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Book Review: How We Heal and Grow
I have been following Dr. Jeffery Smith’s blog, Moments of Change for some time now and was very honored when he asked to send me a pre-publication copy of his new book, How We Heal and Grow: The Power of Facing Your Feelings for review. I have long been a fan of his lucid, clear writing and his gift for so clearly explaining the often mysterious and elusive interplay of therapy. This book has proved to be no exception to that rule.
If you read only one book about healing this year, or even this decade, let it be How We Heal and Grow. The book is well written and easy to read, with clear prose and carefully delineated arguments. Continue Reading
Where Oh Where Can AG Be?
Greetings Gentle Readers,
Sorry for the prolonged absence, but the release (which actually still hasn’t gone out yet!!! AUGH!!) went down to the wire. I did my final turnover at 5:00 on Wednesday the 15th and then my husband and I left for a cruise at 5 AM the next morning. So I had very limited internet access from the 16th to the 24th. We had a lovely, relaxing time, but it’s been difficult going since we got home. I have been doing some intensive work around being present in my body (which it turns out is NOT a favorite activity of mine) and there is a tremendous amount of shame coming up as well as some very young memories being triggered. I hope to do some writing about it soon. In the meantime, it feels like I kind of just put everything on hold while I was away, but now that I’ve returned home I am feeling quite flooded. There’s a lot of shame and anxiety floating around and I have been feeling incredibly weepy but it’s not really connected with anything. On top of that, things have very much improved and settled down with the crises we’ve been dealing with and it feels like I may be collapsing now that I know it’s over, and I can. Which is the long way of saying that I am struggling with feeling very fragile, overwhelmed and ashamed. Continue reading
Silence
I’m doing a shift on the crisis line tonight and someone put up a wonderful quote from Rachel Naomi Remen on the wall. It’s about the power of silence and it’s so good (and true) that I wanted to pass it on. If you have never read anything by Rachel Naomi Remen, may I recommend that you stop whatever you’re doing and buy one of her books? I read her book Kitchen Table Wisdom a few years back and it was incredibly powerful and moving and led to one major breakthrough (I was a business card that wanted to be a marshmallow. See, now you have to read the book to figure out what in the world I’m talking about. ;)). I read it on BN’s recommendation and then brought it to session with 15 different yellow stickies in it. She understands the power of human stories, but the even more powerful effect of having ours heard and understood. 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
Helpful Books
I am a compulsive reader, always have been. So if a problem rears it’s head, my first reaction is “is there a book about this?” Part of it, to be honest, was an attempt to stay in my left brain and intellectualize away from those messy, confusing feelings. I really struggled with the fact that I couldn’t get through the healing process just by understanding it. The Boundary Ninja often said that if it was just about knowing the facts, that when a client came through the door, he would be able to just hand them a book “How to Heal” and say, have a nice life. 🙂 I often found that to be incredibly frustrating. Later, as I came to understand that the real healing in therapy wasn’t about what you knew, but about what you experienced with your therapist, I kept reading to keep my left brain occupied and out of the way (not to mention the fact that I just became fascinated about the brain, human development and psychotherapy). But, as the Boundary Ninja and I once discussed, it wasn’t just about distraction. My ability to understand the process and the necessity of experiencing the feelings helped me to find the courage to actually feel.
Below is a short list of books I found especially helpful along the way, with a short description of why. As for General Theory of Love, I’ve pushed this book so hard I really should consider contacting the publisher and asking for a commission. 
Continue Reading
Tales of a Boundary Ninja 
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