Tara Porter - You Dont Understand Me: The Young Womans Guide to Life - the Sunday Times Bestseller

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Tara Porter has worked in clinical settings with young people since 1992. Since qualifying as a clinical psychologist in 1997, this has primarily been with girls and adolescents as part of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in the NHS in north London, a region of extreme social-economic, ethnic and religious diversity. She has also been involved in teaching teachers about mental health through the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families and regularly writes about mental health in schools in the Times Educational Supplement (TES). She is an associate clinical tutor at UCL and also works privately.

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Copyright by Dr Tara Porter 2022

Dr Tara Porter has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The names and identifying characteristics of some persons described in this book have been changed.

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For Ella; for Charlie; for Joe.
For always.

CONTENTS

Psychology: the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behaviour in a given context.

In my career as a therapist and psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of girls. This book is based on these conversations: on the girls stories, hopes, fears, thoughts, feelings, behaviour, failures and triumphs. It is what I learnt from listening to them and what I had to learn in order to help them; it has grown out of these girls struggles and successes.

You Dont Understand Me is about how to navigate young womanhood, providing a toolkit for growing up emotionally competent and confident. The world for girls and women has changed beyond all recognition in one generation. Over the 25 years of my clinical practice, I have observed the opportunities and power of teenage girls increase exponentially. You, girls, are outstripping boys academically; the gender balance for entry into medicine and law is now equal; we see teenage girls and young women flexing their power in feminism with #metoo and in climate change with the school strikes. The technological revolution means that girls today are the first generation of women who are screen natives: there has never been a time when the internet wasnt a part of your life and you work a screen instinctively. These changes mean that many of you leave your teenage years with a freedom and a platform that were unimaginable to women a generation ago.

Some things are clearly going right for girls and young women, but other things are going badly wrong. Its clear that with that greater freedom, choice and empowerment there also comes immense challenges. We are all aware that mental health problems are on the rise among young people, but the statistics are somewhat misleading. In fact, rates of mental illness among boys and younger girls are relatively stable. However, mental health problems among teenage girls and young women are sky-rocketing. Self-harm among girls of 1624 years old has shot up from around 6 per cent in 2000 to around 20 per cent now.

It is distressed girls like these that I have met in a therapy room. There, I have tried to listen to their experience, through the lenses of both my clinical knowledge and the collective wisdom I have gained from listening to other young people their peers and the generations before them. I try to help each young woman understand her internal world so as to navigate her external one. And sometimes, something powerful happens in my therapy room: by helping these girls forge order out of the chaos in their minds, it gives them the agency to think differently, which in turn helps them to act differently, to make different choices and consequently to feel better.

In this book, I draw together the commonalities of those experiences to share them with you. What you will read here is the sum of their collective wisdom alongside my observations and musings from listening to them. I want to give you the tools to understand yourself and treat yourself with compassion, to use the freedom girls now have wisely and not at the expense of your mental health. I dont want any more girls to self-scar or starve, to be paralysed with panic, to think the world would be better without them. Enough, already. I want you girls to be armed with the self-knowledge not just to survive but to thrive. To soar and fly with confidence and a clear mind. I want to do myself out of a job.

To all my current and ex-patients: firstly, thank you, oh thank you, for sharing your stories with me. Secondly, none of the case examples are you. Why? Because I had to make them up to protect your privacy. Quite frankly, it took me a long time to get my head around how I could do that because I was worried that it might make the book seem less true or honest. So, what I did was this: I made myself a rule that I would only use a case example if I could think of two or three young people Id worked with whod had that problem, and I combined their stories. Then I took out all the extraneous detail and added some new detail for colour. I did this to protect your stories, which you have trusted me with, and I did this because the reason for including the case studies is to illustrate a wider point, and the key thing is that point and not how old you were or what you look like. So, to be relevant to more people, I placed the things I learnt from you all into a fictional person.

A note about language. This book is written about the commonalities Ive observed while working with teenage girls and young women. Not all of it will be relevant to all girls and women, as you are, of course, a diverse group, and a lot of it will be relevant to some boys and young men. I have not worked with enough young people who identify differently to this, or young people in transition, to claim any specialised knowledge of their psychology. I hope what you read here captures something of your identity. I see gender as socially constructed and self-determined, which, in some ways, makes a book targeted just at girls and young women a contradiction. However, I justify it as the data we have shows that young women are currently suffering more with mental health difficulties (and they are more interested in studying psychology) which suggests some need or demand for a gendered book. I use language in the style of the young people I see, which is generally quite gender-neutral (guys and someone whos a dick or a prick can be any gender). I also use the words mum, dad and parent quite fluidly to account for all people in those roles for you including step-parents, guardians, foster parents and the like.