Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher

Author:Mary Pipher
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-28T01:41:44+00:00

In my first ten years as a therapist, I never saw a client who mutilated herself. Now it’s a frequent initial complaint of teenage girls. Girls deal with their internal pain by picking at their skin, burning themselves or cutting themselves with razors or knives. This trend is particularly disturbing because most young women who have this problem think they are the only ones. As more young women came to my office with this problem, I asked myself why this is happening now. Why are young women choosing, even inventing, this at this particular time? What cultural changes have fostered the development of this widespread problem?

Just as depression can be described as anguish turned inward, self-mutilation can be described as psychic pain turned inward in the most physical way. Girls who are in pain deal with that by harming themselves. There are obvious explanations: Girls are under more stress in the 1990s; they have less varied and effective coping strategies to deal with that stress, and they have fewer internal and external resources on which to rely.

In my experience, behaviors that arise independently and spontaneously in large numbers of people often suggest enormous cultural processes at work. Eating disorders, for example, are related to the pressure that our culture puts on women to be thin. Self-mutilation may well be a reaction to the stresses of the 1990s. Its emergence as a problem is connected to our girl-piercing culture.

Self-mutilation can be seen as a concrete interpretation of our culture’s injunction to young women to carve themselves into culturally acceptable pieces. As a metaphorical statement, self-mutilation can be seen as an act of submission: “I will do what the culture tells me to do”; an act of protest: “I will go to even greater extremes than the culture asks me to”; a cry for help: “Stop me from hurting myself in the ways that the culture directs me to” or an effort to regain control: “I will hurt myself more than the culture can hurt me.”

Once girls begin to cut and burn themselves, they are likely to continue. Inflicting harm on the body becomes cathartic. In the absence of better coping strategies, hurting the self becomes a way to calm down. With time, the habit of inflicting harm on the self becomes more ingrained, so the sooner young women seek help the better.

What is the treatment? Ideally, we will change our culture so that young girls have less external stress to contend with in their lives. But for now, young women must learn better coping strategies and develop more internal and external resources to cope with stress.

Therapy can teach girls to identify early that they are in pain. They need to label their internal state as painful and then think about how to proceed. They must learn new ways to deal with intense misery and also new ways to process pain. Their stock way has been to hurt themselves. They must learn to recognize pain and help themselves.

Fortunately this tendency to inflict harm on the body when in psychic pain is quite curable.

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