The weapon of choice among girls—words?!? Well, think about it. Feelings are fragile things, and some words can be like a sword piercing right through your gut! Consider the following verbal attacks:
You help a guy friend with math homework, and another girl tells everybody, “She is so in love with him!” Ouch!
“Those jeans are totally Kmart.” Ouch!
“Idiot!” Double ouch!
When you hear these things, think “Girl Power!” Am I an idiot? No. Am I totally in love with every guy friend I help out? No. Are my jeans Kmart? Well, maybe, but they are the cutest pair in town, so who cares?
Unfortunately, we can’t control physical brain changes and hormones, so gossiping, insults, backstabbing and discouragement will always be around. But remember, just because someone says it about you doesn’t make it true.
Of course, piercing words aren’t just what “other girls” use. Your brain is telling you to fit in; it’s telling you to join a group separate from your family; it’s even telling you to exclude people from your circle of friends. Hey, brain, cut that out!
What Kind of Friend Are You?
Whew! That’s a pretty unpleasant picture we’ve painted. So are middle school and high school nothing but a bunch of mean girls tearing each other to pieces? Heck, no!
While you can’t control the physical things that happen to you, you can control (Girl Power!) how you react to them. Once again, we get to balance the things we can’t control (brain and hormone changes) with things we can control (actions). We can choose to put down that sword, retract those claws and be a good friend to those around us. The Golden Rule is the perfect guide for friendship: Treat others the way you want them to treat you.
Remember that all middle and high school girls’ brains are giving them signals to be more independent and try on new ideas, actions and attitudes. You don’t need to totally drop a friend the first time she is mean to you. People change! Maybe that same girl just tried on a “snobby” personality for a couple days and found it didn’t fit. Remember, you’re all working through this together.
A great way to have true friends is to be a true friend. Remember that you will be insulting and you will gossip about other people. Some girls will do it more than others, but a good friend will apologize (and mean it) when she messes up. And good friends accept apologies graciously.
Now we get to the meat of friendship . . . what kind of friend are you? Do your actions match up to your words? Do you treat other people the way you want to be treated? When you choose friends by asking yourself, “Are they walkin’ or just talkin’?” ask the same about yourself. Remember that list of words you want other people to use to describe you? Do your actions make those things true about you, or is it just talk?What have you done lately that was “just talkin’”?1.2.3.What have you done lately that was really “walkin’”?1.2.3.
Cliques
What do you look for in a friend? Does a girl have to wear the trendiest clothes? Be athletic? Read two novels a week? Wear black all the time? Play in the band? Be a drama queen, a cheerleader or a yearbook staffer?
You’ve seen the groups. They hang out together, eat lunch together, and sometimes even dress and act alike. Lots of groups have names. In most schools there are jocks, cheerleaders, preppies, goths, brainiacs, druggies, gearheads and artsy-fartsies. Your school probably has other groups that don’t have such stereotypical names but are just as well-known. Can you name them?
Preteen and teen girls have a funny way of defining their groups. Clique is one way to describe a group of people who hang together. The word clique is usually used in a sort of negative way. Cliques can give “outsiders” a negative feeling because a lot of cliques don’t let anyone else in, and they can be snobby and mean about it.
Have you ever seen a group make fun of other people who aren’t like them? When groups of people get together, they feel a lot more powerful than any one person would ever feel alone. In a group, people will do things they would never do on their own—sometimes mean things or risky things. At the head of many cliques is a leader who likes control. Some of these leaders win friends by insisting on loyalty and making people scared they will be excluded if they don’t go along with everything the leader says.
But there are also good leaders. They are the girls who gather people together based on shared interests. They welcome new friends into the group. And they allow you to have other friends outside of the group. They don’t boss their friends. These types of groups also have more power than any one individual would have, and they can accomplish powerful and amazing things—good things.
You may even belong to several different groups. You can be a soccer player and a brainiac at the same time. You can share common interests with your neighborhood friends and your friends from your religion’s youth group. The girls you meet at a Red Cross babysitting class can even become a clique because you all share the same job.You may be in a group or clique yourself. Do other people have a special name for your group?
Who is in your group?
What do all the girls in your group have in common?
Do you welcome other girls or exclude them?
Outsiders and Feelings of Isolation
We hate to keep bringing up the yuck side of cliques, girl relationships and brain changes, but these things are important. Feelings of isolation and being on the outside are normal and real.Really real. At some point, almost everyone experiences these feelings a little or a lot. They happen to you and every one of your classmates.
For starters, kids who make other people feel isolated and on the outside on purpose are not worth a minute of your time. That just had to be said. We know that’s an easy statement to make and a tough statement to live by. But we also know that it is true!
Girls who want to make other girls feel left out use some pretty sneaky tactics. They’ll tell secrets, start rumors, exclude you, give you the silent treatment or manipulate you with confusing talk and demands. They may try to “steal” your other friends by monopolizing their time or telling them bad things about you.
They may also use more obvious tactics like putting you down and making snide remarks in front of other people. They may tease you, harass you and reveal secrets you told them. They may even attack you physically. And sometimes they can totally ignore you and exclude you, like you are invisible or a puff of smoke they brush aside with a wave of the hand.
Feeling ignored, unknown and invisible can be the worst feeling of all. If it happens to you, you can believe it has happened to a lot of other girls, too. When you find someone who has had the same feeling, it’s almost a relief to know you are not alone, and better yet, you are not invisible! Nobody is. Sometimes it just takes finding the friend who sees you well. People who ignore you are just looking at superficial stuff. They obviously don’t know who you are on the inside—the real you.
We’ll let you in on a big secret. People put other people down to make themselves feel better . . . that means the popular girl who makes a snide comment about a classmate may be a little jealous. She probably sees something in another girl that she doesn’t have. That kind of bully wants to make her “prey” feel bad about themselves, so the bully can feel like she has power over them.