Dr. Barbara Becker Holstein and Martha Trowbridge discuss young women’s development on archived radio show Happiness for Women Only.

Posted on November 10, 2009
Filed Under Happiness | 2 Comments

Here is an excerpt about young women from the June 15th, 2007 broadcast:

Barbara: I find that women between 20 and 35 do have a kind of wonderment that they finally made it to be a grown up. And yet, at the same time, they’re often struggling with left over self-esteem wounds, sometimes from boyfriends that went wrong, sometimes from overly harsh or critical parents, sometimes from not doing well in their education process. So, oftentimes, young women come to me with a great deal of injury around feeling good about themselves.

Another thing that women between 20 and 35 struggle with is how to be successful, both emotionally and financially. Emotionally, there’s that constant tug between the young woman’s needs for her own identity, her own sense of pleasure, her own interests, and yet she’s still, at the same time, being pulled toward other people’s needs, often because she wants to be. She wants a boyfriend and/or a husband or a partner, she wants babies, she wants pets, she wants to live on her own rather than at home. So there’s so many struggles going on.

And yet, at the same time, often, where is the real young woman? Where is she in all of this? If one marries, there is suddenly the pull between her husband’s needs and her own. And sometimes there isn’t enough wisdom and maturity to buffer his needs and her.

I do find, particularly, and I don’t know if you’ve seen this at all, Martha, in the literature or dealing with more abused women, that the first year of marriage can be very disorienting to a woman’s psyche. And she can particularly sort of lose her sense of being grounded as to who she is. And then it usually just starts to come back, and that passes.

Martha: Well, Barbara, actually, the first year can be a honeymoon. It can be, in some ways, blinding to the reality of the situation you find yourself in. And perhaps in later years, the issues, the faults, the deficits and so on become more obvious. So I think it depends on the relationship.

I agree with you, though, wholeheartedly, it’s so different to be a married woman versus a woman who has never been married. Your whole identity really does get called into question. It gets put under a lamp in the sense of there is a person with whom you’re sharing time and space in a very intimate way. So it can be threatening. It can be a very threatening time for a woman who does not have a secure sense of self.

Barbara: ….Let me just remind you, even though we are emphasizing some of the issues that real women face between 20 and 35, we are not trying to skew the picture that there are millions and millions of women around the world just feeling miserable between 20 and 35.

It also can be a very glorious time, with built in happiness. For example, for many, many women, having a child, or even more than one, is close to bliss. Not only what certain women get from the pregnancy and the childbirth, or even the exciting process of adoption, but the actual development, raising of a child can be extremely connective and uplifting for many, many women.

Martha: And the excitement of those years, once you’re 20, 22. You often have opportunities to travel, to travel on your own versus going as somebody’s daughter. You have opportunities to do things you hadn’t done in the past, to perhaps get your own apartment or house. And it’s a very exciting time as well. There’s lots of hope, generally, and anticipation and you just find yourself doing so many things, as you were saying earlier, as a real woman, as an adult woman, that it can be a really fantastically splendid time of life.

Barbara: Yes. And another thing is that for many, many women, probably most women that are in good health, between 20 and 35, there’s a sense of personal wonderment about your body and your ease of movement and just even your own sexual feelings that maybe secretly as a teenager you were uncomfortable with, now you are much more comfortable with everything about your body.

And there is that energy for going and doing and even, I remember myself, when I was about 24, I remember walking down the street and just feeling so light and airy and, you know, it was so easy to walk and there were some men, and they whistled….

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2 Comments so far
  1. Jennabel July 2, 2011 6:00 am

    It was dark when I woke. This is a ray of sunsnhie.

  2. Emery December 18, 2011 10:59 am

    Why do women spend so much time trying to feel better about themselves? What is at the root of their feelings of inadequacy or low self esteem? Is it another form of self absorption? Looking in the mirror too long? “God gave you one face and make another?” If God created you – then what did he create you for? Women have a remarkable gift for making men feel better about themselves. Perhaps therein lies the key. Perhaps you were created to make men feel better about themselves and in so doing you feel better about yourself. Your the gift that keeps on giving.

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