Reviving Ophelia Quotes

“Young men need to be socialized in such a way that rape is as unthinkable to them as cannibalism.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“Another vital skill is managing pain. All the craziness in the world comes from people trying to escape suffering. All mixed up behaviour comes from unprocessed pain. People drink, hit their mates and children, gamble, cut themselves with razors and even kill themselves in an attempt to escape pain. I teach girls to sit with their pain, to listen to it for messages about their lives, to acknowledge and describe it rather than to run from it. They learn to write about pain, to talk about it, to express it through exercise, art, dance or music.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“Authenticity is an “owning” of all experience, including emotions and thoughts that are not socially acceptable.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia

“I teach girls certain skills. The first and most basic is centering. I recommend that they find a quiet place where they can sit alone daily for 10 to 15 minutes. I encourage them to sit in this place, relax their muscles and breathe deeply. Then they are to focus on their own thoughts and feelings about the day. They are not to judge these thoughts or feelings or even direct them, only to observe them and respect them. They have much to learn from their own internal reactions to their lives.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“Adolescent girls discover that it is impossible to be both feminine and adult. Psychologist I. K. Broverman’s now classic study documents this impossibility. Male and female participants in the study checked off adjectives describing the characteristics of healthy men, healthy women and healthy adults. The results showed that while people describe healthy men and healthy adults as having the same qualities, they describe healthy women as having quite different qualities than healthy adults. For example, healthy women were described as passive, dependent and illogical, while healthy adults were active, independent and logical. In fact, it was impossible to score as both a healthy adult and a healthy woman.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia

“Girls struggles with mixed messages: Be beautiful, but beauty is only skin deep. Be sexy, but not sexual. Be honest, but don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Be independent, but be nice. Be smart, but not so smart you threaten boys.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“We talk about the disappointments of early adolescence - the betrayals by friends, the discovery that one is not beautiful by cultural standards, the feeling that one's smartness is a liability, the pressure to be popular instead of honest and feminine instead of whole.

I encourage girls to search within themselves for their deepest values and beliefs. Once they have discovered their own true selves, I encourage them to trust that self is the source of meaning and direction in their lives.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“The most important question for every client is "W X ho are you?" I'm not as interested in an answer as I am in teaching a process that the girl can use for the rest of her life. The process involves looking within to find a true core of self, acknowledging unique gifts, accepting all feelings, not just the socially acceptable ones, and making deep and firm decisions about values and meaning. The process includes knowing the difference between thinking and feeling, between immediate gratification and long-term goals, and between her own voice and the voices of others. The process includes discovering the personal impact of our cultural rules for women. It includes discussion about breaking those rules and formulating new, healthy guidelines for the self. The process teaches girls to chart a course based on the dictates of their true selves. The process is nonlinear, arduous, and discouraging. It is also joyful, creative and full of surprises.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“shows the destructive forces that affect young women. As a girl, Ophelia is happy and free, but with adolescence she loses herself. When she falls in love with Hamlet, she lives only for his approval. She has no inner direction ; rather she struggles to meet the demands of Hamlet and her father. Her value is determined utterly by their approval. Ophelia is torn apart by her efforts to please. When Hamlet spurns her because she is an obedient daughter, she goes mad with grief. Dressed in elegant clothes that weigh her down, she drowns in a stream filled with flowers.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia

“Simone de Beauvoir believed adolescence is when girls realize that men have the power and that their only power comes from consenting to become submissive adored objects. They do not suffer from the penis envy Freud postulated, but from power envy.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia

“Finally I teach the joys of altruism. Many adolescent girls are self-absorbed. It's not a character flaw, it's a developmental stage. Nonetheless, in makes them unhappy and limits their understanding of the world. I encourage girls to find some ways to help people on a regular basis.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia

“Social change is a million individual acts of kindness; culture change is a million subversive acts of resistance.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“The more I looked around, the more I listened to the music, watched television and movies, and examined sexist advertising, the more convinced I became that, as a society, we were on the wrong path with our daughters. American culture was poisonous to teenage girls. The messages girls received about sex, beauty and their place in the world truncated their development and left many of them traumatized. With the onset of puberty, girls were crashing into a junk culture that was just too hard for them to understand and master. Many became overwhelmed, depressed and angry.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“America today limits girls’ development, truncates their wholeness and leaves many of them traumatized.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia

“Girls become fragmented, their selves split into mysterious contradictions. They are sensitive and tenderhearted, mean and competitive, superficial and idealistic. They are confident in the morning and overwhelmed with anxiety by nightfall. They rush through their days with wild energy and then collapse into lethargy. They try on new roles every week--this week the good student, next week the delinquent and the next, the artist.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“Girls know they are losing themselves... Girls become fragmented, their selves split into mysterious contradictions. They are sensitive and tenderhearted, mean and competitive, superficial and idealistic. They are confident in the morning and overwhelmed with anxiety by nightfall. They rush through their days with wild energy and then collapse into lethargy,. They try on new roles every week: this week the good student, next week the delinquent and the next, the artist.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“As a mother and a therapist, I struggled to make sense of what I was observing. My friends and I had unleashed our share of adolescent angst yet, for the most part, we didn't develop eating disorders, threaten suicide, cut ourselves or run away from home. Why were girls having more trouble in the 1990s?”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“As a therapist, I often felt bewildered and frustrated. These feelings led to questions: Why are so many girls in therapy? What is the meaning of lip, nose and eyebrow piercings (which were new phenomena at that time)? How can I help 13-year-olds deal with herpes or genital warts? Why are drugs and alcohol common in the stories of seventh graders? Why do so many girls say they hate their parents?”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“As I talked with these girls, I became aware of how little I really understood about the world of adolescent girls in the 1990s. My adolescent experiences from the early 1960s weren't helpful. Girls in the 1990s were living in a whole new world, a world of increasingly violent and sexualized television, MTV videos and blantantly sexualized advertising.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“In the 1990s, my office was swamped with girls with serious, even life-threatening problems such as anorexia or the desire to harm themselves. Others had problems that ranged from refusing to go to school, to intentionally underachieving, to constantly provoking fights with their parents. These kind of issues were less dangerous than suicide threats, but more puzzling.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“inadequate. Most do not help students with what they need most—a sense of meaning regarding their sexuality, ways to make sense of all the messages, and guidelines on decent behavior in sexual relationships.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia

“Many girls become vegetarians. They love animals and actively work for animal rights. I think this cause is popular with girls because they so easily identify with the lack of speech and powerlessness of animals. One girl I know wore a button that said 'If animals are to talk, we must be their voices.' Girls identify with gentle, defenseless creatures. And they will work with great idealism and energy to save them.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls