Mother Teresa said, “In the West there is loneliness, which I call the leprosy of the West. In many ways it is worse than our poor in Calcutta.”
In my experience, loneliness is best predictor of relapse. If a young woman finishes treatment successfully but returns home to no friends, even if her parents are “there” for her consistently, she will relapse within a very short amount of time. Teens need a support system outside of their immediate families.
Think about it: if someone loves you and wants to be around you, and they are not required or expected to do so, doesn’t that make you feel good? Parents and siblings are supposed to love us. But friends are not. Once we experience love and validation from others outside of our immediate families, something within us changes. We begin to believe that we DO have value and that the nice things our parents have been telling us about ourselves could possibly be true.
Mother Teresa went on to say, “There is a terrible hunger for love. We all experience this in our lives – the pain, the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognize it. The poor you may have right in your own family.”
Residential treatment centers have fallen short. We have not incorporated teens’ friends into treatment and transition as well as we should. Well before they transition – even from as early on as admission – we need to provide teens with ways of connecting with good friends. We can provide them with easy ways of keeping in touch with the friends they make in treatment through creative use of social media, such as Facebook and Ning, cell phones and instant messaging. We can help them determine more effectively – on their own – which friends at home are supportive and helpful. And then we should get them to connect with those friends in creative, non-electronic ways.
One young woman went home during treatment and invited her friends to a “non-alcoholic party”. She was nervous that they would think it was dumb. She was even more nervous that no one would show up, because she planned it for a Friday night – a night when “everybody goes out to party”. Well, she had a great turnout and she led them in a game of “supermarket relay”. She formed teams of two, each team filled a cart in the supermarket with goods, they all switched carts, and the first team to put the goods back on the shelves in the correct places won. Her friends had a blast and many commented that they didn’t know they “could have fun without getting drunk”.
Many teens think that being “clean” means being lonely. This young woman returned to finish treatment with a new confidence that she could be successful without having to be lonely.
Photo by jurvetson
It’s not only identity which suffers when girls are in pain. The pain threatens the very idea of their self-worth. At her core, a young woman begins to lose hope in the value she brings to the world and her family and friends. She loses touch with the infinite part of herself – the part which cannot be measured and which is invaluable.
Many months ago I led a group therapy session and brought a strand of my mother’s pearls with me. I pulled the milky-white chain out of my pocket and held it up to the ten young women seated in a circle near me. I explained that I had inherited the pearls after my mother died. My father had purchased them for her in Thailand while he was stationed there during the Vietnam War. Furthermore, I said, I was going to give the pearls to my daughter when she turns 16. I added that I thought it interesting that my daughter’s birthstone happens to be “pearl”.
After allowing them each to hold the strand, I asked them what they thought the pearls were worth. “Are they real?” one asked.
“Yes. What do you imagine they are worth?”
“Do you mean how much they’re worth in dollars?”
“No, in value to me.”
“You can’t put a price on that!” one said. “You have to consider what they were worth to your father, too,” another said. “And to your daughter,” a third added. They all seemed to agree.
Having established the high value of the pearls, I tossed the strand on the wet and muddy floor. The girls were stunned. One stared at me as if I had gone out of my mind.
“What are they worth now?” I asked. “Have they lost any value?”
“No,” was the quick reply.
I stepped on the pearls and used the sole of my shoe to rub the strand around on the dirty floor. I even stood up, my foot firmly planted on the pearls. This time the girls were angry. “What’s wrong with you?” one said. Her voice was loud. “Why are you doing that?” another yelled, and others echoed her question.
I ignored them. “Have the pearls lost any value now? They’re dirtier. And certainly you would agree that stepping on them has made them worth less. Treating pearls like this cheapens them, right?”
“You’re crazy!” one said.
“You don’t deserve those pearls!” said another. “What would your mother think? Your daughter’s going to kill you!”
Ignoring their outrage for the moment, I pressed them to answer my question about the value of the pearls. All agreed that the pearls had not lost their value. We discussed the similarity between the pearls and their own lives. Many felt downtrodden, dirty, and abused, like my mother’s pearls. Many, if not all, had lost sight of their intrinsic value.Understanding spread across their faces as they applied the object lesson to their own lives.Similarly, treating young women requires us to see beyond the surface. As we submerge ourselves deeper beneath the cold reality of the presenting behavior, what appears at first to be a significant outcropping of jagged, icy moodiness above the surface reveals itself to be a vast, confused form of frigid misunderstanding, confusion, and despair. We can never help a young woman heal if we don’t acknowledge the true nature of the problem, as well as its scope. That said, it is important to remember that the problem may appear bigger than she is, but it is critical that we communicate to her that, with help, nothing is impossible to overcome.
