Chapter 10

THE BEGINNING OF CHANGE

I’m still here, I move around to try to get a new me, but I still remain the same. And now I’m moving again, this time with a real hope to make it work, to change things, to rip off this part of me.

When my husband and I got engaged, I threw myself into wedding planning. I needed to believe that my life was about to change—not just that I would be a wife, settled down, but that I would somehow stop feeling that old desperation that had continually gotten me into trouble with men. I figured that by taking my game piece off the table, that part of me would evaporate. Someone loved me. He loved me enough to marry me. What’s more, he was wonderful—kind, attentive, available. I no longer needed to spend my time searching for what I didn’t quite get yet was pure fantasy. I no longer needed to try to fill my emptiness. It would be filled now through my marriage.

A few months after the wedding, though, I found myself out again at a bar. There was a guy there. Beautiful—big eyes and full lips. He brushed his hair back from his face with his hand. He turned his eyes to me, and it was as though the entire world went away. There was no husband, no marriage. No friends at my table. No noise. There was me and there was this guy, a guy who would surely penetrate my pain, who would show me through his attention to me that I was worthwhile.

Later that night, having left alone, dodging that boy’s advances, I sat in the bedroom where my husband unknowingly slept and tried to calm myself. In truth, I was terrified. Would I ever be free of the grip of my addiction? Would I be able to stay committed to this man I loved, who loved me? That evening I understood in a deeper manner that I would always be that girl. Marriage would not release me from her. Being loved by a man would not shake her loose. She and I were one. I would need to consider how to live my life with her.

That night was an important turning point for me as a loose girl. It was the beginning of my movement toward true intimacy—perhaps not intimacy as our culture defines it, where a man and a woman fall in love and ride off into the sunset and all is forever right with the world—but movement toward intimacy, which is the greatest achievement for a loose girl.

Perhaps you have a daughter who you want to protect. Perhaps she has already begun heading down this path. Perhaps you are a therapist who regularly hears stories just like these from your clients. Or maybe you are the girl you see in these pages. You are the one seeking change. This chapter is indeed about change. Readers write me daily: “Tell me what to do. Tell me how to change.” To talk about change for a loose girl, we must first talk about not changing, because the bottom line is that it remains highly unlikely that you will stop feeling that urge to seek male attention when you are feeling low. As noted in the previous chapter, and like with any addiction, the first step is acceptance. Here, we examine the idea of acceptance more closely.

LOVING YOURSELF

Most of the women who spoke to me have been told at one time or another that they must love themselves before someone else will love them. Friends tell them. Therapists tell them. Their parents tell them, too. For a loose girl, though, it isn’t that simple. For most of us, loving ourselves is too complicated. We’ve screwed up too many times. We’ve pushed too many people away with our addictions. We’ve gotten pregnant, had abortions, put ourselves in situations where we were mistreated again and again. We are too miserable when we’re alone. Other people can love themselves first, but not us. When I asked a few of the women what they thought of when they heard “love yourself,” they grew silent. Mandy said she’d never really thought about what that would even entail. Carla said she guessed she was supposed to take spa days, or lavender baths, or have a candlelit dinner for one. We laughed, hearing how ridiculous that was.

Loving yourself is a lifelong process of acceptance for who you are. It is a process of acknowledging the ways you’ve screwed up, harmed yourself, done irreparable damage to relationships, and still seeing that you are a worthwhile human being. You won’t get there by taking a bath. Loving yourself is part of an endless movement toward intimacy. The women I interviewed who felt they were more in control of their loose girl than in the past all said something similar about accepting themselves as they were.

Before we can have intimacy with anyone else, we must find a way to accept ourselves. But girls who have sex are not treated kindly in American culture. You are a slut. You don’t care about yourself. You don’t care about having real love. Otherwise, you wouldn’t stand before the mirror before you go out, trying to determine which skirt best shows off your legs. Or, if you aren’t a slut, you are the empowered girl discussed in chapter 3; you have sex because, by God, you can do whatever you want to do. You can go out in the evening and collect boys like fireflies in a jar. You don’t have to want love.

All these assumptions made about you sink into your sense of self. It is nearly impossible to keep out the voices of a culture that will not let girls define their sexual identity. And then, too, there are parents and friends and ex-boyfriends and boys at school—all of them make assumptions about who we are as sexual beings. Inevitably, we feel judged, defensive, hurt, and misunderstood.

