I think many people have struggled with the so-called “mean girls” (or boys) throughout their lives. I recently had an aha moment about some people I have been struggling with in my life, people that I want to treat with kindness but have to keep at a distance to protect my own energy, health, and well-being.  They really challenge my view on what is appropriate in how we treat others, and I find myself struggling to balance kindness with boundaries without being fake.  Fake is one of my least favorites!  I remember people like this from high school.  College.  And then I guess something in my mind decided that people grow out of that, or heal out of that, or that they should, and so those “mean girls” don’t exist anymore.  Here is my aha: those “mean girls” totally still exist.  Well into adulthood.  Long past when I guess I feel like it should.  And because my college years were around the time of the release of the movie, I feel like getting nostalgic (and psychological). 

Twenty-two years ago, this movie came out that made us laugh.  And also gave us something to learn.  We still quote it. Still know the rules of the burn book, the Wednesday pink, the plastic smiles that weren’t really smiles. Memes pop up all the time.  This was never just a fun teen comedy.  Critics said as much back in 2004, calling it smart and pointing to the wisdom buried underneath the jokes about conformity and cruelty. And the reevaluations haven’t stopped since. Writers and psychologists keep coming back to it decades later, still unpacking what it captured about how teenage girls survive each other. But maybe it is about more than surviving each other as teenagers…these behaviors, the “mean girl” stuff, follow us into our twenties and thirties and forties.  And while I’ve only just hit the forties, I suspect long into our fifties and sixties and so on.  Ugh! 

Regina George didn’t wake up one morning and decide to destroy people for fun. I imagine she woke up terrified that if she stopped controlling everyone around her, she’d lose the only thing she thought made her matter.

Mean girl behavior isn’t a personality. It’s a symptom. And once you see it as a symptom, you stop being confused by it and start being able to do something about it, whether you’re the one wearing the crown or the one standing in front of her, shaking.

Let’s get into it.

Many evaluations and articles tell you mean girls are secretly sad, lonely outcasts overcompensating for low self-worth. Sometimes that’s true. But the research is more interesting, and more useful, than that.

Relational aggression (the technical term for what we call “mean girl” behavior) was named by researchers Nicki Crick and Jennifer Grotpeter in the 1990s. It’s aggression that doesn’t use fists. It uses relationships as a weapon: exclusion, rumor, silent treatment, triangulation, the strategic withdrawal of approval. And the research since then has found something that should reframe how you think about this entirely: the girls who use relational aggression most effectively are often not the friendless, insecure outsiders of movie stereotypes. They’re frequently the popular, socially skilled ones. The ones who know exactly how a room works and exactly which lever to pull.

So, if it’s not simple insecurity, what is it?

Two things, usually, and they can coexist:

Narcissistic injury and ego threat. I do not believe that mean girls are narcissists.  Some maybe.  Well, some absolutely yes. But generally, no.  But the behaviors relate here.  Research on narcissism shows a pattern: narcissists tend to report high self-esteem when you ask them directly, but show low self-esteem on implicit, indirect measures. Translation: confidence is real on the surface and hollow underneath. When that gap gets threatened (when someone else’s presence exposes it), aggression is the nervous system’s way of slamming the door before anyone looks inside. That’s not insecurity in the “I feel bad about myself” sense. It’s insecurity in the “my sense of self cannot survive being seen clearly” sense. Same root, different bloom.

Status protection as a learned survival strategy. Girls are socialized early to suppress direct anger (“be nice,” “don’t make a scene”) while boys are given more permission for it. So, the aggression doesn’t disappear. It goes underground. It becomes exclusion instead of a punch, a look instead of a push, a group chat instead of a shove in the hallway. Frankly, this is much more societal than it is personal, if it’s what we are taught.  It’s a strategy that worked, got reinforced, and became identity. And it peaks exactly when identity is most unstable (early adolescence), which is not a coincidence.

Put those together, and you get the real definition: mean girl behavior is what happens when an unstable sense of self meets a social environment where status equals survival, and direct aggression is off the table. The meanness is the coping mechanism. The self isn’t there yet to cope any other way.  And sometimes that self lags behind or never shows up.

