Book Summary: Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood
Lisa Damour, Ph.D., New York: Ballantyne Books, 2016.
This is a book which demonstrates that you can combine compassion and scholarship without diluting either. Damour includes 274 Notes at the end of her book, each of which supports one of the positions or statements which she makes. Reading these - a strange activity when divorced from the text to which they refer - is an education: dozens of citations of peer-reviewed research studies; links to current neuroscience and child development literature, and references back to the historical basis of psychiatric theory. Damour is no light-weight when it comes to synthesizing research and clinical experience.
The Globe and Mail (February 5, 2016), reviewing this book, highlighted these statements extracted from the text: "Complaining to you allows your daughter to bring the best of herself to school. Instead of being rude or aggressive toward peers or teachers at school, your daughter contains her irritation and waits until she is safely in your company to express it"; "If you really want to help your daughter manage her distress, help her see the difference between complaining and venting. Complaining generally communicates a sense that 'someone should fix this', while venting communicates that 'I'll feel better when someone who cares about me hears me out' "; "Externalization happens when your daughter wants to get rid of an unfomfortable feeling. And not just anyone will take on her uncomfortable feeling; it has to be someone who really loves her"; "It's the difference between 'Mom, I want to tell you how uncomfortable this very hot potato I'm holding is and see if you've got any good ideas for how I might mange it' and 'Mom, take this hot potato, I don't want to hold it any more. And hang on to it for a while.' "
Notice the expressions, "safely in your company", "someone who cares about me", "someone who really loves her". These are the kernels of Damour's thesis: if your teenage daughter has to hand out a hot potato - externalize her very strong emotions - then she needs to find that she has a receptive, loving parent to receive and hold these feelings until they can be talked about in a less overwhelming (rational) way.
Teenage girls may be drama queens but if you're the audience you need to truly love her and all her pain. She may be the victim of society or her developing emotional system or her hormones or perhaps all three of these forces. In the end, it's your ability to be emotionally regulated and receptive that will help your daughter to weather her storms. When your teenage daughter is being tossed about by emotional storms she needs an anchor - a solid, caring parent who will take a tough stand if needed and who will provide a soft shoulder to cry on at other times. And yes, there are lots of specific strategies and scripts to help you to deal with the more common concerns of teenage girls; but the real value in the book - from my perspective - is the attitude which it encourages: don't take your daughter's explosions or depressions personally, their adolescence isn't about us, it's about (as Gordon Neufeld says) holding them close until we can let them go.
Copyright 2016, Susan Dafoe-Abbey, BIS, MED, RMFT, RP, Neufeld Professional Associate. Permission to use this material, either in English or in translation, for educational purposes, is hereby granted.