So, before you can begin to have intimacy with yourself and others, before you can make choices for yourself that aren’t self-destructive, you must first embrace the part of you that needs. This is a hard one. Just hearing that feels wrong. Girls aren’t supposed to need. Our neediness is ugly. It pushes boys away. It’s the reason we are unlovable. These are the lies we believe—that girls should not crave anything. We shouldn’t have intense desires. Open any book called How to Make a Man Love You or some version of that title, and the number one rule is don’t be needy. Boys hate that, they all say.

Mandy, twenty-three years old, explains that her neediness feels like “an open sore.” She says, “Every time I start to like a boy it’s like I can’t control myself. I can’t act cool anymore. I call too much. I say too much. I know I make myself unattractive, and I hate it. Sometimes I wish I could just rip my neediness out of my body.” Mandy isn’t alone with this feeling. I hear this sense of repulsion regularly from girls when they talk about their neediness. I felt that way, too. The shame I had from my need in my teens and twenties was so intense, in fact, that it threw me back into yet another boy’s bed again and again. Shame about one’s need is one of the defining features of the loose girl.

However, when a girl acts needy with a boy, if she, like Mandy says, calls him again and again and he doesn’t call her back, leaves messages saying, “Why haven’t you called? Don’t you like me anymore?” then what she is really doing is trying to control him with her need. We girls do all sorts of things like this, don’t we? Some of us send too many emails and texts. Some hang on him in public, afraid he’ll look at someone else. Some break into his Facebook account to see if he’s talking with other girls. This kind of behavior among girls is almost considered normal.

A few weeks ago at a nail salon, I heard a woman breezily say to her friend, “I figured he was cheating on me again, so I broke into his email account to see if I was crazy.” (Honey, once you’ve broken into his email account, there’s nothing more to see about whether you’ve crossed over into crazy.) “Women,” the guys all say, rolling their eyes. And sure enough, girls call each other to talk about these actions, to get support for them. “Of course you had to break into his account! He was acting weird!” “Of course you called him again! He still hasn’t called you back! What does he expect you to do?”

But this isn’t normal behavior. When we engage in these sorts of behaviors, we have moved so far away from ourselves, from caring about ourselves, from being a friend to ourselves, that we are so completely out of control that we may as well be drinking until we puke or shooting our arms full of drugs. When a girl relentlessly pursues a guy to find out what he’s thinking, she is demanding that he make her feel better, that he feed a part of her that has nothing to do with him by calling her back and saying, “Of course I like you.” When she breaks into his accounts, she is suggesting that he can’t have a will of his own, that there is no way he would love her if she doesn’t control him into doing so. Who in their right mind likes that? Who finds that attractive? Nobody wants to be made responsible for another person’s feelings. You don’t have to be a boy to feel that way. Girls don’t want to have a boy’s desperation dumped on them either. The problem here is not the neediness itself. It’s making other people responsible for your needs. It’s acting on no one’s behalf, not even your own. It is acting without any compassion for him and his needs, or for you and your own.

Beneath all that chasing and pursuing and desperation, of course, there is a little girl, a girl who feels abandoned every time you don’t give her attention and try to make someone else—a boy—take care of her. There is a little girl who doesn’t believe for a moment that anyone would love her if she didn’t try to force them into it. Some of the women I spoke with had had experiences in therapy where the therapist had tried to help them find this girl and take care of her. Twenty-seven-year-old Carla described how useless that was:

Carla’s story exemplifies how many of the therapeutic approaches to help us stop needing male attention probably won’t help. There are lots of exceptions, of course. Some women will find success with twelve-step programs or with the sort of visualization that Carla described. But most of us don’t, because unlike most addictions, part of what we are after is perfectly healthy—love, attention, and sex. Not only is it perfectly healthy, but it’s also necessary to a satisfying life.

So, before anything else, girls like us have to accept that that part of us that desperately wants attention, that desperately wants to be loved, is never going away. That time is past. Way back when, my mother didn’t love me enough, caught up in her own narcissism. Mandy’s father left when she was two years old, and she can count the amount of times she’s seen him since on one hand. Carla’s parents were so busy with their own unhappiness that they didn’t care to see hers. The other girls and women I spoke to had mothers who tried to kill themselves, fathers who ignored them, fathers who bullied and were sexually inappropriate or outright molested. Others were raped or simply became caught up in the cultural pressure to be sexy and to put out so that guys would find them worthwhile.

We all have our stories. They are ours to keep, a part of what makes us who we are. We will never be rid of them. Never. When you can swallow that fact, when you can acknowledge that you will always feel that ache, that it will resurface every once in a while, and that it is only yours and that no one else has the capacity to make it feel better, then you are ready to move toward real change.

