Dirty Little Secrets (20 page)

It’s important to note that often the predictable pattern feels good. Something about that drama and pain, something about getting to feel the feelings we usually tamp down, feels good. Think about any other sort of addictive pattern. Imagine you were a heroin addict. Imagine the ritualized process of calling your dealer, driving into that seedy part of town. The haggard people on the streets. Your heart beats wildly in your chest. You know that you will get that feeling again. Then after doing that drug, imagine how it feels to come down and feel desperate for more, how familiar it is. The process is almost comforting, even as you start to sweat and feel sick. You know it by heart. This is the same for the loose girl. She gets pleasure from the process, even as it feels like hell. Those familiar neurons fire, those same sections of the brain light up, the various neurochemicals begin their work. The loose girl must acknowledge this buzz as part of her necessary awareness.

In most therapies for substance abuse, the addict is told to commit to staying away from his or her triggers, and that absolutely applies to the loose girl. If she usually messes around with boys at parties and regrets it later, she should stay away from parties. If she gives blow jobs in the school stairwell, she should stay away from the stairwell. Not forever. Just until new habits can take hold.

There are a number of established studies about how behavior changes, and they all point to the idea that there is a limited period of time in which a habit should change. The best documented is the work of Prochaska, Norcross, and DiClemente, who determined through research that habits form after just about twenty-one days. They also established the “stages of change” approach, which recognizes that people are in precontemplation, contemplation, or preparation, all before reaching action and maintenance; it’s important to know where one is among these stages before trying to change.
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Thus far, I’ve been encouraging the contemplation stage, where you build awareness about your issue and begin to believe you might want change. Put another way, I’ve been encouraging readers to move out of precontemplation and into contemplation. Assessing what your triggers are, such as parties, is part of the preparation. When you are ready to commit, you can move out of preparation and into action, which I discuss shortly. Maintenance comes with the gradual rewards that arrive, although they don’t arrive quickly. First, lots of challenges come, including the opportunity to relapse, which commonly happens and is no reason to give up. Finally, environmental controls are established, and often the person who changes does some sort of work in the world—perhaps as a therapist or writer or teacher—to help others with change, too.

Something I appreciate about the stages-of-change model is that it acknowledges that not everyone is ready to change. I would take this a step further and say that we should never judge where a person is. Not one of us knows what it’s like to be anyone else, what resources a person has internally and externally. When you aren’t ready to change something in your life, you aren’t ready. That’s all there is to it. You can try to force it. You can beat yourself up about it. But it will happen when it happens. The human psyche is not readable that way, and thank goodness. We are multifaceted and complicated, and that humanness is beautiful enough to keep me in love with my work. Be patient with yourself. Accept where you are.

This is a good place to note the myths about change, and in particular about change for a loose girl. The first myth is that change is simple. Of course, some have an easy time changing, but we hate those people (kidding!). Most don’t have an easy time. Most, in fact, have tried many things. Change for a person who is deeply entrenched in a habit, who is acting addictively, is not easy.

A closely related myth is that willpower leads to change. Willpower is necessary, of course, to reach a place at which you will commit to change. But it is only a small piece of change. For a loose girl, she needs willpower to not go to that party where the boys are, especially when she’s feeling down on herself. But the willpower isn’t enough. She needs to engage in a circuit of efforts, including social support, acceptance of herself, and self-awareness about her fantasies. She needs to be willing to sit through some pretty painful feelings that come when she doesn’t relieve her anxiety with male attention.

The other important myth here is the magic bullet. Our society can probably be blamed for much of the origins of the magic bullet. We do not cater to patience or discomfort. Technology has practically removed the word
slow
from our vocabulary. Everything is immediate gratification. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending how you look at it—personal change won’t ever be fast. If it is, then I guarantee you it isn’t real. There is nothing—no pill you can take, no shot you can get, no new-age therapy you can do—that will take away your shame or your pain or your propensity to act out with boys. I often remind my clients—and myself—that this is a lifelong process. It is more than possible that you will never be fully free of it. Embrace that.

CREATING RULES

So, action. The first action is to remove your triggers. You can think of this like rules. Here are some examples:

“I may not go to the bar until further notice.”

“I must remove Dylan’s phone number from my phone and never contact him again.”

“I may not text a boy back until he has texted me twice first.”

Rules are terribly useful. You can write them on sticky notes or in your phone. Refer to them often. Pull them out whenever you need. Addicts in general, and loose girls in particular, need rules because we often live our lives out of control. In fact, loose-girl behavior can be a failed way to try to get control.

EMBRACING DISTRACTIONS

Along with rules, loose girls need a list of distractions they can turn to when necessary. Examples of distractions are exercise, calling a particular friend who won’t judge you, chopping firewood, knitting, cooking, or playing piano. It seems simple, but it really is a necessary part of the process, because when a loose girl doesn’t go out boy hunting or doesn’t text the guy she knows will grant her a booty call and then ignore her afterward, even with all her awareness about her patterns, she will experience anxiety. And distractions will help her cope.

