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What I learned in therapy Lesson 2
See here for Lesson 1.
See here for Lesson 3
Lesson #2: I don’t need to be scared of my feelings or overwhelmed by them. I learned this by watching the Boundary Ninja not be overwhelmed by them.
By the time I started working with the Boundary Ninja (OK I give, I’m using an acronym 🙂 BN) I had done significant work in therapy, recovering memories, processing trauma, learning about boundaries and most importantly, in learning I had my own voice. Throughout this, anyone who knew me (for over three minutes) would have probably described me as a very emotional person with a wide range between my highs and lows (for the geeks in my audience, if I were a sine wave, I would have a high amplitude. :)) So you can imagine my total shock that the most major discovery I made working with BN was how very far I stayed away from my feelings. They were often in lockdown, shut away, and kept as far from me as possible. This dynamic was so pronounced that I was in my late 40s before I actually realized I was a right-brain dominant person and that I actually had a creative side. I had fled SO far over into my left brain to stay away from my feelings that I had gotten an engineering degree. (I worked as an engineer for eight years, then left the work force for five years when my first child was born and when I returned became a technical writer.)
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Dissociation and Trauma: It wasn’t really that bad, was it?
This post is based on an exchange I got into with another member on psychcafe a few years back which ended up being a discussion of dissociation as a response to trauma. This particular member was struggling with “choosing” to disassociate in the face of stress. Her assertion was that she shouldn’t have disassociated as a child because what happened to her did not qualify as trauma, and even if it did qualify as trauma, she was no longer in the same danger so why did she keep going away? It’s very common for trauma survivors, especially of long-term trauma in childhood from a caregiver to believe that they are making WAY too big a deal of what happened to them and seeing themselves as weak or damaged if they continue to disassociate now that the abuse is no longer ongoing. These are beliefs that were reasonable to form during the abuse or neglect, but that doesn’t make them true and continuing to accept them can really interfere with healing. Fighting them is what makes healing such a “hellish bind” to quote the Boundary Ninja. Continue Reading
Tales of a Boundary Ninja 
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