Archive
Evidently I’m Human
Just a quick update so as not to leave anyone in suspense. I saw the Boundary Ninja yesterday and it helped immensely, although I am now aware that I am grieving. So much for numbness. I walked in and pretty much exploded all over his office and covered the emotional spectrum: love, hate, pity, grief, compassion, anger, sadness, hurt. You name it, I think I felt it. As it was with my father, losing male members of my family seems to be the perfect definition of ambivalence. From the way I exploded once I knew I was with BN (I started sobbing at the beginning and couldn’t manage to talk for at least several minutes) I think I needed to really feel safe, the kind of safe I really only feel in BN’s office in order to allow myself to feel. Continue Reading
A Blog I Think You’d Like
A dear friend of mine, who is also healing from childhood trauma, has recently opened her blog for public viewing. She works through her feelings and processes her healing by painting. She is an incredible artist and her paintings are both very beautiful and very powerful. They reach inside me to those places where words fail; where we must reach for art to express the inexpressible. I’m thrilled she’s sharing them. I also love that she shares brief thoughts on the meaning of the paintings, what inspired them or what she is struggling to learn. Go take a look, you’ll be inspired. (The blog is also in my blogroll.)
I could learn a lot about brevity from her. 🙂
Keeping Our Hearts Safe
This is a favorite quote of mine from CS Lewis, one of my favorite authors. Most people know him as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, but he was a leading Christian intellectual of the 20th century with a number of excellent books on and in defense of the Christian faith. I am a very big fan of The Four Loves and the Great Divorce, although anything he has written is worth your time. He also has a wonderful adult novel based on the myth of Psyche called ‘Til We Have Faces, that I return to again and again.
The reason I love this quote is that it is a reminder that life and living will sometimes involve pain, but the price of not experiencing that pain is too high to pay. Besides, I tried it for a number of years and it really didn’t work out. This quote provides me with the necessary courage to risk that hurt in order to live more fully. I hope it can help you as well.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to risk of tragedy, is damnation.
The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
Shackles
Greetings gentle readers. I have returned safely from a wonderful, refreshing vacation, but re-entry was a bit bumpy. 🙂 We brought back a stomach virus, to which I added some asthma and sinus problems, so I’m sloooooowwwwly getting back into a normal rhythm. It was really nice to be away, but it’s also really nice to be back. 🙂
I wanted to share with you an analogy about healing that I thought many people might find helpful (h/t to Blackbird as it was during a discussion with her on psychcafe that I first came up with this one :)). When I first started seeing BN, the prism through which I saw myself was one of pathology. That I had been injured and damaged by the abuse and I needed to be “fixed.” One of the greatest gifts that BN has given me (which is saying a lot as the list is quite long) was instead seeing my struggles as development gone awry. That there was nothing fundamentally “broken” or “wrong” about me. I just had not gotten what I needed or been taught what I needed to know. That anyone who had endured what I did would have similar struggles with similar issues; my reactions were reasonable, it was the circumstances that produced them that were unreasonable. Continue Reading
Diminished
Yesterday was a very sad day. My husband called me in the morning because he had heard from a mutual friend, that our handyman, whom I’ll call Dan (not his real name), had a heart attack while training this weekend for an upcoming bike race for charity and had died. He was a very fit guy, and only 44 years old, so it was a total unexpected shock. I just kept saying “no” to my husband through most of the phone call.
We’ve known Dan over fifteen years. The friend who called to tell us of his death had recommended him years ago, just after Dan had gone out and started his own Construction company. We hired him to do some minor repairs. Dan’s specialties were carpentry and masonry and the man did dry wall like nobody’s business. He did such a great job the first time that we have just continued to hire him through the years whenever we needed work done. We sold our first home around seven years ago, because we were building a new house with an in-law apartment for my mother-in-law, and he was the one who got it into shape to sell. And he’s still who we call, when we need anything done. Or at least he was. Continue Reading
Tales of a Boundary Ninja 
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