In search of a kindred spirit

From the School Psychologist

“Marilla”, she demanded presently, “do you think that I shall ever have a bosom friend in Avonlea?”

“A–a what kind of friend?”

“A bosom friend – an intimate friend, you know – a really kindred spirit to whom I can confide my inmost soul. I’ve dreamed of meeting her all my life. I never really supposed I would, but so many of my loveliest dreams have come true all at once that perhaps this one will, too. Do you think it’s possible?” (Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables).

When I was a girl I would read Anne of Green Gables over and over again. The adventures of Anne, Diana and Gilbert of Avonlea captivated me and the angst and joy of their relationships seemed to leap off the pages inviting the search for my own kindred spirit. So it was perhaps no surprise that recently I found myself mesmerised one afternoon observing two adolescent girls at my local park engaged in a very intense conversation. The news one girl delivered was met with shock and dismay by her friend and I felt captivated by her expression—she physically caught her breath as she processed the information she had just been told. The first girl waited patiently for her friend to absorb her news, biting her lip worryingly. However she needn’t have feared for once her friend recovered from her shock she turned and placed a comforting, reassuring hand on her shoulder, a gesture communicating acceptance, reassurance and support. The pair then sat together for some time, not speaking, just resting their heads on each other and being linked in the moment. What I had the privilege to be observing was female friendship in action—what Anne Shirley calls “bosom friendship”—deep, intense, intimate and powerful female friendship. It invited me to reflect on the concept of friendship, its joy and its pitfalls.

This year’s Student Council exhorted their peers to “embrace the sisterhood” (Sweep & Tonge 2011). There is little doubt that sisterhood and female friendship remains a rich part of the tapestry at Girls Grammar as evidenced by a multitude of incidental behaviours from singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to debriefing after an exam or braiding each other’s hair. Second to their parents and prior to boys, girls fall in love with each other as friends and during this time friendship can be as intense as any romance and feel as important as oxygen (Apter & Josselson, 1998; Deak, 2002; Simmons, 2002). Girls’ friendships perform a far greater purpose than simply engaging in shopping, gossiping and hair braiding. These relationships instead are serving an array of emotional and developmental needs, continually moulding and changing all involved and leading one towards the development of authenticity and confidence (Apter & Josselson, 1998).

As girls navigate the development of their identity and separate from their parents they use their friendships with each other to discover who they are, independent from their family. Sharing secrets, admitting fears and insecurities and borrowing advice, clothes, hairstyles and images are all part of building the intimacy and deepening the connection with one another. A girl often defines herself via her relationships with her friends and her self esteem can be linked to her capacity to initiate and sustain relationships with people outside of her family (she assumes family members have to like her due to being related—though she obviously has no idea what it is like to live with an adolescent!).

At times the friendships between girls can become dynamic and passionate and are perhaps best described as “an intense, deeply intimate, nonsexual bond that offers them emotional support and a sense of being understood and accepted” (Diamond, Savin-Williams & Dube, 1999, p195). Female friendships usually develop within a group setting and a girl uses her group to explore who she is, what she thinks about things and how she interprets the world. Within a group she feels comforted by the awareness that others, too, feel similar to her and share the same types of fears and concerns. The group, and the understanding and acknowledgement she receives from it, reassures her that she is okay. While she assumes different personas, the group holds and guides her with either encouragement or criticism in the exploration of her identity. We all have a need to belong, but girls crave to be understood by another and it is often only following a friend’s understanding of her that a girl can then begin to understand herself— “throughout life, as a girl or a woman searches for what is genuine and authentic in herself, she looks in the mirror of her girlfriends gaze” (Apter & Josselson, 1998, p4).