Here’s the part nobody tells you at graduation: aging out of high school does not mean aging out of knowing mean girls (or being a mean girl). The research backs this up more clearly than I expected when I went looking for it. Studies tracking relational aggression across adulthood have found women between 45 and 65 still commonly rate relationally aggressive behaviors as “sometimes true” of themselves, meaning this isn’t a phase that quietly resolves by your twenties or thirties. It just moves out of its parents’ house. It moves into office politics, into friend groups, into moms’ groups and church committees and neighborhood associations, into kids’ sports, into extended family. Workplace bullying research specifically identifies relational aggression as a documented pattern among adult women in professional settings (the exclusion, the gossip, the strategic freeze-out, now dressed up in blazers instead of backpacks).

So, if you’ve caught yourself thinking, the way I did, that people mostly grow out of this, here I am, turning the light bulb on for both of us. Some people heal out of it. Plenty don’t. The nervous system pattern that got rewarded at fifteen doesn’t come with an expiration date. It comes with a new office, a new group chat, a new PTA meeting.  Then, even more confusing, some people weren’t a “mean girl” in high school and became one later. That’s a tough one. But it actually fits the psychology better than the stereotype does.  Remember, this was never really about a fixed personality. It’s about what happens when an unstable sense of self meets an environment where status feels like survival. Divorce, a new social circle, motherhood, a promotion, a move —any of it can reopen that vulnerability at forty that never got triggered at fifteen. The behavior was always available. It just needed the right threat to call it out. 

Let’s dive in:

Worth knowing before we get to the movie: Mean Girls isn’t just a comedy that happened to nail clique dynamics. It’s loosely based on a real nonfiction book, Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes (2002), written from over a decade of listening to actual teenage girls talk about how cliques work. Tina Fey adapted Wiseman’s framework into the fictional world of North Shore High.

Wiseman’s book maps out named roles inside a clique, and two of them line up cleanly with what’s on screen. The Queen Bee, the one who holds the group through “charm, confidence, and social manipulation,” admired, feared, and imitated, is Regina. The Wannabe/enforcer role, girls who orbit the Queen Bee, imitate her, and act as enforcers of her social rules in exchange for staying inside the circle, is Gretchen’s function in the group.

Karen doesn’t map cleanly onto one of Wiseman’s named roles. She’s not a strategist, and she’s not enforcing anything; she’s just present.  It’s worth noting that not every character in a clique or with “mean girl energy” is playing a calculated role, and pretending they are would be reaching past what the book or the movie actually supports.

“Mean Girls” as a Case Study — and Who They Grow Up to Be

You don’t need a psych degree to watch this play out on screen. You just need to know what you’re looking at. And once you know, you’ll start recognizing the same energy at thirty-five in places that don’t have hallway lockers.  You can feel that discomfort, the arousal of your nervous system, even if you don’t know that is what it is, the pit in your stomach, the, well, ugh!

Regina George is the textbook ego-threat responder. Her power is entirely external (looks, money, control of the narrative), which means it has to be defended constantly, because nothing external is ever secure. The moment a threat appears (a new girl, a rumor, a crush), the response isn’t curiosity or connection. It’s elimination. That’s not confidence but does appear to be a nervous system in a permanent, low-grade fight state. Grown up, she might be the one running the room by making sure everyone stays a little afraid of losing her approval (the friend group’s or work group’s unofficial gatekeeper, the coworker whose mood decides the whole team’s day).  You had someone pop into your mind, didn’t you?  I sure did!

Gretchen Wieners is what happens when relational aggression meets an anxious attachment style. She’s not the aggressor by nature.  She’s the enforcer, because enforcing Regina’s rules is the price of staying inside the circle. Her fear isn’t “I’m not good enough.” It’s “I will be discarded if I stop being useful.” Watch how much of her energy goes into managing Regina’s moods. That’s not friendship. That’s threat monitoring. Grown up, she might be the one relaying information between people who aren’t speaking, smoothing things over, still auditioning for a spot she was never actually at risk of losing, staying in relationships much longer than she should.

Karen Smith gets written off as the dumb one, but she’s actually the least psychologically dangerous of the three.  No strategy, no manipulation, just along for the social protection of the group. Which tells you something important: not everyone in a mean-girl dynamic is mean. Some people are just afraid of what happens if they leave.  Grown up, she could have gone in so many directions.

Cady Herron is the whole thesis in one arc. She starts as an outsider, gets absorbed into the hierarchy, and becomes exactly as ruthless as the system rewards her for being.  Not because she was secretly a mean girl all along, but because the environment shaped the behavior. That’s the most uncomfortable truth in the movie, and honestly, of adulthood too: meanness isn’t usually a fixed trait. It can be a response to incentive, positive or negative. Put the wrong person in the right (wrong) environment at any age, and you’ll get a Cady.

