Mean Girls: How We Develop and Heal Anxiety
“But you are ugly.”
“WTF?” is probably what I would’ve said if I was a few years older. Instead, I just sat there silently, stung and hurt by her words but pretending nothing happened.
Ashley was the first mean girl ‘friend’ I ever had. She was tall, well-dressed, and popular. We became friends somehow, and she loved to give me all kinds of advice pertaining to my appearance. But her advice came with sometimes subtle and sometimes overt insults like what she had just said.
This time, she was trying to convince me to wear more makeup because I was ugly. Then, she proceeded to gossip about another girl who wears makeup but does it wrong, ending the tale with “so don’t even bother if you are gonna do it like her because that’s just embarrassing.”
Unable to shake off her insult, I ended up spending a good chunk of my high school trying to hide my flaws, obsessing in front of the mirror before going out, hearing her voice, but this time internalized in my head: You are ugly, so you need to try extra hard.
This story came to mind when my client told me she was brought up to pay meticulous attention to her physical appearance. “Girls need to be beautiful,” she was told. And then there were her friends, mean girls, who were each obsessed with their looks and attractiveness and didn’t hesitate to be brutally “honest” with each other. The voices of her parents, friends, and even strangers continued to haunt her, making her hypervigilant every time she presented herself to others. The result was chronic anxiety, never feeling like she’s good enough and being convinced that she’s unattractive.
To be fair, it’s not just girls who could be mean. Boys as well as full-grown people can be mean and hurtful too. Have you ever been told something like this?
“You are boring.”
“You are not cut out for this.”
“Loser.”
“Why can’t you be more like your brother?”
When someone speaks to us like this and we take it to heart, it becomes a wound. We feel like damaged goods. Instead of taking care of the wound with gentle compassion, we try to hide it. We say to ourselves,
I never want to be called a loser again. I’ll be more successful than anyone I know.
Or
I shouldn’t even bother trying. I don’t belong here.
How do we learn to avoid getting too close to a heat source like an open fire? By being burned. The pain of the burn gets etched into our young minds, and we stop playing with fire. We all have a natural instinct to avoid anything that brings us pain.
So if someone calls us a loser, it hurt, AND there’s a likelihood that other people can call us a loser at any point in the future, naturally we’ll try to avoid it by doing everything we can to NOT be a loser, whatever that means.
But all this effort does nothing to free us from the fear itself, the fear of being called a loser, ugly, or whatever and the accompanying pain. As long as we are focused on preventing a pain, the fear of pain will continue to dominate our lives, often in the form of anxiety. Anxiety in turn takes many forms such as overworking, always saying yes, procrastinating, and worrying.
What if, instead of preventing what may or may not happen, we focused on healing the wound itself?
What if, by learning to accept and be kind to ourselves, we became the kind of person who can laugh it off when someone, out of their own insecurity and unattended wounds, insults us?
When I go back to the scene with Ashley in my mind, there is no more pain, anger, or anxiety. There only is a lesson, which most certainly isn’t I’m ugly and should try harder. It’s that people will say whatever they feel like and I have a full choice over whether to take it or leave it.
As simple as it sounds, I wasn’t able to learn this lesson for many years. So what helped me get here? I stopped trying to cover up my flaws and started facing my anxiety. I worked on myself, not to fix or improve myself so no one could criticize me, but to understand, accept, and love myself for who I am and do the same for others.
If you want to free yourself from the pain of anxiety, the answer is probably closer than you think. It’s not even therapy that you need. Therapists are only helpful to the extent that they can support you in doing this work of understanding, accepting, and loving yourself.
You can start healing your wounds today by being kind to yourself and making a commitment to stop hiding or running away from your pain. It’s never too late to change.