Archive
Bass Ackwards
I was talking to a friend about therapy today and connected to a very important principle about healing that I wanted to share. We often approach healing from the standpoint of “once I heal enough to not be <insert emotion here> than I’ll <insert new behavior here>.” We want to get our feelings to the right place, then act. But it doesn’t really work that way; we need to act in a new way so that our feelings follow. Continue Reading
Lake Loop Trail
Hi all, sorry for the gap in posting but you’ll be happy to know I have a number of excuses reasons for why this has occurred. 🙂 Thanksgiving was a very busy weekend with lots of plans (not to mention the unseasonably high temperatures. Do you have any idea how rare it is to put up your outdoor Christmas decorations in shirtsleeves in Syracuse NY?!? We just had to take advantage of the opportunity.) Then, since it is November, I came down with a sinus infection. Actually I was two days away from making it through the month without one, which hasn’t happened in years, but didn’t quite make it. The good news was, I already had a doctor’s appointment for a routine visit set up, so I was able to get antibiotics and may have actually caught this before I go into my usual follow-up of bronchitis and kicking off my asthma. Light years to go, but my self-care is getting better! 🙂 Not to mention, one of my rare visits with the Boundary Ninja. (Ok, rare might not be EXACTLY accurate, but humor me, I’m trying to hang on to a sense of progress!) And to be perfectly honest, I am having a much more difficult time writing the next entry in my Developmental Skills series (Series? What series?! How do you call one post a series? ) then I expected. So I thought that if I wander off in another direction for a bit and write about something else, I could distract myself, so that whatever subterranean level of my brain which actually produces this stuff can proceed unhampered by my conscious mind.
I was talking about therapy with a friend the other day and how endless it can feel, when I was reminded of a story which is the perfect analogy for therapy. And that is the story of the Lake Loop Trail. Continue Reading
Why won’t my therapist just tell me how this works?!?
I don’t know about anyone else, but one of the most frustrating things about therapy for me was the fact that I was working so hard to get it “right” but the Boundary Ninja refused to cooperate. In any way. He’s a very stubborn man. Or perhaps determined might be a better word.
When I started really working with the Boundary Ninja on an individual basis, I was consumed with the worry that I was being a nightmare of a patient, way too needy and that he was just sitting across from me keenly anticipating the day that I would finally leave. I was consumed with worry about how I was doing in therapy. Was I getting it right? Was I being a good patient? Was I working hard enough? Did he actually like me or was he just tolerating me for pay? I’m sure most of you could come up with a long list of your own. Continue Reading
Forgiveness
This is based on a (very long) post I wrote on the psychcafe in response to another member asking about forgiveness. Forgiveness was something I struggled with for a very long time (I still can!) and I thought some people might find it helpful to read.
Disclaimer/Trigger warning for religious material: This is very much written from the perspective of my world view as a Christian and I understand that not everyone reading will agree with all the values that I discuss. I am also painfully aware that some people have undergone childhood abuse presented in religious terms and therefore might find this very triggering. But in order to explain what happened I have to refer to those beliefs and how they affected me. All I ask is that you accept that they were my values so this was how I saw it. I think the larger principles about forgiveness translate pretty well across other world views.
Back in 2000, I was still struggling with forgiveness. I had done a lot of trauma work which had finally allowed me to recognize my anger (ok, rage). But as hard as I was working, I couldn’t let go and forgive (I have a strong belief that forgiveness is a necessary thing, although now I believe that it can take a lot of time depending on the severity of wrongdoing, and in some ways is an on going process for the rest of your life.) My husband and I had just taken a really great Sunday school class at our church (best we ever took actually) on parenting. There was one section that addressed the commandment “Honor thy father and mother.” The couple teaching the course (it was a video tape series) talked about everyone being called to obey this commandment. But depending on how we raised our children, we could rob them of the joy of obeying that command. That honoring your mother or father can be a joyful, easy thing to do or it can become an onerous duty. When I heard that, something in me was struck like a bell: “that’s it!! I’ve been robbed of the joy of honoring my parents.” But along with it came the deep sense that in order to be faithful to the call of God on my life, I needed to do just that, honor my mother and father, no matter how impossible it looked from where I was sitting (and it looked utterly impossible from where I was sitting). I didn’t believe that God would give me a commandment and not the resources to obey it (ok, I did struggle with the feeling He was trusting me too much. 🙂 Continue Reading
Why your therapist SEEMS cruel, but really isn’t
We all know that therapy is a unique relationship, unlike any other relationship that we experience. It defies classification in that while it shares aspects of other relationships -friend, lover, parent, colleague – it is not quite any of these things. One of its unique characteristics is a therapist’s reaction to your pain.
In most relationships, when you express pain, the other person’s natural reaction is sympathy; they feel bad for you. This sympathy is often followed by some action whose clear intent is to make you feel better or help relieve your pain. Human beings (at least sane ones) do not like being in pain. So much so that we find it painful to see people we care about, and even people we don’t particularly like, in pain. So there is an almost automatic human response of answering someone’s pain with comfort. If someone is crying, we offer a tissue or a hug, if someone is scared, we offer comfort or reassurance, if someone is angry, we try to help correct whatever is making them angry. Continue Reading
Self Esteem
Just had to share this. It’s from a blog called Monkeytraps (it’s in my blog roll). I would have written a 1,000 word post to explain what Fritzfreud did in a short series of dialogue. This is so straight forward, yet incredibly powerful. The truth he portrays here is one I had to work long and hard (and have BN explain to me 534,123 times) before it penetrated. Wish I had seen this years ago.
Tales of a Boundary Ninja 
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