SHARING OUR STORIES

Leigh knows she will always be a loose girl, and in some ways, that was the truth that helped her feel like she could move forward with her life. She spent her teens and most of her twenties trying desperately to get male attention, trying to turn every glance from a man into a relationship. By the time she met Chris, the man she’d wind up marrying, she knew she had to find a way to stop relying so much on men to make her feel worthwhile. She came to me at that point, wanting to hear how she could not screw up her relationship with Chris. When I told her the first step was to acknowledge that she would always feel the way she feels, that she would always have the propensity to seek out other men, she grew angry. She said, “How does that help me?” But over time, she saw that it was true. To change her behavior, she had to stop beating herself up for her feelings. She had to recognize that she had those feelings again and again to know that she need not act on them. Just because she felt the desire didn’t mean she had to act on it.

The other process that helped Leigh was finding a group of women who struggled like she did. Many psychologists understand that stories can heal. Sharing stories—telling your own and listening to those of others—is a therapeutic process. Much has been written about using narrative in psychotherapy—psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral therapies—as a way to help clients integrate their histories, their multiple selves, and as a way to make better choices. When we tell our stories, we are forced both to claim ourselves (“I did this”) and to claim our responsibilities to other people, such as our families and communities. When we tell our stories, and when our audience demands vulnerability from us, we can no longer get away with behavior like breaking into Facebook accounts. Suddenly, it is just us and our feelings and the question of what we will do with them.

I would argue that the group experience of knowing that you’re not alone—particularly for issues such as promiscuity, where girls carry so much shame—is useful as well. So many of us have these stories, and yet so few feel safe sharing them. After Loose Girl came out, I set up a system on my website where girls could simply submit their loose girl stories and read others’ in the hope that knowing so many of us are out there would be healing.

EXAMINING THE THINGS WE TELL OURSELVES

Any girl or woman I’ve worked with who is still in the throes of loose-girl behavior, still pursuing male attention at any cost, even as it makes her feel like garbage, believes in the fantasy she has about men. With each of these women I’ve asked the same question: “What do you believe he will do for you?” Their answers are almost all the same:

A huge part of being a loose girl is believing in a fantasy, and that fantasy is of course not factual. We have been handed the lie about men by our media and culture. A boy will make you worth something. A boy’s loving you means you matter in the world. We’ve bought the idea entirely. But beneath the fantasy is the blatant lie. It isn’t true. Not even close. No man’s attention to a girl means anything. In fact, more often than not it just means he has an opportunity to use her for sex, which, in the typical cultural irony for a girl, makes her matter less. Perhaps more important, whatever fantasy you or your daughter or your client or student carries around is based on some lack that can’t possibly be filled by another person, and most certainly not some random boy. That emptiness is very real, but the fantasy that someone will fill it is not.

Often, when it comes into their awareness that they have these beliefs, the girls and women I work with are surprised. I encourage them to write those beliefs down on one side of a piece of paper, and then to make a list on the other side of what those men actually wind up doing for them. This is important, because even if men do provide some positives in these women’s lives, they do not do this impossible task of filling their emptiness, of taking away or saving them from their pain.

Larissa believed that every boy that gave her attention, or who she developed a crush on, would be “the one.” When I pressed her about what she meant by “the one,” she admitted he would be the one who would love her so much that all her pain would go away and she’d always be happy. Larissa grew up with parents she described as “distant,” whom she was never able to feel loved by. After she wrote down this belief, we discussed what she really did get from these boys. She determined that she got some affection and some sense that she was pretty and desirable, but little else. She said she never even felt like they were her friends. I didn’t expect this to change everything for Larissa right away, but it was a task I suggested she repeat with each encounter or crush. The more she paid attention to her fantasy about boys, the easier time she would have unraveling why it felt so terrible when it didn’t work out, and let’s face it—it was never going to work out as long as those were her expectations.

Deb provides another example. She had a boyfriend, but she cheated on him constantly. When I asked her what she wanted from him, she told me that she wanted him to make her feel whole. These sorts of answers are so common. We hear them everywhere. They are spread across our media, in every teen drama and romantic comedy. A boy will complete you. It’s yet another line delivered that rarely does any good for teen girls. Clearly, though, she didn’t feel whole. She slept with other boys because she felt desperate and uncared for, and she secretly hoped one of these other boys would give her that sense of wholeness. Deb and I stayed in touch, and though she hadn’t stopped searching for that sense of wholeness, she could see how she had reached that point and needed to make a change.

