Quotes from 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.”
― quote from Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“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.”
― quote from 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.”
― quote from 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.”
― quote from 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.”
― quote from 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.”
― quote from Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“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.”
― quote from Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“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.”
― quote from Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“Authenticity is an “owning” of all experience, including emotions and thoughts that are not socially acceptable.”
― quote from 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.”
― quote from Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“America today limits girls’ development, truncates their wholeness and leaves many of them traumatized.”
― quote from Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

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

“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.”
― quote from Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“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.”
― quote from Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

Popular quotes

“If I could blame it on all
the mothers and fathers of the world,
they of the lessons, the pellets of power,
they of the love surrounding you like batter ...
Blame it on God perhaps?
He of the first opening
that pushed us all into our first mistakes?
No, I'll blame it on Man
For Man is God
and man is eating the earth up
like a candy bar
and not one of them can be left alone with the ocean
for it is known he will gulp it all down.
The stars (possibly) are safe.
At least for the moment.
The stars are pears
that no one can reach,
even for a wedding.
Perhaps for a death.”
― Anne Sexton, quote from The Awful Rowing Toward God

“I invite you to consider anew what you know and what you have; what you are here for and where you are going; and how you are going to do what you have come here to do. p 13”
― Sheri Dew, quote from No Doubt About It

“Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic. If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it’s not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance away from me. Over there, you are of no help.”
― Nicholas Wolterstorff, quote from Lament for a Son

“Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss

“Vorsichtshalber haben sie das Etikett 'Kapitalismus' ersetzt durch solche, auf denen 'freie Marktwirtschaft' und 'Konsumkultur' steht, nur roch das immer noch zu sehr nach Hund-frisst-Hund, nach allzu vielen Verlierern und maßlos abrahmenden Gewinnern. Wenn man die Hunde aber isch nicht miteinander balgen lässt, dann liegen sie den ganzen Tag im Zwinger und pennen. Im Grund besteht das Problem darin, dass die Gesellschaft anständig zu sein versucht, und mit Anstand ist gegen die menschliche Natur nichts auszurichten. Nicht das Geringste. Wir sollten alle wieder Jäger und Sammler werden, dann hätten wir eine hundertprozentige Beschäftigungsquote und ein gesundes Magenknurren.”
― John Updike, quote from Terrorist

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