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Girls face two major sexual issues in America in the 1990s: One is an old issue of coming to terms with their own sexuality, defining a sexual self, making sexual choices and learning to enjoy sex. The other issue concerns the dangers girls face of being sexually assaulted. By late adolescence, most girls today either have been traumatized or know girls who have. They are fearful of males even as they are trying to develop intimate relations with them.
Mary Pipher -
Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like all borders, it's teeming with energy and fraught with danger.
Mary Pipher
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Adolescents are travelers, far from home with no native land, neither children nor adults. They are jet-setters who fly from one country to another with amazing speed. Sometimes they are four years old, an hour later they are twenty-five. They don't really fit anywhere. There's a yearning for place, a search for solid ground.
Mary Pipher -
Good therapy, gently but firmly, moves people out of denial and compartmentalization. It helps clients to develop richer inner lives and greater self-knowledge. It teaches clients to live harmoniously with others and it enhances Existential consciousness, and allows people to take responsibility for their effects on the world at large. For me , happiness is about appreciating what one has. Practically speaking,this means lowering expectations about what is fair, possible and likely. It means,finding pleasure in the ordinary.
Mary Pipher -
The fullness of life comes from an identity built on giving and on joy.
Mary Pipher -
Girls developed eating disorders when our culture developed a standard of beauty that they couldn't obtain by being healthy. When unnatural thinness became attractive, girls did unnatural things to be thin.
Mary Pipher -
Adolescents' immature thinking makes it difficult for them to process the divorce. They tend to see things in black-and-white terms and have trouble putting events into perspective. They are absolute in their judgments and expect perfection in parents. They are likely to be self-conscious about their parent's failures and critical of their every move. They have the expectations that parents will keep them safe and happy and are shocked by the broken covenant. Adolescents are unforgiving.
Mary Pipher -
I want to write. I have always wanted to write. I do not care it I am not good at it. I just want to try.
Mary Pipher
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Maturity involves being honest and true to oneself, making decisions based on a conscious internal process, assuming responsibility for one's decisions, having healthy relationships with others and developing one's own true gifts. It involves thinking about one's environment and deciding what one will and won't accept.
Mary Pipher -
People come here penniless but not cultureless. They bring us gifts. We can synthesize the best of our traditions with the best of theirs. We can teach and learn from each other to produce a better America.
Mary Pipher -
Most parents of adolescent girls have the goal of keeping their daughters safe while they grow up and explore the world. The parents' job is to protect, the daughter's job is to explore.
Mary Pipher -
I'm a perfectly good carrot that everyone is trying to turn into a rose. As a carrot, I have good color and a nice leafy top. When I'm carved into a rose, I turn brown and wither.
Mary Pipher -
True freedom has more to do with following the North Star than going whichever way the wind blows. Sometimes it seems like freedom is blowing with the winds of the day, but that kind of freedom is really an illusion. It turns your boat in circles. Freedom is sailing toward your dreams.
Mary Pipher -
Traditionally parents have wondered what their teens were doing, but now teens are much more likely to be doing things that can get them killed.
Mary Pipher
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When one of us tells the truth, he makes it easier for all of us to open our hearts to our pain and that of others.
Mary Pipher -
Therapy isn't Radio.We don't need to constantly fill the air with sounds. Sometimes, when its quite, surprising things happen.
Mary Pipher -
Real friends require honesty, openness, and even vulnerability. They also require attention and simple acts of kindness.
Mary Pipher -
The protected place in space and time that we once called childhood has grown shorter.
Mary Pipher -
We tend to value military heroes and Schwarzenegger types who are physically courageous. The heroics of doing the right thing every day even when it is dull and inconvenient are undervalued.
Mary Pipher -
Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves.
Mary Pipher
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Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.
Mary Pipher -
We are a small, interconnected world; that we are all safe or none of us are; that we are all well cared for or all at risk.
Mary Pipher -
All feelings are acceptable, but all behavior isn't.
Mary Pipher