The burn book deserves a mention. Here’s my read on it: it functions like externalized shame. It’s not just cruelty for its own sake.  It’s a place to put whatever these girls can’t stand looking at in themselves, written onto someone else’s face instead. That’s what relational aggression almost always is underneath, at fifteen or forty-five. Not “I see something wrong with you.” It’s “I cannot look at what’s wrong in me, so I’m going to make sure you carry it instead.”  How useful shadow work would be at this point…

If You’re the Mean Girl (or Grown Woman): How to Actually Heal

Not performative accountability. Actual repair. Here’s where to start:

  • Name the nervous system state, not just the behavior. “I was mean” is a moral judgment that keeps you stuck in shame. “I went into a threat response and controlled the room to feel safe” is accurate, and accuracy is what lets you change something. Shame keeps the pattern alive. Clarity interrupts it.
  • Find out what you’re actually defending. Every act of exclusion or cruelty is protecting something (an image, a relationship, a fear of irrelevance). Get specific. “I froze her out because I was scared she’d take my spot” is more useful than “I don’t know why I did that.”
  • Do the somatic work, not just the cognitive work. Insight alone won’t change a threat-response pattern that lives in your body, especially one that’s had twenty or thirty extra years to get real good and comfy. Nervous system regulation like breathwork or grounding, co-regulation with a safe person, and body-based therapies or coaching that work to connect the body to the mind are what actually rewire the reflex.
  • Practice being seen without controlling the outcome. The core fear under most mean-girl behavior is exposure. The antidote is small, repeated experiences of being known and not abandoned for it. Start low-stakes. Build the evidence.
  • Repair without a performance. A real apology names the specific harm, doesn’t ask for reassurance, and doesn’t happen because you got caught. If it centers your discomfort, it’s not repair yet.

If You’re Dealing with a Mean Girl — At Any Age — How to Not Lose Yourself

This part is mostly for me.  But I really hope it helps someone else too. The hardest version of this isn’t a stranger being cruel to you once. It’s someone you have to see regularly, someone you still care about, someone that knocks the wind right out of you with THAT energy.  The ones you can’t escape.

  • Stop taking it as information about you. It isn’t. It’s a data point about her nervous system’s threat response. That reframe alone will save you years of self-doubt (and in my case, hours and hours of ruminating as to what I did to deserve this and how I can fix it).
  • Regulate before you respond. Relational aggression is designed to provoke a reaction it can then use against you. The steadier you are, the less material you give it.
  • Set the boundary without the audience. Mean-girl dynamics thrive on witnesses. Address it privately and directly where possible. It removes the performance incentive.
  • Don’t try to out-nice your way to safety. Appeasement doesn’t satisfy the dynamic; it feeds it. As sad as it may sound and be, “mean girls” feed on your insecurities (your need to belong or be seen/heard or accommodate).  You cannot earn your way out of someone else’s insecurity.
  • Kind and close are not the same thing. You can hold real kindness toward someone and still keep meaningful distance between you and them. That’s not fake.  Fake is pretending the distance isn’t there. Boundaries with warmth are honest. Fake closeness is not.
  • Build your own base, deliberately. Isolation is the mechanism relational aggression relies on. The strongest counter isn’t confrontation, but rather a support system that doesn’t depend on the approval of the person targeting you.
  • Know when to exit or just keep the distance permanent. Some dynamics aren’t solvable by better communication.  Some people you don’t get to fully exit (family, extended community, small towns). If someone consistently needs your diminishment to feel secure, that’s not a misunderstanding. That’s the system working as designed. You’re allowed to protect your energy from it indefinitely.  It is dang hard, but so is staying in that environment.

The Bottom Line

Meanness is never the root problem. It’s the visible symptom of something underneath that never got resolved, like an unstable sense of self, a nervous system stuck in threat, a shame that never found anywhere safer to go than someone else’s back. And apparently, none of that comes with an age limit.

That doesn’t make the behavior okay. It makes it explainable, and explainable things can change in the people doing it, if they’re willing, and in how we respond to it, whether or not they ever are. Whether you’re the one who needs to do the changing or the one standing next to it, still trying to figure out how to be kind without being fake, the same principle holds: you don’t fix a nervous system problem with a personality judgment. You fix it by understanding what it’s protecting, and then giving it, or yourself, somewhere safer to go.