Thursday, January 13, 2011

Why Women Go To Therapy- Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher

Mary Pipher, the author of Reviving Ophelia has an interesting take on why young women often turn to therapy in adolescents. Adolescents is a period of physical growth, which occurs too rapidly for the girls to comprehend. You go from feeling comfortable in your own skin and to losing total self confidence, resilience and ambition. Unfortunately, adolescents is the time when you are supposed to be finding yourself and taking risks that can shape your future. What is making modern adolescent girls more prone to holding back and feeling anxious is the vulnerability and fear that parallels modern expectations. Girls who are reaching the stage of adolescents today are "more likely to have been traumatized;" Therefore, women feel less freedom "to roam about alone," Says Pipher, there is also new advancements that lead to exposure for young women at a younger age. With their wings pinned down, they are stuck to the ground, drowning in the need to please and unable to feel satisfied with themselves. With adolescent suicides rates at an all time high and the self loathing, both physical and mental, these young girls grow into women still lacking "wholeness, self confidence and self-direction." More often than not it is the older generation of women going to therapy to work through the unresolved holes opened up during their adolensents that never got the attention need to heal. In fact, Pipher says that women come into therapy knowing how others around them feel, but lacking an important understanding about themselves. I agree that therapy is a way to gain an advocate who can help guide you to find unresolved answers in your life that hold you back. It is hard for a parents to guide his or her own daughter when she is so resistant to him/her during this time, and on top of that they do not have the same realizations about "how universal and extreme the suffering is" for their child.