I met Jennifer during a visit to Santa Barbara,
with Dr. Anne Davin. Davin and Jennifer started working together in
1988, when Davin served as Jennifer's counseling intern for an
innovative youth program that served teens in prison by putting their
stories to work with other teens on the edge of trouble.
When I met Jennifer, it was love at first sight and we immediately wanted to work together.
Jennifer is brilliant, funny, fun, and a passionate smart ass
who devotes her work to an under-serviced, under-loved portion of our
population--teenagers.
She is also a celebrated professor who has taught for nearly two
decades at Pacific Graduate Institute. Her clinical degrees focused on
mythology, the work of Carl Jung, and cultural contributions of Marija
Gimbutas and Joseph Campbell.
Her current youth program, The Academy of Healing Arts, serves three counties and hundreds of teens and their families.
She ignites their souls. She inspires them. She connects them to the deepest part of themselves.
Allow her to inspire you!
Mama Gena
School of Womanly Arts: Can you tell us about the work that you do with teenagers?
Jennifer Freed: I have been an educator and a psychotherapist working with teens all my life, since I was a teenager, and what I’ve found is that young people don’t want to go to therapy. They hate it. But they long for authentic community and a place to find out who they truly are instead of being defined by social norms in contemporary culture. They want a place to shine their souls.
My partner and I thought, let’s start a summer program and bring in all these amazing people that we know, faculty, who do this cutting edge, dynamic, alive work. The real emphasis is on bringing people into their aliveness. It was the best thing I’ve ever done in my entire life, and the young people were thrilled. This has become the Academy of Healing Arts which we’ve run now for 10 years. We use the creative arts as the medium for teens to get in touch with their full selves, so we use dance, singing, poetry, acting. We believe that the creative is in each person, whether they define themselves as creative or not, and when you realize your glory in your body through all these different channels, this is a way to open up confidence, purpose, and also community. I think everybody, especially young people in a very mechanical and dead culture in terms of their own bodies and liveliness, wants to be in a place where they can be really expressive and learn about their inner joy.
SWA: Aren’t most teenagers bratty, angry, and confrontational?
JF: For good reason: they are not initiated. You come into puberty and that is when you are supposed to wake up and begin really contributing to your society. You’re really full of this libidinal force to be in life, full of life, and with people, but nobody really is trained with what to do with that.
My work comes from my own wounds. As a teenager, I always felt something was deeply missing in my life. I was in a lot of pain because I sensed there was this other way to live and I didn’t know how to get there, and no adults were showing me. I was very lucky that through that pain at 18 years old I began my personal growth journey. Because I had some amazing adult mentors, I recognize how essential it is for young people to have those people. Parents are fantastic, and they have to be part of the equations, but I really believe that young people need more than parents. They need parents and other adults. At that age, we are looking for role models, and we need a variety so we aren’t pigeonholed into one expectation of what we are supposed to grow up to be.
SWA: What has surprised you about teenagers?
JF: As the tech age has advanced, the young people are both way more checked out, in terms of groups of kids, and way more vulnerable and longing to be connected. As they get more attached and addicted to machines, they are even hungrier to really connect because their lives have become so routinized and robotic in a way.
One of my specializations is helping girls with the topic of sexual wisdom. Girls are way more sexually active than they were years ago. One-third of girls have had sexual intercourse by the time they’re 14, but they know hardly anything about their sexuality. In the groups we run, over half the girls don’t know how to have an orgasm, and maybe don’t even touch themselves. There is so much outwardly-directed activity with so little personal awareness. Like how many blow jobs girls are giving and how few are getting any. It’s amazing; the sexism is way beyond flourishing.
Women continue to be highly objectified in media and retail, and are given a very strong message that your sexuality is for the other. Young girls think they are only as good as the guy that is interested in them or how thin they are. These are direct cultural messages. I think they have a huge barrier to overcome to reclaim an inwardly-directed sexuality that is pleasure based, related to everything that Mama Gena does for adult women. “Come on--get back in your own wisdom--you are the center of your sexuality. Your body is your temple.” Women are not really trained to express their divine power and gorgeous sexuality in an in-charge kind of way. So it is critical to start when girls start coming into their sexual power, which is 13 and 14.
SWA: What can parents of young girls do with this knowledge of what our culture gives our girls?
JF: I think you have to be absolutely determined to keep shedding those oppressive beliefs as a mother. It’s not what you say; it’s who you are. You want to surround yourself with women who are also working that. And you want to make sure that the men in your life think women are goddesses. What I’ve seen is that girls are going to go towards the best possible sensation. And if the best sensation is a quick blow job with a guy that doesn’t even know them, they’ll go there. But if they dance, write poetry, sing in a group, study biology, find an invention -- there is no blow job that will compete with that. If they are around women who live vibrant, exuberant lives (what we call charismatic adults), they are going to say, “I want that.”
SWA: Why is creativity so essential to women?