Developmentally, females are thought to be designed for connection, forming more intimate friendships and creating larger social networks than boys (Baron-Cohen, 2003; Nagel, 2008; Taylor, 2002). Engaging in more self disclosure, smiling and making eye contact, girls experience more pleasure in one-to-one interactions and are observed to sit closer, touch, caress and compliment each other more than boys (Baron-Cohen, 2003). Psychiatrist Louanne Brizendine proposes that females find ‘biological comfort’ in one another’s company and that the hormones released when connecting and talking (or gossiping) activate the pleasure centres in a female’s brain (Brizendine, 2007). Oxytocin, the nurturing, bonding hormone seems to not only drive females to connect but also surges upon connection, therefore reinforcing their desire to bond. As the release of oxytocin has a calming and soothing effect, girls can be using their friendships as a way to buffer the turbulence of adolescence. Esteemed psychologist Professor Shelley Taylor and her colleagues discovered that rather than the traditional fight vs flight response, the female’s response to stress is better described as tend & befriend (Taylor, 2002). This is why, in times of distress—the dog has died, she failed her test or her boyfriend broke up with her—we see girls making a bee line for their friends, bunkering down together and using their relationships with each other to heal the hurt. During this time, friends seem to replace the ‘bandaid and Dettol’ once supplied by parents.

Although we all value social relationships, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen from Cambridge University suggests that while males tend to value power, politics and competition in order to affirm their social status females, on the other hand, prioritise altruistic, reciprocal relationships which provide a supportive experience (Baron-Cohen, 2003). Professor Baron-Cohen’s studies into autism and gender differences over two decades have led him to controversially theorise that the “female brain is predominately hardwired for empathy. The male brain is predominately hardwired for understanding and building systems” (Baron-Cohen, 2003, p1). In his theory of mind work, Professor Baron-Cohen proposes that as natural empathisers, not only do females more readily tune into and understand another person’s feelings and thoughts, but also possess the ability to take on the other person’s perspective, with girls being ahead of boys in this capability from as young as three years of age.

Despite the joy of female friendships, or perhaps because of it, girls are not always found to be made of sugar and spice and all things nice. Paradoxically it is her superior skills in navigating social encounters and her drive for connection which enables her to hurt others in sophisticated and subtle ways, barely detectable to those observing from the outside. Researcher and author on female aggression, Rachel Simmons, suggests that intimacy and anger are often inextricably linked and that aggression stems from the passion close friends lavish on one another (Simmons, 2002). The intimacy created within a friendship can be hard to sustain (Apter & Josselson, 1998). This, coupled with the quest for sameness, can leave girls feeling frustrated and anxious while they juggle the competing demands of uniformity with others and the emerging individuality of their identities.

Friendships assist girls to grow and change during adolescence, however when growing in different directions, as is often the case, the friendship can become the casualty of this growth. If friendships are as important as oxygen, then loneliness is an adolescent girl’s greatest fear. In other words, when relationships are not going well it can feel like a girl’s whole world is in chaos. Because a girl defines herself through her relationships with others, when these relationships sour she can be left feeling distraught by the belief that she no longer knows who she is—her mirror has been broken and her reflected image is now shattered.

In the quest to be understood, liked and feel close to another, a girl often discloses her innermost secrets and insecurities to a friend and best friends can turn into savage enemies as this self disclosure, which once cemented their intimacy, now acts as a powerful bullet in a social war. And when at war in the social world, girls fight their battles in very different ways from boys. Researchers found that from as young as the age of three, girls engage in relational aggression, which is different to the physical aggression preferred by boys (Underwood, 2003). Relational aggression involves exclusion, rumours, gossiping and turning others against the victim and while engaging in this, girls can maintain the impression of niceness and femininity to outside observers. Experts suggest that relational aggression allows females to express their anger, which they have been raised to suppress, whilst still appearing cooperative and nice to others (Apter & Josselson, 1998; Brown, 2003; Underwood, 2003).

Girls can be just as competitive as boys and experience the same types of normal human emotions of anger, fear, frustration, envy and jealousy. However, parents and teachers tend to discourage the physical and direct aggression in girls when it surfaces thus sending a message that it is wrong to disagree or fight, thereby unwittingly encouraging girls to express their anger in secret or underhand ways (Simmons, 2002). As adults then, we must have an understanding of the minutiae of girls’ relationships and an awareness of the way they bully each other and why. To assist girls we need to educate them to know that targeting an individual via exclusion or gossiping is still bullying. Importantly, helping girls to negotiate the intricacies involved in female friendship, supporting them to communicate feelings of anger or frustration via the use of “I feel” statements, and encouraging them to really listen to each other, can go a long way in preventing the nastiness of relational bullying.

