Selena Gomez is on the cover of April’s Vogue, a huge moment for her because this is her first official American Vogue cover, and that’s every famous girl’s dream, right? Of course, the profile is cloyingly done by a male writer who must babble on about her “mane of chocolate brown hair,” feeling protective of her, and note her “tiny waist” while he puts an apron on her. Yuck. If only Vogue‘s writing could match their photography!
But I digress, because what Selena says in the story more than makes up for the gross male gaze that’s needlessly applied. She used the biggest moment of her career to talk about her mental health struggles, helping barrel down that door and let teen girls everywhere — and everyone else — feel like it’s okay to be struggling. You guys — it’s absolutely, 100% okay to be struggling.
Specifically, Gomez discussed the 90 day stint in recovery/rehab program that she entered last summer, and one of the therapy techniques there that helped her the most: Dialectical Behavior Therapy. This caught my eye, because DBT practices were actually part of my own therapy program. DBT was originally conceived to help manage Borderline Personality Disorder, but is applied much more broadly now because of its effectiveness. It is often used in conjunction with PTSD — something many women in the spotlight suffer from — and it focuses on four main areas: mindfulness, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and emotion regulation.
It changed my life, and Gomez echoes that sentiment here:
“DBT has completely changed my life,” she told Vogue. “I wish more people would talk about therapy. We girls, we’re taught to be almost too resilient, to be strong and sexy and cool and laid-back, the girl who’s down. We also need to feel allowed to fall apart.”
As far as what spurred her to go develop some therapeutic techniques in the first place, growing out of her childhood star mode into an adult pop star became a source of anxiety for Selena. As she explained it to Vogue:
“Tours are a really lonely place for me. My self-esteem was shot. I was depressed, anxious. I started to have panic attacks right before getting onstage, or right after leaving the stage. Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable. I felt I wasn’t giving my fans anything, and they could see it — which, I think, was a complete distortion. I was so used to performing for kids. At concerts I used to make the entire crowd raise up their pinkies and make a pinky promise never to allow anybody to make them feel that they weren’t good enough. Suddenly I have kids smoking and drinking at my shows, people in their 20s, 30s, and I’m looking into their eyes, and I don’t know what to say. I couldn’t say, ‘Everybody, let’s pinky-promise that you’re beautiful!’ It doesn’t work that way, and I know it because I’m dealing with the same sh*t they’re dealing with. What I wanted to say is that life is so stressful, and I get the desire to just escape it. But I wasn’t figuring my own stuff out, so I felt I had no wisdom to share. And so maybe I thought everybody out there was thinking, ‘This is a waste of time.'”
Fortunately for Selena, she seems to have beaten back that self-loathing and replaced it with a new quiet confidence. She all but quit Instagram, and didn’t say a word about her tumultuous romance with The Weeknd to the prodding interviewer. In the photos from the shoot, she looks confident and beautiful, but she still looks like Selena Gomez — they’re desert-infused and a little windblown, but nothing risque or hyper-sexualized.
Kudos to Selena for coming back so strong, and shouting out the therapy that helped her along the way.
