boundaries | Tales of a Boundary Ninja

The “L” word Part II

February 16, 2012 Attachment Girl 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 Attachment Girl 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

Therapy Lesson #6: Say how you feel anyway

February 2, 2012 Attachment Girl 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

What I’ve Learned in Therapy: The Complete List

January 11, 2012 Attachment Girl 22 comments

Someone once posed the question on the forum, what are the most important things you’ve learned in therapy? I’ve actually written expanded posts on some of my answers, but thought it might be useful to post my whole list here. I’ve put links a the end for the previous expanded posts.

The most difficult thing to explain about healing in therapy is that it isn’t about “knowing” it’s about experiencing being with another person. So much of what I talk about below totally gonzo confused me when I first learned it. I used to tell BN that he was talking in Russian. But staying with my feelings and continuing to express them through the confusion is how I learned it. And I must give credit again to BN, who is really an incredibly gifted, compassionate man doing exactly what he should be. So much of my “wisdom” is actually my ability to accurately quote him. 🙂

So the full list is below. If there’s a particular item in the list you would want me to expand upon, please feel free to leave a note in the comments. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, ambivalance, boundaries, commitment, dependence, earned attachment, encouragement, feelings, healing, hope, love, needs, pain, perserverence, self-worth

What I learned in therapy Lesson 5 – The relationship of love and pain

December 8, 2011 Attachment Girl 22 comments

This is lesson five of what I learned in therapy: Pain is not a part of love, love is the answer to pain.

This lesson actually came later in my healing and my work with the Boundary Ninja. I’m writing about it now as it’s been a subject that has been both coming up in a lot of conversations I’ve had lately and because I am learning to experience it as a lived truth. If forced to choose, I think I would pick this understanding as the most powerful that I learned in therapy. It is also extremely difficult to explain because at its heart is a mystery that lives at the heart of our existence. It’s not so much a truth that you understand, as much as you learn to accept. Continue Reading

But therapy can take us a long way: Learning Developmental Skills Part 1

November 23, 2011 Attachment Girl 4 comments

This was going to be the second part of a discussion on how therapy is not enough. I talked about how therapy isn’t enough to make up for the loss of the unmet needs of childhood which are impossible to meet now because we are no longer children and unable to take in the kind of love and care on a deep enough level to completely wipe out the loss. Even if someone was willing to re-parent us, the behavior a parent exhibits towards their child is not appropriate for an adult. But the second half of the equation, that I wanted to address here is the developmental steps that were skipped or distorted by not having our needs met or being taught certain skills because our parents did not know them either. This is also a big part of why therapy can be so painful even though no one is doing anything wrong this time around. I had been planning on covering all of the developmental learning in the rest of this post but as I outlined what I wanted to say, it became evident that the post would become a twee long even for me. So instead, this is the beginning of a series. 🙂 Continue Reading

Categories: attachment theory, boundaries, dependence, earned attachment, encouragement, feelings, healing, insecure attachment, limbic resonance, needs, safety, self-worth

Therapy isn’t enough

November 21, 2011 Attachment Girl 27 comments

Therapy isn’t enough. Never has been, never will be. The Boundary Ninja would often say that to me when I would bring up my pain about his boundaries. I had all the classic complaints. How could I work through what I needed to in only 50 minutes a week? How do I open up when I need to and then pull it back together to walk out? Why couldn’t he hold me and comfort me when I was in pain? Why couldn’t I see him outside of therapy and know more about him? Why couldn’t I live under his desk? 🙂

Now the first time he ever told me therapy wasn’t enough, I must confess gentle reader, that what went through my head was “What the f***?!?! If you know that, then why in hell am I here?! I have no f***ing idea what you’re talking about?!?” Took me a long time to express that (I do believe I cleaned up my language when I asked. But maybe not, I could sometimes really rip loose in the BN’s office. Mainly because the first time I ever used the “F” word in front of him, when I calmed down I apologized for my language. He informed me, in no uncertain terms, that I was never to apologize for that, adults talk that way when they’re angry, we sanitize things too much and I should express myself however I needed to. I have often wondered if he ever regretted saying that. :)) He said many times to me (he had to repeat most things to me about 13563 times as I am slow to catch on) that therapy isn’t enough, and honestly, I thought it was extremely puzzling for a long time. I mean, I heard the words, but had no idea what he meant by them. But I eventually learned their truth. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, ambivalance, attachment theory, boundaries, dependence, disorganized attachment, earned attachment, feelings, healing, limbic resonance, needs, self-worth, transference

Why won’t my therapist just tell me how this works?!?

November 16, 2011 Attachment Girl 13 comments

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

Categories: acceptance, ambivalance, boundaries, dependence, feelings, needs, self-worth

What I Learned in Therapy Lesson 4: It wasn’t my fault

November 7, 2011 Attachment Girl 16 comments

Therapy Lesson One
Therapy Lesson Two
Therapy Lesson Three

Therapy Lesson #4: I wasn’t responsible for the sexual abuse nor did I deserve any of it.

This was a VERY tough lesson. It’s a very tough lesson for most victims of abuse but especially so for people who experience long term abuse as children. So many of the circumstances around abuse and developmental truths about children can feed into the perception on the victim’s part that they “deserved” the abuse, they “asked” for the abuse or they are some kind of pathetic target for abuse because there is something fundamentally warped in them. We can have a very good cognitive understanding that it wasn’t our fault, but to get that emotionally? Long uphill battle. There is an almost incomprehensible level of shame around this subject, which doesn’t make it easy to talk about. But the only way to break through shame is to talk about it. Terrifying to say the least. Couple this with the fact that so many victims actually believe that if they get close to someone and let them know what happened, they’ll infect them with their “darkness.” So it took a very long time and being told over and over and experiencing compassion from so many people around me to learn this one. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, ambivalance, attachment theory, boundaries, childhood sexual abuse (CSA), disassociation, feelings, needs, responsibility, safety, self-worth

Helpful Books

October 7, 2011 Attachment Girl 14 comments

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.
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