Adolescent Girls and Social Pressure
by Tiffaney Hale, MFTI

Tiffaney Hale, MFTI, has made work with adolescent girls one of her specialties.

Adolescent girls are a particularly vulnerable group developmentally. Common issues that surface during this period include: decrease in academic achievement, decrease in confidence level, higher risk of body image issues and eating disorders, social aggression within peer groups, and general identity confusion.

One complication with recognizing these issues is that often girls in the most severe pain are also the most invisible, having learned the skill of a keeping a polite, quiet exterior while turning frustration and aggression inward. Symptoms, although often destructive, can be a sign of healthy resistance to unreasonable social expectations of young girls and women.

Therapy can offer adolescent girls a place to begin finding meaning in their symptoms and verbalize feelings and experience, thus relieving some of the internal pressure of discrepancies between self and the "ideal" woman. Therapy can be a space to unpack hidden feelings with the hope of integrating the childhood self and a developing adult self with consciousness and choice.