"US GIRLS"

By

Leigh Travis, Ph.D.

You've seen them in restaurants or businesses or walking down the street together, hand-in-hand: a middle-aged woman and a teenaged girl who are "two peas in a pod": they are usually dressed alike - or, sometimes, even identically - seem to smile alike, laugh at the same time at the same jokes, appear to be so wielded together that it would take an acetylene torch to separate them. Recognize them?

Supposing you could somehow follow these Siamese twins around, you'd probably see them going everywhere together, inseparable, almost like young, teenaged, "steadies". The older woman appears to be the girl's chauffeur and escort and if you watched them long enough you might come to believe that there was no husband, lover, boyfriend, or other siblings in the lives of the duo: just the woman and child, fused together by the heat of their perfect love, forever. A beautiful vision of togetherness in these days of family warfareand dissolution!

If you overheard them talking, you'd probably learn that they refer to themselves as "us girls" - two different people, almost a generation apart, who nonetheless always seem to agree on everything: "us girlsthink that--," or "us girls feel that -," as if the plural "us" meant the singular "I', one entity. Quite a marvel!

Maybe.

Or maybe not: on second look, there seems to be something odd about them - something forced and hollow about their laughter, something plastic and two dimensional about the happy smiles eternally frozen on their faces, something precarious about their apparently dedicated unity. And, sooner or later, it might dawn on you that what you are observing is a grotesque charade, namely, a child being emotionally and mentally destroyed, a daughter whose personality is being treacherously swallowed whole by a "loving, devoted," mother, a mother whose husband has most probably just sued her for divorce and for custody of the children, including the daughter.

Behind the public facade of blissful togetherness, in other words, what this type of desperate mother is probably attempting to do is to emotionally alienate the daughter from her father and her siblings by using the most cruel and most viciously effective weapon in child custody disputes: "mother love," or rather, a brutally evil, calculated, aberration thereof.

This kind of corrupt "love" usually works this way: the mother lavishes her daughter with daily devotions (chauffeur services to and from school and everywhere else, every night out to dinner, hours of intimate "adult" conversation, etc.), and grants the daughter absolute license to do anything she wishes - with impunity: no matter what the child does - stays out all night and cuts school the next day, gets drunk, uses drugs, has sex - her devoted mother accepts the behaviors without even an eyebrow raised in disapproval, as if the child had suddenly become an adult responsible for the consequences of her behaviors. The young daughter wrongly reads this lack of disapproval as approval and the mother's acquiescence to the daughter's behaviors as unconditional "love" of the her, right or wrong, despite the fact that the daughter undoubtedly knows her behaviors are profoundly age inappropriate and, in many instances, illegal and morally wrong.

Now, the daughter is probably going along with the deadly game of "us girls" not only because of the delicious freedoms of the damned it provides, but also because, in part, she has most likely been convinced that she must play the game because of her mother's insidious claim that the daughter's presence is absolutely essential to the well-being of the mother, who "can't live" without her daughter, would be "lonely" and "sad" without the daughter's constant companionship.

When the father or the brothers and sisters sense the potentially lethal dangers in this game to the daughter's soul and complain that they miss their daughter/sister, want to do things with her again like they used to do, the mother will probably dismiss these concerns by explaining to her child that the father and siblings are "just afraid to let go" of the daughter, afraid to let her "grow up," and thus scurrilously imply that they are contemptibly unloving in being critical of the child's recent, miraculous, "maturation".

As the days and weeks pass by, the daughter will most likely gradually become a clone-like caricature of her mother, adopting the mother's mannerisms, style of dress, idiomatic language quirks, values, tones of voice, style of laughter. When other family members comment directly to the daughter on these bizarre personality changes, the expression of their legitimate concerns will probably backfire because the daughter - who probably vaguely suspects in some dark corner of her mind that she's being swindled - will outwardly resent the implications that she isn't "herself" anymore, and will usually react with a furious denial of the truth that she is, in fact, being brainwashed. Her denials are not surprising: the daughter has really no choice: to admit to the truth of the swindle would be to realize the horrifying actuality that her mother's "devotion" to her and "mother love" are, in fact, heartless, cold-blooded, manipulative shams, designed to destroy the daughter's love of her father and siblings and addict her to the mother's toxic devotion.

If the family members press their attempts to prevent their loved one from losing herself totally, the mother will often counter attack by offering the daughter some kind of future "grand prize" - a new car, part - time work in the mother's business, an expensive vacation - to "prove" how much she "loves" her child, and will increase her frenzied devotional activities with the child, keeping her daughter at a level of constant activity and exhaustion, always condoning her behaviors, whatever and no matter how outrageous they might be, "loving" her child to death.

With enough time and diligent execution of this plan, when the divorce comes to trial the daughter will most likely have not only essentially lost her former youthful good looks, but her former sense of separate identity as well, will most probably tell the judge that "her" heartfelt preference is to live with her "dear, beloved, mother," and the mother will have won the custody suit at a cost beyond calculation to her daughter's future chances of individuality and happiness. Such is the terrible price of being "us girls" for some daughters.

If something like the above is happening to you and your daughter, what can you do?

The answer, unfortunately, is not much. The methods above described, and other similarly ruthless "brainwashing" tactics, are technically "mental injury child abuse" in Michigan Law (MCLA 722.622[c]) and in the laws of other states; thus, you can petition the court for psychological evaluations of all the parties and hope that the psychologist sees through the vicious hoax, recommends custody to you forthwith, and intensive psychotherapy for your daughter (and perhaps her mother as well). But outside of this legal/psychological rescue, there's essentially virtually nothing you, as the child's father (or brother or sister) can legally do about it if a teenaged daughter becomes deeply enmeshed in the mother's fraudulent illusion of a longed-for, but unreal, all-encompassing, uncritical "love": the daughter's preference, given her age, will prevail.

And there are unfortunately no easy, magical "cures" for this dilemma following the divorce and custody award either. The few "solutions," such as they are, appear to be: (a) to continue to see your daughter as much as possible and to genuinely love her (that includes sending her flowers and birthday/Christmas presents, support of her positive activities and disapproval of activities that are inappropriate), and (b) perhaps live on the hope that someday, somehow - psychotherapy, a tough, honest, female friend or a wonderful man - your daughter will rediscovered and become again that once lovely child in herself lying buried and choking under all that duplicity, manipulation, and unmitigated hatred poured into her by her "devoted, loving," mother.