JF: Because we have vaginas and we procreate, so even though I haven’t had biological children, I am constantly birthing things. Whether it be this group, a book I’ve written, or a radio show, I’m constantly birthing. Women need to birth themselves over and over and over again. Creativity doesn’t have to mean literal artwork. It can also mean really going for it, birthing yourself anew every day, challenging yourself, and making yourself more of who you are by taking risks and creating, instead of being a passive object. That’s what we have to change. These girls walk into my group and they could be the living dead, waiting to see what people want of them.
I think that it’s easier for men to be the authority of their creation because they literally are built externally. I think that literally, from an anatomical place, they have no problem saying, “I did this.” 5,000 years of training have created and reinforced that men are the initiators, the penetrators of life, but it doesn’t mean that these teen boys aren’t totally shut down too. They feel disconnected, unloved, having all these random experiences and not feeling better about themselves.
SWA: Why are the boys so shut down?
JF: Boys are shut down because our educational system doesn’t really support their masculinity. I think boys need to be very active, they need the opportunity to be outside and enjoy nature. Girls need this too, but many guys that we work with --they’re called ADD or oppositional -- what they really is testosterone, aggressive, curious adventurous. They need more than just sitting and doing academic drills. They need to build, be part of community, feel useful and productive, and know that their hands, their hearts, and their spirits have something to offer.
SWA: Are there schools of educational philosophies that you would suggest parents look at?
JF: Unfortunately, private schools are more likely to offer these opportunities, and it is ridiculous that that’s where it has to be. The only educational philosophy that makes sense is the one that educates -- and the Latin root of that word is “to lead out,” to help people come out and become all that they can be. Only one part of that personhood is academic learning. We are fully dimensional people and need to know how to use our bodies and creative selves. More than anything, what is missing in most schools is what I call the communitarian self, the parts of us that need to feel like a useful and active member of community. This is why Mama Gena’s work is so powerful: she is a genius at creating community. People need to be affiliated and aligned with something bigger than their own ego. Kids need that desperately. That is why our program does so well and why we are looking to transport it elsewhere.
SWA: Could you talk about the program that you will be doing with Regena in the fall?
JF:We will be presenting a workshop on teen girl sexual wisdom. It starts with a full day in November, ends with one in February, and features teleclasses in between to keep them going. Through this creative and dynamic format, we will help young women form a community of peers who are about being alive, dynamic, and in charge of their sexuality. We are going to help them realize what amazing goddesses they are, and what they can be if they are centered on their own power, desire, and choice through really fun exercises. It will be open to mature 13 to 18 or 19 year olds. (For more information, please contact Rendy Freedman at 805-565-0845.)
SWA: We hear that you are in a very interesting relationship.
JF: I am with a woman named Rendy, and we have been together almost 14 years. She was married before me to a man, so she brought into our relationship three children, who are now adults. We are two joyful women who are definitely in love, and we have fun and run this program together. The interesting part is that neither of us define ourselves as lesbian, because we love men and we love women, but we are each other’s mate and we are thrilled to be with each other.
What we focus on and what our relationship is about is the quality of love, sharing, and happiness that you can have with another human being. That is a long lasting remedy for what people long for. Our children think so: every one of them used our relationship for their college essay. They each told us later that they truly learned what love was and that they want a relationship like ours, and they are all straight. It’s a very big compliment and sometimes very hard to live up to, because we are just fools like everyone else.
We are not into labels, although if people want them they can have them. That’s one of the things that we work with the girls too: to let them be anything they want without having to decide it from anyone else’s point of view. What we found in working with these teenagers is that everybody is bi. You can’t even believe how little they care about labels. I think women’s sexuality has always been fluid. If a man is with a man, he is much more likely to define himself as gay. But we have tons of women friends and all these girls that are bi bi bi bi… There are some boys who are now saying that they are bi, but it is still much less socially acceptable.
SWA: What are the top three things that parents can do to support a teenage girl coming into her womanhood?
JF: 1. Be passionate about your life 2. Be thrilled to be in the body and age that you are 3. Be involved in a passionate community of vital adults so that they have a lot of choices about who they are going to learn from.
It’s not anything you can lecture. It’s what you demonstrate: how you move in your body, who you spend time with, who you are. All it takes is a group of four women to start sitting and having dinners once a week with their girls, even at a really young age, and just be themselves. It takes very few people to make a huge impact on a teenage girl’s life.
Mama Gena's Course for Teens, Sexual Wisdom: Living a Luscious Life of
Choice, features Jennifer Freed. It begins this fall on November 22,
2009. To nab one of the thirty available spots or for more
information, please contact Rendy Freedman at 805-565-0845.
Jennifer Freed Ph.D. is a psychotherapist, professor, and author of 7 books. She teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute and she is the co-director of the Academy of Healing Arts for teens. Her passions include depth astrology, poetry, and swimming with dolphins. Please learn more about Jennifer at www.jenniferfreed.com.