As with most things in life, making friends can be easy for some but harder for others and even the nicest girl can find herself struggling to initiate or sustain friendships. Thankfully, the ‘high school reunion’ movie genre illustrates that not everyone peaks during adolescence. For some girls it is not as important to have friends as it is for others and while one girl may like to have a lot of friends, for another just one special person is enough. Transition times such as commencing Year 8 can be difficult for friendships. High school brings with it new people, a new environment and new social rules. Many of our Year 8 students think that if they didn’t find a friend on the first day then they have missed their opportunity “because all the groups have already been formed”. I often use the ‘lava lamp’ as an analogy to educate girls about relationships (thank goodness for the 70s!). Relationships are not fixed entities, instead they remain in flow—very few people form a group on the first day of high school and spend the next five years being best friends with that same group of girls. It is very natural and common for groups and relationships to change, just as our girls themselves grow and change—so Anne Shirley’s idea of a “bosom friend” is best thought of as fluid. Opportunities to join and leave groups, and initiate or end relationships, continue to present themselves throughout the high school experience and girls benefit from the guidance adults can provide to navigate these relationship changes. Furthermore, making friends requires patience, time, energy, circumstances and courage.

Although there is a lot of magic within female friendships, and some researchers proclaim we are destined to connect, it is not often that one becomes best friends with another simply by frequenting the same vicinity. I invite girls to compare their friendships to a plant (yes I do like my analogies), and see that relationships require nurturing to grow. If a girl can remain patient and contain her anxiety enough to invest in a relationship by finding opportunities to connect and spend time together (phone calls, texts, social networking, outside of school ‘play dates’, common interests) then her relationships with others will grow and strengthen. This can be reinforced and modelled for girls by their parents, as the opportunity to muster one’s courage and employ one’s best social skills continues to present itself throughout life as we all navigate new relationships.

Anne Shirley, with all of her earnestness and enthusiasm, offers an important message to us all. New people, new places and new relationships can be both challenging and rewarding. Undeniably, as I observed that afternoon in the park, female friendships can be magical and very worthy of the effort and courage often required. Not all of us will find our “bosom friend” during adolescence, and in fact the one who fulfils this role for us during one phase of our life may not be the same person we need during another. Nonetheless, we can make a commitment to remain open and welcoming to future kindred spirits who may cross our paths. One just needs to flick through the pages of Anne of Green Gables, or wander the campus of Girls Grammar, to see the value of doing so!

Mrs J Forbes

References

Apter, T & Josselson, R. (1998). Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls’ and Women’s Friendships. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Baron-Cohen, S. (2003). The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain. London: Penguin Books.

Brizendine, L.B. (2007). The Female Brain. London: Bantam Press.

Brown, L.M. (2003). Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection among Girls. New York: New York University Press.

Deak, J. (2002). Girls will be Girls: Raising Confident and Courageous Daughters. New York: Hyperion,

Diamond. L.M; R.C Savin-Williams, & E.M. Dube. (1999). Sex, dating, passionate friendships, and romance: Intimate peer relations among lesbian, gay and bisexual adolescents. In W. Furman, & B.Brown (eds), Contemporary perspectives on adolescent romantic relationships. New York: Cambridge University Press. In Brown, L.M. (2003). Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection among Girl.s New York: New York University Press.

Nagel, M.C. (2008). It’s a Girl Thing. Victoria: Hawker Brownlow.

Simmons, R. (2002). Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. Florida: Harcourt Books.

Sweep, A. & Tonge, L. (2011). A force more powerful than gravity. Brisbane Girls Grammar Gazette. Autumn: p4.

Taylor, S. E. (2002). The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing is Essential for Who We Are and How We Live. New York: Times Books.

Underwood, M.K. (2003). Social Aggression Among Girls. New York: The Guilford Press.

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