Along with the fantasy about boys are the core beliefs—called core schemas in cognitive therapy—we have about ourselves. So often, we come to believe some essential lie about ourselves: I am not lovable. I am not special. I am worthless. I don’t matter. These lies come about through various channels, such as growing up with parental abuse or neglect or addiction, or with a trauma such as rape. Or they come about because of situations with boys, or because of our personality type, or simply because of how our culture makes us feel as girls.

Paula, for instance, developed the core belief “I am not special” right after she went through puberty. She developed crushes on boys, but those boys kept choosing other girls to date. When one finally did choose her as his girlfriend, he decided he liked someone else after about a month. This is ordinary dating behavior among adolescents, but Paula felt as though it meant she were different from other girls, that she wasn’t special.

Combine those sorts of core beliefs with the fantasy of what a boy can provide, and it’s easy to see why a girl might get hung up on getting with boys. She can easily come to believe that a boy will save her from these terrible things she believes about herself. He can make them untrue. I encouraged Paula to notice when she had that thought about not being special, and then we worked together to examine the thought process that led her to that false belief. Over time, she began to recognize that there was little logic to it. Having this sort of awareness so young—fourteen years old—Paula has the potential to avoid heading down a loose-girl path.

MAKING NEW HABITS

Deb was in the perfect mind space for changing her behavior, for creating new habits. One of the dangers of loose-girl self-harming sexual activity is that your brain develops habits. In the same way that one might develop a psychological dependence on a glass of wine in the evening, or a few hits of marijuana to sleep, girls (and boys) can develop a psychological dependence on promiscuity (as with other process addictions). Deb, for instance, knew she was making bad choices. She knew she had a false fantasy, and she hardly believed in it anymore. But just knowing is sometimes not enough. Often the behavior is entrenched enough that we have to do things differently, too.

It’s important to note that often the predictable pattern feels good. Something about that drama and pain, something about getting to feel the feelings we usually tamp down, feels good. Think about any other sort of addictive pattern. Imagine you were a heroin addict. Imagine the ritualized process of calling your dealer, driving into that seedy part of town. The haggard people on the streets. Your heart beats wildly in your chest. You know that you will get that feeling again. Then after doing that drug, imagine how it feels to come down and feel desperate for more, how familiar it is. The process is almost comforting, even as you start to sweat and feel sick. You know it by heart. This is the same for the loose girl. She gets pleasure from the process, even as it feels like hell. Those familiar neurons fire, those same sections of the brain light up, the various neurochemicals begin their work. The loose girl must acknowledge this buzz as part of her necessary awareness.

In most therapies for substance abuse, the addict is told to commit to staying away from his or her triggers, and that absolutely applies to the loose girl. If she usually messes around with boys at parties and regrets it later, she should stay away from parties. If she gives blow jobs in the school stairwell, she should stay away from the stairwell. Not forever. Just until new habits can take hold.

There are a number of established studies about how behavior changes, and they all point to the idea that there is a limited period of time in which a habit should change. The best documented is the work of Prochaska, Norcross, and DiClemente, who determined through research that habits form after just about twenty-one days. They also established the “stages of change” approach, which recognizes that people are in precontemplation, contemplation, or preparation, all before reaching action and maintenance; it’s important to know where one is among these stages before trying to change.¹

Thus far, I’ve been encouraging the contemplation stage, where you build awareness about your issue and begin to believe you might want change. Put another way, I’ve been encouraging readers to move out of precontemplation and into contemplation. Assessing what your triggers are, such as parties, is part of the preparation. When you are ready to commit, you can move out of preparation and into action, which I discuss shortly. Maintenance comes with the gradual rewards that arrive, although they don’t arrive quickly. First, lots of challenges come, including the opportunity to relapse, which commonly happens and is no reason to give up. Finally, environmental controls are established, and often the person who changes does some sort of work in the world—perhaps as a therapist or writer or teacher—to help others with change, too.

Something I appreciate about the stages-of-change model is that it acknowledges that not everyone is ready to change. I would take this a step further and say that we should never judge where a person is. Not one of us knows what it’s like to be anyone else, what resources a person has internally and externally. When you aren’t ready to change something in your life, you aren’t ready. That’s all there is to it. You can try to force it. You can beat yourself up about it. But it will happen when it happens. The human psyche is not readable that way, and thank goodness. We are multifaceted and complicated, and that humanness is beautiful enough to keep me in love with my work. Be patient with yourself. Accept where you are.