FEELING THE FEELINGS

Let’s go back to Larissa’s story. Every time Larissa reached out to a boy, she did so out of anxiety. Her anxiety about her pain, about her unhappiness, was the real trigger that led her to seek out another boy. Her anxiety rose up, and without thinking, she sought out the next guy to quell it. This anxiety is one of the greatest challenges. There’s a reason girls keep pursuing what makes them feel like crap soon after. That reason, in a momentary sense, is anxiety. One thing we know about anxiety is that it is very treatable with behavioral methods. Anxiety is simply a resistance to feeling. It’s fear of feeling. In that way, it is irrational fear. Anxiety generally won’t kill you. So one of the best ways to treat anxiety is to extinguish the fear feelings that go along with it, and the way to do that is to simply
feel the feelings
. No doubt, anxiety is scary, but when you let yourself feel the terrible fear, when you feel that awful pain you’ve been avoiding for years, you find you live through it. You may be debilitated for a bit. You may have to stay in bed for a weekend and cry. You may have to yowl and scream. That is OK. You will still live through it. And you can tell yourself this all the way through: “This is just the pain I never let myself feel. It feels this bad because I’ve avoided it for so long. I’m going to come out the other side.”

The next time, it won’t be quite as bad, and the next time a little less. Over time, it may always be painful, but you’ll feel it, you’ll cry or whatever it is you do to move through it, and then you’ll carry on. It is painful, just like the behavior with boys was painful, but at least this pain is in your control, and you aren’t demanding anything from others in the process.

OTHER PROGRAMS

There are other approaches to treatment out there. Some loose girls have connected to the approach found in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA), since there is plenty of overlap between the loose girl’s experience and someone who identifies as a sex or love addict.
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Others try alternative approaches, such as therapies that address posttraumatic stress disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, or anxiety disorders in general. It is important to find what you respond to. The main thing to remember is that change is ongoing. Your pain will always be your pain. No one—really,
no one
—will save you. It is just a decision, and when you are ready, when your daughter is ready, when your client is ready, you, she, will do this.

At the end of a chapter about change for the loose girl, we must restate where the chapter started. You will always be this girl. You will never go through a struggle in life without finding yourself up against these thoughts or desires. You will not magically become someone new. Change is a journey, with no clear end point.

Chapter 11

WAVES

Protecting against Loose-Girl Behavior

J
o is a single mother and former loose girl who has been doing her best to work though her own issues with male attention as she raises her teenage daughter. “I’m so worried,” she told me, “that I won’t be able to help her. I try to behave in ways that will show her a woman can make good choices. But sometimes it feels like a failed effort.” When I asked her what she meant she spoke about all the magazines, the television shows, her daughter’s friends, and the boys. “I feel helpless in a world that has already determined what will happen to my daughter. She’ll think everything she needs comes from some guy, and she’ll never believe in herself enough to be everything I know she can be.” After a few moments, she added, “I don’t mean that. I sound so pessimistic.”

Beyond the loose girl, beyond the shame, the behavior, the question of right or wrong, beyond all the dirty little secrets, is the culture that created this dilemma for girls. In so many ways, Jo is right. Her daughter doesn’t have a fighting chance against the cultural wave explored in chapter 1.

Parents ask me often, “How can I protect my girls?” Colleagues in psychology and education wonder, “Is it even possible to prevent what happens to girls regarding sex?” This chapter explores this idea of prevention, how we can work to overhaul the culture to do so.

When I asked Jo what she
is
doing, she said she’s doing the opposite of what her parents did. Her parents told Jo not to have sex. That was it. Just don’t do it. Jo recognizes that telling her daughter to stay away from boys, or to not have sex, would be useless. She said, “I don’t want to do that to her. She should have sex! Oh God, I’m sure parents all over the world would judge me for that one. I think she should be able to have sex. I just don’t want it to become her whole life, like it did for me.”

For decades, the push has been along the same lines as what Jo’s parents told her. And the results have been consistent: nothing has changed. The large majority of those who pledge abstinence at thirteen lose their virginities by sixteen and are just as likely to engage in oral and anal sex as those who didn’t pledge, according to a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.
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With limited guidance and plenty of shame about contraception, they wind up with STDs and pregnancies. They get married too young, to the wrong person, because they just want to have sex already and not be judged as bad. Many become what we can now define as loose girls, young women who use sex and male attention to fill emptiness and need, who wind up disappointed and ashamed, unsure how to change their behavior, and terribly judged.

Jocelyn M. Elders, in her foreword to Judith Levine’s book
Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
, wrote:

We lead the Western world in virtually every sexual problem: teenage pregnancy, abortion, rape, incest, child abuse, sexually transmitted disease, HIV/AIDS, and many more. Yet when the Surgeon General issues a call to action on sexual health urging comprehensive sex education, abstinence, and other measures to promote responsible sexual behavior, and advocates that we break our “conspiracy of silence about sexuality,” we want to fire the Surgeon General
.
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We are caught in an odd rigidity on this issue, one that is burdened with false, fear-inducing dangers about what it is to be a girl, when meanwhile the biggest danger of being a girl is how impossible it is to wade through the fear-inducing propaganda to find the truth.

When the child psychologist G. Stanley Hall coined the term
adolescence
, sexuality came to be seen as more of a test than a natural progression. It became a danger to traverse, a danger that adolescents must not allow to take over their lives to avoid future problems, such as impulsivity. Like Freud’s theories about sexual stages, this was simply another theory, certainly not evidenced by research. This isn’t to say Hall’s notion of adolescence hasn’t been immensely useful. Obviously, it has. My comment is only to point out that our panic about girls having sex is based on a man-made philosophy, not empirically supported research, and is therefore worthy of questioning.

It is important to note these odd biases, because they are so hugely in the way of us making any headway on the very real cultural issues attached to girls and sexuality. We must begin to change our minds about how to transform the culture when it comes to teen girls and sex.