Girls' Psychological Health

By Lisa Machoian and Katie Wheeler
From The Girls’ Coalition Newsletter,
Winter 1999, vol. 6, issue 2, p. 3

For over a century, mental health professionals have known that girls' psychological health and resilience become vulnerable at adolescence. Until recently, this phenomenon has gone unexplained. In the 1980's Carol Gilligan and her colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education studied over time girls from diverse backgrounds aged 6 to 17 years and discovered that at adolescence girls face a relational paradox that has no easy resolution. What has often been called a "loss of self-esteem"--as if girls suddenly spring a leak—may more accurately be described as a "crisis of connection." In childhood, girls' psychological strength and resilience are linked to their ability to speak directly about what they are experiencing. At adolescence, girls' ability to speak directly about what they are thinking and feeling can become more risky.

As girls become acutely aware of the cultural ideals of femininity and womanhood that urge girls to modulate their voices, they feel pressure to stifle expression of the full range of their thoughts and feelings, particularly anger. Girls are aware that women who express negative emotions and say what they know to be true risk being judged and labeled--rude, stupid, bad, bitchy, crazy, or manipulative.

Girls' ability to distinguish genuine relationships in which people speak openly and honestly from inauthentic relationships in which people speak in false voices and mask what they are really feeling can become a liability. Girls' outspokenness about the relational worlds in which they live often arouses fear and attempts at silencing on the part of adults, and also peers. In the dominant culture, girls are often praised for being attractive, quiet, well behaved, and "nice." Their ideas (particularly if they involve challenging the status quo or authority figures) are rarely heard or taken seriously.

At this juncture, where girls' relational strengths can, ironically, jeopardize their relationships, girls feel that they must either drive their voices "underground" or risk the negative consequences of speaking out. As a result, many girls disconnect or dissociate from their full range of thoughts and feelings and take "themselves" out of relationship with themselves in an effort to maintain relationships with others. Girls therefore learn to distinguish where and when and with whom it is safe to speak.

They may speak directly about their desire for real relationships, but if their speaking voice is not taken seriously, and if they lack places to talk safely with others, they may adapt an indirect language of symptoms to communicate. In other words, girls may find other ways of speaking and showing their psychological distress--for example, through eating disorders, cutting and other forms of self-mutilation, suicidal acts, depression, somatic illnesses, running away, sexual acting out, early pregnancy, delinquency, stealing, declining academic performance, dropping out of school, and/or gang membership.

Thus, with the knowledge that the mind and body are closely connected, a key form of intervention to foster girls' psychological and physical health is to create safe relationships--relationships in which girls can voice what they are truly thinking and feeling, have the freedom to disagree, feel heard and validated, and hear women speak honestly about their own life experiences.

Thanks to Mia Levy for her contributions to this article.