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Archive for February, 2012

Nanny McPhee

February 26, 2012 8 comments

Who knew the Boundary Ninja is really Nanny McPhee? Like Nanny McPhee, the more time I spent with him and the more I learned, the better looking he got. 🙂 And her rules are strangely applicable to therapy.

There is something you should understand about the way I work. When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, then I have to go. It’s rather sad, really, but there it is.

In some ways, it’s such a concise description of therapy. When I needed him, I had to stay, but when it became that I only wanted him, then it was time to go. Insights come from the oddest places.

Categories: acceptance, movies

The “L” word Part II

February 16, 2012 10 comments

This is the second part of a two-part series, for part I see The “L” word Part I.

Before I tell you about what happened in the follow-up session (hey, no whining, I had to wait for two weeks! 🙂 ), I want to talk about what happened in between. Because therapy doesn’t just happen in your therapist’s office; your sessions are actually the tip of an iceberg. The part below the surface is all the processing and integration you do between sessions as you consider what was said and how it fits and consider what you want to talk about next time. For me, therapy can often feel like one long conversation, punctuated with long pauses, during which I’m doing a lot of thinking about what got said. Continue Reading

Categories: ambivalance, attachment styles, boundaries, commitment, disorganized attachment, feelings, healing, limbic resonance, love, safety

The “L” word Part I

February 14, 2012 15 comments

So far all of the writing I have been doing here  has concerned my healing history so to speak. Stories of work I have already done and lessons learned. I’m going to deviate from that and actually talk about what’s going on with me right now. Partially because I think it would be helpful for others to hear about it, but also because I am working through this and struggling to understand what it means and how it fits in my understanding of who I am. When I talk about the past, a past about which I have had a chance to reflect, the stories can come out in such an orderly fashion, like little perfectly wrapped packages with a gift bow when the reality was actually an experience of raw confusion. I thought it might be helpful to see the raw confusion as it was happening.

I’m going to talk about the “L” word. Yes, that four letter word we avoid like the black plague in therapy: Love. Have you ever noticed that the shorter the word in English, the more confusing talking about it’s meaning is? I mean the long words like antidisestablishmentarianism  have very specific meanings. But say “God” or “love” or “happy” and suddenly you have a very long, complex conversation on your hands.  So one thing I do want to note is that throughout this post when I discuss BN loving me, I very much mean it as a parental kind of love, a love which seeks my good, not in any romantic or erotic sense. I don’t believe that there is an erotic or romantic component to his love for me. But if there was, I’d be the last person on the planet to ever know about it anyway. But I’ve never picked up on anything along those lines. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, ambivalance, attachment theory, boundaries, dependence, feelings, love, psychotherapy blogs, safety, transference

Great article from a new blog I just discovered

February 3, 2012 6 comments

I found a new blog by a psychotherapist (h/t to WG of Therapy Tales fame) which I found to be really interesting. She had one post on the purpose of payment in the psychotherapuetic relationship that I found both illuminating and reassuring. (For the record, I have slipped into both the “how pathetic, I have to pay to have an intimate relationship” and “this isn’t real, it’s simulated because I pay you” interpretations.) I think a lot of people might find this helpful to read. If you like this one, you might want to check out the other posts also, there’s a lot of good stuff. I’ll be adding her to my blog roll. 🙂

what a shrink thinks: What You Pay For

Categories: money, needs, power, psychotherapy blogs, responsibility, transference

Therapy Lesson #6: Say how you feel anyway

February 2, 2012 9 comments

I had mentioned in the  What I Learned in Therapy, the complete list post, to leave a comment if there was any particular lesson anyone wanted to know more about. Normalwasnotmygoal (may I just say, awesome username!) left a comment asking about feelings being irrational, so I thought I would expand on that lesson in this post.

So therapy lesson #6: Feelings are more often than not, irrational. Just because they don’t make sense, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be expressed.

I had no idea how divorced from my feelings I was, when I started seeing the Boundary Ninja. Actually most people would have told you I was quite an emotional person (ignore my husband in the background, jumping up and down yelling “Hell yeah!”).  I was so scared to recognize or express my feelings that I would stuff them down and stuff them down and stuff them down, until the pressure built past the breaking point and then they would burst forth in all their ugly glory, taking everyone, including honestly, me, totally off guard because the intensity level would often seem way out of proportion to whatever was going on. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, boundaries, feelings, healing, hope, self-worth