Tales of a Boundary Ninja

I just saw the Boundary Ninja on Monday. I have been running into some significant transference and triggering in some relationships right now and wanted to sort through it. I am planning on writing about it at some point when it’s clearer than it is now. 🙂 I stopped going regularly to therapy in September of 2010, but have been back for single sessions every couple of months when I’ve needed to work through something that came up. This was the first time that I have seen him that I made another appointment before leaving. Usually I leave without an appointment and just email him to ask for one when I need it.

Part of my reaction was to walk out the door, clutching the appointment card in my grubby little hand, singing “I have a golden ticket” in my head. I’m seeing him in three weeks. But the rest of my reaction is a  tendency to see this as going backwards as in, yeah, right,  I left therapy, but here I am with an appointment again.

But in thinking through it, I realized that I am not going to see him about OUR relationship. I am going to talk about problems in other relationships. And those relationships are part of my stepping out into new challenges as I have stepped away from therapy. So my leaving really was the end of a chapter, a true leavetaking of my being dependent, but not the end of working with the Boundary Ninja. I deeply appreciate him still being there because he holds a deep  understanding of me and is incredible at using that knowledge to help me drill down to what is underneath my transference reactions. Once I understand them, it becomes much easier to move through them. OK, him telling me to breathe while I process the emotions that come up doesn’t hurt either. 🙂

Anyway, by now you’re wondering “hey,  didn’t she mention a poem in the title of this post? What was that about?” All of this thinking about leaving, made me remember the poem I wrote about the “end” of therapy. I actually read this to BN at our “last” appointment and gave him a copy. I thought I would share it here. This was an attempt to express the bitter-sweetness and complexity of all that leaving him meant.

The Leavetaking