Dirty Little Secrets (19 page)

So, before you can begin to have intimacy with yourself and others, before you can make choices for yourself that aren’t self-destructive, you must first embrace the part of you that needs. This is a hard one. Just hearing that feels wrong. Girls aren’t supposed to need. Our neediness is ugly. It pushes boys away. It’s the reason we are unlovable. These are the lies we believe—that girls should not crave anything. We shouldn’t have intense desires. Open any book called
How to Make a Man Love You
or some version of that title, and the number one rule is don’t be needy. Boys
hate
that, they all say.

Mandy, twenty-three years old, explains that her neediness feels like “an open sore.” She says, “Every time I start to like a boy it’s like I can’t control myself. I can’t act cool anymore. I call too much. I say too much. I know I make myself unattractive, and I hate it. Sometimes I wish I could just rip my neediness out of my body.” Mandy isn’t alone with this feeling. I hear this sense of repulsion regularly from girls when they talk about their neediness. I felt that way, too. The shame I had from my need in my teens and twenties was so intense, in fact, that it threw me back into yet another boy’s bed again and again. Shame about one’s need is one of the defining features of the loose girl.

However, when a girl acts needy with a boy, if she, like Mandy says, calls him again and again and he doesn’t call her back, leaves messages saying, “Why haven’t you called? Don’t you like me anymore?” then what she is really doing is trying to control him with her need. We girls do all sorts of things like this, don’t we? Some of us send too many emails and texts. Some hang on him in public, afraid he’ll look at someone else. Some break into his Facebook account to see if he’s talking with other girls. This kind of behavior among girls is almost considered normal.

A few weeks ago at a nail salon, I heard a woman breezily say to her friend, “I figured he was cheating on me again, so I broke into his email account to see if I was crazy.” (Honey, once you’ve broken into his email account, there’s nothing more to see about whether you’ve crossed over into crazy.) “
Women
,” the guys all say, rolling their eyes. And sure enough, girls call each other to talk about these actions, to get support for them. “Of course you had to break into his account! He was acting weird!” “Of course you called him again! He still hasn’t called you back! What does he expect you to do?”

But this isn’t normal behavior. When we engage in these sorts of behaviors, we have moved so far away from ourselves, from caring about ourselves, from being a friend to ourselves, that we are so completely out of control that we may as well be drinking until we puke or shooting our arms full of drugs. When a girl relentlessly pursues a guy to find out what he’s thinking, she is demanding that he make her feel better, that he feed a part of her that has nothing to do with him by calling her back and saying, “Of course I like you.” When she breaks into his accounts, she is suggesting that he can’t have a will of his own, that there is no way he would love her if she doesn’t control him into doing so. Who in their right mind likes that? Who finds that attractive? Nobody wants to be made responsible for another person’s feelings. You don’t have to be a boy to feel that way. Girls don’t want to have a boy’s desperation dumped on them either. The problem here is not the neediness itself. It’s making other people responsible for your needs. It’s acting on no one’s behalf, not even your own. It is acting without any compassion for him and his needs, or for you and your own.

Beneath all that chasing and pursuing and desperation, of course, there is a little girl, a girl who feels abandoned every time you don’t give her attention and try to make someone else—a boy—take care of her. There is a little girl who doesn’t believe for a moment that anyone would love her if she didn’t try to force them into it. Some of the women I spoke with had had experiences in therapy where the therapist had tried to help them find this girl and take care of her. Twenty-seven-year-old Carla described how useless that was:

The therapist had me close my eyes and try to visualize the part of me that felt needy as a small child. I did it too. She was in there, like in my stomach, or maybe my womb. She was probably about six or seven. The therapist had me like kiss her and hug her and stuff, and even though I did it, the whole time I was thinking how ridiculous it was. I mean, I could love this part of me all I want, but as a woman I was still going to want a man to love me.

Carla’s story exemplifies how many of the therapeutic approaches to help us
stop
needing male attention probably won’t help. There are lots of exceptions, of course. Some women will find success with twelve-step programs or with the sort of visualization that Carla described. But most of us don’t, because unlike most addictions, part of what we are after is perfectly healthy—love, attention, and sex. Not only is it perfectly healthy, but it’s also necessary to a satisfying life.

So, before anything else, girls like us have to accept that that part of us that desperately wants attention, that desperately wants to be loved, is never going away. That time is past. Way back when, my mother didn’t love me enough, caught up in her own narcissism. Mandy’s father left when she was two years old, and she can count the amount of times she’s seen him since on one hand. Carla’s parents were so busy with their own unhappiness that they didn’t care to see hers. The other girls and women I spoke to had mothers who tried to kill themselves, fathers who ignored them, fathers who bullied and were sexually inappropriate or outright molested. Others were raped or simply became caught up in the cultural pressure to be sexy and to put out so that guys would find them worthwhile.

We all have our stories. They are ours to keep, a part of what makes us who we are. We will never be rid of them. Never. When you can swallow that fact, when you can acknowledge that you will always feel that ache, that it will resurface every once in a while, and that it is only yours and that no one else has the capacity to make it feel better, then you are ready to move toward real change.

SHARING OUR STORIES

Leigh knows she will always be a loose girl, and in some ways, that was the truth that helped her feel like she could move forward with her life. She spent her teens and most of her twenties trying desperately to get male attention, trying to turn every glance from a man into a relationship. By the time she met Chris, the man she’d wind up marrying, she knew she had to find a way to stop relying so much on men to make her feel worthwhile. She came to me at that point, wanting to hear how she could not screw up her relationship with Chris. When I told her the first step was to acknowledge that she would always feel the way she feels, that she would always have the propensity to seek out other men, she grew angry. She said, “How does that help me?” But over time, she saw that it was true. To change her behavior, she had to stop beating herself up for her feelings. She had to recognize that she had those feelings again and again to know that she need not act on them. Just because she felt the desire didn’t mean she had to act on it.

