Free Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher Page B

appearance or a bad mark on a test can hurl a teenager into despair. Not only are feelings chaotic, but girls often lose perspective. Girls have tried to kill themselves because they were grounded for a weekend or didn’t get asked to the prom.
    Despair and anger are the hardest emotions to deal with, but other emotions are equally intense. Just as sorrow is unmodulated, so is joy. A snowstorm or a new dress can produce bliss. There’s still a childlike capacity to be swept away. One girl told me of wandering about in woods reading poetry and feeling in touch with the central core of the universe. She was elated by the sunlight dappling the leaves, the smells of wild plum blossoms, the blueness of the sky and the trills of mead-owlarks. The feeling of the moment is all that exists.
    I teach girls to rate their stress as a way to modulate their emotions. I’ll say, “If one is a broken shoestring and ten is a terminal brain tumor, rate things that upset you on this one-to-ten scale.” Then I’ll ask, “What would you rate your argument with your boyfriend today?” The girl will say, “A fifteen.”
    The instability of feelings leads to unpredictable behavior in adolescents. A wildly energetic teen will be frenetic one moment and lethargic the next. A sentence or a look from a parent can start a crying spell or World War III. A girl who is incredibly focused when it’s time to plan a skit for prom night is totally disorganized about her social studies project due the same day.
    It’s hard for adults to keep up with the changes and intensity of adolescent emotions. When Sara was in junior high I called her after school. Some days she was full of laughter and confidence. (“School rocks my world.”) Other days she needed crisis intervention over the phone. (“It sucks to be me.”)
    Girls’ emotional immaturity makes it hard for them to hold on to their true selves as they experience the incredible pressures of adolescence in the 1990s. They are whipped about by their emotions and misled by them. At a developmental time when even small events are overwhelming, big events such as date rape or a friend who tests positive for the HIV virus can be cataclysmic.
    Girls deal with intense emotions in ways that are true or false to the self. A girl who operates out of her false self will be overwhelmed by her emotional experiences and do what she can to stop having these painful emotions. She may do this by denial of her feelings or by projection onto others. Charlotte did this by running away, by using alcohol and drugs and by losing herself in a relationship in which she thought only of her boyfriend’s feelings. When girls fail to acknowledge their own feelings, they further the development of a false self. Only by staying connected to their emotions and by slowly working through the turbulence can young women emerge from adolescence strong and whole.
    Lori is still remarkably stable emotionally. I predict that she may have a rough time ahead, and that like most girls she may feel anxiety, confusion and despair. But I suspect she will manage to acknowledge these emotional experiences. She’ll be able to rage, cry, talk and write about her emotions. She’ll process them and gradually sort them out. Lori will emerge from adolescence somewhat tattered emotionally but intact. She will be an authentic person who owns all her emotional experiences. She’ll possess what Alice Miller calls “vibrancy.”
THINKING SELVES
    Most early adolescents are unable to think abstractly. The brightest are just moving into formal operational thought or the ability to think abstractly and flexibly. The immaturity of their thinking makes it difficult to reason with them. They read deep meaning into casual remarks and overanalyze glances.
    The concreteness of girls’ thinking can be seen in their need to categorize others. People are assigned to groups such as geeks, preps and jocks. One girl’s categories included “deeper than thou,”