CALL YOUR MOM #003: girl on girl violence

reputation destruction, isolation, and your early twenties

Welcome back to CALL YOUR MOM, an open conversation for anyone who needs help getting unstuck and finding what makes them feel alive. My messages are open; send me your questions!

Dear Helen,

I really enjoy your work on female relationships, but I want to ask you about their dark side. I’m having trouble with the fact that in just about every area of life, I have serious female “opps.” I graduated college about a year ago, am almost 23, just started a new job, and am becoming serious with my new boyfriend. At work, there are two older female coworkers I know who gossip about me and do that thing where I can tell they’re laughing about me in front of my face. I’m also struggling with my husband’s brother’s girlfriend. I try to be friends with her and then after we all hang out, I get blindsided by my boyfriend asking me about something she said I said, reframed to make me look as bad as possible. I hate misogyny, and I hate to admit this, but I’m genuinely struggling with disliking women, or at least not trusting them by default. To top it all off, all my college friends are spread in a million different directions. Those relationships seem like they may have been more shallow than I thought. How can I get past this?

Sincerely,

Miserable in Minneapolis

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Dear Miserable,

Before we talk about how other people behave badly (and they do), it’s best to be brutally honest with the mirror. Your early twenties can be a difficult transition in life for many reasons, one of which you mentioned: you’ve gone from college—which is often a tight-knit, walkable community of people with built-in shared experiences from age to circumstance—to the “real world”—where you’re surrounded by seemingly unrelatable strangers who have adult problems like taxes and health insurance and grown kids and alimony. While exciting, this can also be quite stressful in ways you may not even realize. Sometimes anxiety and alienation can stir up feelings of misanthropy as a protective mechanism, especially during big transitions. It does for me, anyway. I do find it useful to give myself a gut-check every time I go through a major transition or start to feel lonely or misanthropic or angry at the world, whether after moving to a new place, or having a baby, or even in grief. I’m the type of person who has to be really conscious about taking care of myself, or I simply won’t. None of that stuff comes naturally to me, and it’s usually the first to go during times of stress. If you’re anything like me, you may need to ask yourself:

1. Are you taking care of yourself physically? Exercise, sleep, clean environment, regular showers, nutrition, sunlight? If not, you need to develop a solid routine and start checking those boxes.

2. Are you trying to engage with other people, or are you expecting relationships without investment? When was the last time you initiated a connection with another person? When was the last time you made yourself of service to another person?

3. Are you engaging in substantive, objective work that keeps you busy and puts you in a flow state? Reading, art, community service? Are you at least trying to limit your screen time?

If you can honestly answer “yes” to all three of these questions and your problems persist, then let’s move on.

What you’ve described in both cases, professional and personal, is a well-documented social phenomenon known as relational aggression.

The Science of Social Disgrace

In 1995, Dr. Nicki Rae Crick, psychologist and professor of childhood development, coined the term “relational aggression” to describe the covert ways that children can express hostility as opposed to outright physical threats. These tactics include exclusion, withdrawing affection, and reputation destruction through whisper campaigns. Her research challenged the long-held assumption that boys are more aggressive than girls by introducing a new framework for aggression that encompassed that which was passive and social in nature.

While an important step in the field of psychology, one of the results of Crick’s work was that relational aggression was characterized in popular culture as a uniquely female phenomenon. But this is far from true. Crick studied very young children, finding that the rate variance between male and female relational aggression peaks in the early years, when executive function and social sophistication is lowest. The story changes as people get older.