I was packing up my things after a teacher training in a K-8 school when a woman stopped me. Her pained expression was as familiar as what she confessed; “I’m a pushover. I hate conflict. I avoid other teachers and parents. It happens in my other relationships. I feel like we don’t grow past ‘Mean Girls.’ We just get older.”

Over the years, women have reached out to me bewildered, frustrated and paralyzed by their inability to get past mean-girl behavior, even as adults. As the author of the book that was the basis for the movie “Mean Girls,” I have worked with girls and young women to navigate the complexities of their social world for more than two decades.

We complain about women undermining each other at work. We find ourselves in friendships with adult women that feel just as judgmental as the ones many of us experienced in middle school. Recently, we read about one of those in Natalie Beach’s confessional about her dysfunctional friendship with Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway.

We see it, we experience it, and we are silenced by it.

Indirect Anger

While cliques and social isolation can cause significant health concerns, they are not entirely the problem. One of the big problems affecting women’s relationships with men as well as with one another is that women are raised to express their anger indirectly. We tend to run from hard conversations, choke on our words and let relationships dissolve.