feelings | Tales of a Boundary Ninja

A Blog I Think You’d Like

July 18, 2012 Attachment Girl 8 comments

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.)

Cycles of Becoming

I could learn a lot about brevity from her. 🙂

Categories: acceptance, encouragement, feelings, healing, hope Tags: art, healing

Keeping Our Hearts Safe

July 14, 2012 Attachment Girl 13 comments

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.”

Categories: acceptance, commitment, encouragement, feelings, hope, love, pain, perserverence, safety Tags: love, pain, risk

The Beginning Part I

June 28, 2012 Attachment Girl 7 comments

NOTE: Since I’m going to be discussing couples counseling in this post, I just want to be clear in order to be fair to my husband, who has no voice here, that the problems in the marriage were complex, based on both our pasts and our reinforcing those patterns for each other. We were both, most definitely, part of the problem. I am also happy to say that we both took responsibility for our part and worked very hard to change. We just celebrated our 26th anniversary and are happier than we have ever been.

So I thought it would be good to go back to the beginning and explain how I ended up working with the Boundary Ninja. It was not a simple, straight-forward process, but interestingly enough contained the dynamic that I most needed to see. Which after a number of years and one break in therapy, I am finally working through. 🙂 Therapy does not usually take the most direct path (or in my case, even an intelligible one) for long periods of time. 🙂 Continue Reading

Categories: ambivalance, attachment styles, attachment theory, Boundary Ninja, childhood sexual abuse (CSA), dependence, disorganized attachment, feelings, healing, hope, perserverence, sexual attraction, transference Tags: indentifying needs, secure attachment, sexual desire, therapeutic relationship

Diminished

May 15, 2012 Attachment Girl 6 comments

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

Categories: acceptance, feelings, healing, hope, love, pain Tags: grief, unexpected shock

Learning developmental skills: Identifying and Expressing needs

April 16, 2012 Attachment Girl 18 comments

This post is a continuation of a series started in But therapy can take us a long way: Learning Developmental Skills Part 1. In this post, I want to talk about learning to identify and express your needs. For most trauma victims, this is most definitely a skipped part of development. Because the caretaker is putting their own needs ahead of the child’s when abusing them, by definition the child’s needs are being overlooked and pushed aside. How do you learn to identify and express something that is not even acknowledged to exist?

A long-term trauma victim often becomes hyper-vigilant. They learn to watch their abuser and observe their behavior in minute detail in the hope of getting some warning before an episode of abuse. So they’re paying a whole lot more attention to the abuser’s feelings and needs than their own. Add to this the fact that many victims of long-term abuse believe and/or are told the abuse is their fault, so they are also watching the abuser for cues about who they need to be and what they need to do to “finally” make the abuser happy with them and stop the abuse. (This serves the function of providing some sense of control in a situation in which you are powerless and have none.) Your own feelings and needs fade to insignificance in the face of needing to survive. Continue Reading

Love is the Answer Addendum

March 20, 2012 Attachment Girl 5 comments

I woke up this morning after staying up late last night to finish the Love is the Answer post. Writing the post took me back through the feelings evoked and I woke up feeling drained and sad. Even as I finished the post, something felt a little “off.” In thinking through what was going on this morning, I realized that what I said in the post and the conclusions I came to are the truth as I see it. I meant everything I wrote, but sometimes when trying to distill the meaning from the confusion of experience, things get missed or overlooked in order for the arc of writing to follow a true path, so that the truth you are groping after can be expressed.

It is important to me that I am honest with you, dear readers. I have spent too much of my life not being honest and had to work too hard to learn how, to not exercise it now. And the last thing I would want to do is add to anyone’s burden by making them wonder why they are struggling so hard when someone else, dealing with the same issues, seems so “clear” about what is going on. Please don’t ever think that. My journey has been long and messy, it has wandered and circled, there have been blind spots, and cul de sacs, nuclear powered defense mechanisms, and lovingly nurtured periods of denial. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, ambivalance, feelings, safety

Love is the Answer

March 19, 2012 Attachment Girl 5 comments

So I went back to see BN on Wednesday morning. Actually I went back to see BN on Tuesday evening for a couples’ session. I mentioned it before, but my husband and I have decided to tackle some issues that we share, not a conflict, and thought that BN could help us. I was very focused on not making the couples’ session about my stuff. So focused in fact, that it wasn’t until the session was over that I realized just how shut down I was. It started to occur to me towards the end of the session because my husband was actually sharing some pretty powerful feelings in answer to a question that BN asked both of us. I had floated through with a pretty superficial answer and there was my DH reaching deep. That’s when I realized that I was pretty shut down. I actually felt kind of guilty about that, like I had lied. But it hit me that I had stayed so shut down because it felt like it was my only way to get through the appointment.

So when we left the session, at the end of which BN had warmly shaken my hand and said “see you soon,” by the time we reached the car, I was starting to fall apart. I then realized that I hadn’t been shut down ONLY so I wouldn’t derail our couples’ session, I was shut down because their was a deep terror welling up at the thought of going to see BN the following morning. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, ambivalance, boundaries, disorganized attachment, earned attachment, Emotional regulation, encouragement, feelings, healing, hope, limbic resonance, love, needs, pain, safety, self-worth, transference

Hmm, knowing it was love didn’t have quite the effect I expected.

March 10, 2012 Attachment Girl 10 comments

For the beginning of this story, you might want to read The “L” word Part I and II, if you haven’t already done so.

Gentle readers, I am not in a good place. My reaction to not being in a good place is usually to go find a deep dark cave and hole up in there until I get the pain and hurt under control, but it’s an impulse I’ve been working on changing for a long time. So despite being in the midst of a Category-5 shame storm, I’d thought I’d talk about how I’m feeling instead. So if you’re reading this, thank you for listening. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, ambivalance, boundaries, childhood sexual abuse (CSA), dependence, disassociation, disorganized attachment, feelings, love, needs, safety, self-worth, transference, trauma

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