This is a good place to note the myths about change, and in particular about change for a loose girl. The first myth is that change is simple. Of course, some have an easy time changing, but we hate those people (kidding!). Most don’t have an easy time. Most, in fact, have tried many things. Change for a person who is deeply entrenched in a habit, who is acting addictively, is not easy.

A closely related myth is that willpower leads to change. Willpower is necessary, of course, to reach a place at which you will commit to change. But it is only a small piece of change. For a loose girl, she needs willpower to not go to that party where the boys are, especially when she’s feeling down on herself. But the willpower isn’t enough. She needs to engage in a circuit of efforts, including social support, acceptance of herself, and self-awareness about her fantasies. She needs to be willing to sit through some pretty painful feelings that come when she doesn’t relieve her anxiety with male attention.

The other important myth here is the magic bullet. Our society can probably be blamed for much of the origins of the magic bullet. We do not cater to patience or discomfort. Technology has practically removed the word slow from our vocabulary. Everything is immediate gratification. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending how you look at it—personal change won’t ever be fast. If it is, then I guarantee you it isn’t real. There is nothing—no pill you can take, no shot you can get, no new-age therapy you can do—that will take away your shame or your pain or your propensity to act out with boys. I often remind my clients—and myself—that this is a lifelong process. It is more than possible that you will never be fully free of it. Embrace that.

CREATING RULES

So, action. The first action is to remove your triggers. You can think of this like rules. Here are some examples:

Rules are terribly useful. You can write them on sticky notes or in your phone. Refer to them often. Pull them out whenever you need. Addicts in general, and loose girls in particular, need rules because we often live our lives out of control. In fact, loose-girl behavior can be a failed way to try to get control.

EMBRACING DISTRACTIONS

Along with rules, loose girls need a list of distractions they can turn to when necessary. Examples of distractions are exercise, calling a particular friend who won’t judge you, chopping firewood, knitting, cooking, or playing piano. It seems simple, but it really is a necessary part of the process, because when a loose girl doesn’t go out boy hunting or doesn’t text the guy she knows will grant her a booty call and then ignore her afterward, even with all her awareness about her patterns, she will experience anxiety. And distractions will help her cope.

FEELING THE FEELINGS

Let’s go back to Larissa’s story. Every time Larissa reached out to a boy, she did so out of anxiety. Her anxiety about her pain, about her unhappiness, was the real trigger that led her to seek out another boy. Her anxiety rose up, and without thinking, she sought out the next guy to quell it. This anxiety is one of the greatest challenges. There’s a reason girls keep pursuing what makes them feel like crap soon after. That reason, in a momentary sense, is anxiety. One thing we know about anxiety is that it is very treatable with behavioral methods. Anxiety is simply a resistance to feeling. It’s fear of feeling. In that way, it is irrational fear. Anxiety generally won’t kill you. So one of the best ways to treat anxiety is to extinguish the fear feelings that go along with it, and the way to do that is to simply feel the feelings. No doubt, anxiety is scary, but when you let yourself feel the terrible fear, when you feel that awful pain you’ve been avoiding for years, you find you live through it. You may be debilitated for a bit. You may have to stay in bed for a weekend and cry. You may have to yowl and scream. That is OK. You will still live through it. And you can tell yourself this all the way through: “This is just the pain I never let myself feel. It feels this bad because I’ve avoided it for so long. I’m going to come out the other side.”

The next time, it won’t be quite as bad, and the next time a little less. Over time, it may always be painful, but you’ll feel it, you’ll cry or whatever it is you do to move through it, and then you’ll carry on. It is painful, just like the behavior with boys was painful, but at least this pain is in your control, and you aren’t demanding anything from others in the process.

OTHER PROGRAMS

There are other approaches to treatment out there. Some loose girls have connected to the approach found in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA), since there is plenty of overlap between the loose girl’s experience and someone who identifies as a sex or love addict.² Others try alternative approaches, such as therapies that address posttraumatic stress disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, or anxiety disorders in general. It is important to find what you respond to. The main thing to remember is that change is ongoing. Your pain will always be your pain. No one—really, no one—will save you. It is just a decision, and when you are ready, when your daughter is ready, when your client is ready, you, she, will do this.

At the end of a chapter about change for the loose girl, we must restate where the chapter started. You will always be this girl. You will never go through a struggle in life without finding yourself up against these thoughts or desires. You will not magically become someone new. Change is a journey, with no clear end point.