The other process that helped Leigh was finding a group of women who struggled like she did. Many psychologists understand that stories can heal. Sharing stories—telling your own and listening to those of others—is a therapeutic process. Much has been written about using narrative in psychotherapy—psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral therapies—as a way to help clients integrate their histories, their multiple selves, and as a way to make better choices. When we tell our stories, we are forced both to claim ourselves (“I did this”) and to claim our responsibilities to other people, such as our families and communities. When we tell our stories, and when our audience demands vulnerability from us, we can no longer get away with behavior like breaking into Facebook accounts. Suddenly, it is just us and our feelings and the question of what we will do with them.

I would argue that the group experience of knowing that you’re not alone—particularly for issues such as promiscuity, where girls carry so much shame—is useful as well. So many of us have these stories, and yet so few feel safe sharing them. After
Loose Girl
came out, I set up a system on my website where girls could simply submit their loose girl stories and read others’ in the hope that knowing so many of us are out there would be healing.

EXAMINING THE THINGS WE TELL OURSELVES

Any girl or woman I’ve worked with who is still in the throes of loose-girl behavior, still pursuing male attention at any cost, even as it makes her feel like garbage, believes in the fantasy she has about men. With each of these women I’ve asked the same question: “What do you believe he will do for you?” Their answers are almost all the same:

“He will love me the way no one ever has before.”

“He will make me happy.”

“He will save me.”

A huge part of being a loose girl is believing in a fantasy, and that fantasy is of course not factual. We have been handed the lie about men by our media and culture. A boy will make you worth something. A boy’s loving you means you matter in the world. We’ve bought the idea entirely. But beneath the fantasy is the blatant lie. It isn’t true. Not even close. No man’s attention to a girl means anything. In fact, more often than not it just means he has an opportunity to use her for sex, which, in the typical cultural irony for a girl, makes her matter less. Perhaps more important, whatever fantasy you or your daughter or your client or student carries around is based on some lack that can’t possibly be filled by another person, and most certainly not some random boy. That emptiness is very real, but the fantasy that someone will fill it is not.

Often, when it comes into their awareness that they have these beliefs, the girls and women I work with are surprised. I encourage them to write those beliefs down on one side of a piece of paper, and then to make a list on the other side of what those men actually wind up doing for them. This is important, because even if men do provide some positives in these women’s lives, they do not do this impossible task of filling their emptiness, of taking away or saving them from their pain.

Larissa believed that every boy that gave her attention, or who she developed a crush on, would be “the one.” When I pressed her about what she meant by “the one,” she admitted he would be the one who would love her so much that all her pain would go away and she’d always be happy. Larissa grew up with parents she described as “distant,” whom she was never able to feel loved by. After she wrote down this belief, we discussed what she really did get from these boys. She determined that she got some affection and some sense that she was pretty and desirable, but little else. She said she never even felt like they were her friends. I didn’t expect this to change everything for Larissa right away, but it was a task I suggested she repeat with each encounter or crush. The more she paid attention to her fantasy about boys, the easier time she would have unraveling why it felt so terrible when it didn’t work out, and let’s face it—it was never going to work out as long as those were her expectations.

Deb provides another example. She had a boyfriend, but she cheated on him constantly. When I asked her what she wanted from him, she told me that she wanted him to make her feel whole. These sorts of answers are so common. We hear them everywhere. They are spread across our media, in every teen drama and romantic comedy.
A boy will complete you
. It’s yet another line delivered that rarely does any good for teen girls. Clearly, though, she didn’t feel whole. She slept with other boys because she felt desperate and uncared for, and she secretly hoped one of these other boys would give her that sense of wholeness. Deb and I stayed in touch, and though she hadn’t stopped searching for that sense of wholeness, she could see how she had reached that point and needed to make a change.

Along with the fantasy about boys are the core beliefs—called core schemas in cognitive therapy—we have about ourselves. So often, we come to believe some essential lie about ourselves:
I am not lovable. I am not special. I am worthless. I don’t matter.
These lies come about through various channels, such as growing up with parental abuse or neglect or addiction, or with a trauma such as rape. Or they come about because of situations with boys, or because of our personality type, or simply because of how our culture makes us feel as girls.

Paula, for instance, developed the core belief “I am not special” right after she went through puberty. She developed crushes on boys, but those boys kept choosing other girls to date. When one finally did choose her as his girlfriend, he decided he liked someone else after about a month. This is ordinary dating behavior among adolescents, but Paula felt as though it meant she were different from other girls, that she wasn’t special.

Combine those sorts of core beliefs with the fantasy of what a boy can provide, and it’s easy to see why a girl might get hung up on getting with boys. She can easily come to believe that a boy will save her from these terrible things she believes about herself. He can make them untrue. I encouraged Paula to notice when she had that thought about not being special, and then we worked together to examine the thought process that led her to that false belief. Over time, she began to recognize that there was little logic to it. Having this sort of awareness so young—fourteen years old—Paula has the potential to avoid heading down a loose-girl path.

MAKING NEW HABITS

Deb was in the perfect mind space for changing her behavior, for creating new habits. One of the dangers of loose-girl self-harming sexual activity is that your brain develops habits. In the same way that one might develop a psychological dependence on a glass of wine in the evening, or a few hits of marijuana to sleep, girls (and boys) can develop a psychological dependence on promiscuity (as with other process addictions). Deb, for instance, knew she was making bad choices. She knew she had a false fantasy, and she hardly believed in it anymore. But just knowing is sometimes not enough. Often the behavior is entrenched enough that we have to
do
things differently, too.