friends’ experiences more than her own. She had friends who were dumped after they had sex with their boyfriends. Other friends were raped or had abortions. Generally she felt that she wouldn’t get in the same kind of trouble, but she admitted she had experienced a few close calls.
When we talked about guys, she was surprisingly insightful. She had wanted a boyfriend so badly that she had done anything to win favor. She said, “I don’t feel good about myself unless a guy likes me. I do whatever it takes.”
Our work proceeded erratically. It’s hard to do therapy with an anarchist. Like her parents, I wanted to keep her safe while she grew up, and like them, I had to be careful or I might say the wrong thing. If she folded her arms over her chest and looked out my window, I knew it was over for that session.
Rosemary saw the world in rigid categories. She overgeneralized, simplified or denied what she couldn’t understand. Her feelings were chaotic and often out of control, and her need for peer approval, particularly male approval, placed her in dangerous situations. She had a hard time saying no to boys who pushed for sex. Furthermore, she was determined to figure everything out for herself. She literally flinched on those rare occasions when I offered advice.
I thought of the many ironies in this family. These New Age spiritual parents had a daughter whose main concern was weight. The parents’ laissez-faire approach didn’t work well in a time of AIDS and addictions. Carol and Gary were careful to raise Rosemary in an androgynous environment, and she was now ultrafeminine so that she could attract and hold boys. They taught her to be assertive, but she used those skills only with grown-ups. Most ironic of all, Rosemary, who had grown up in a home with a meditation room,