healing | Tales of a Boundary Ninja

Emerging from the drug haze

December 8, 2012 Attachment Girl 21 comments

Trigger warning: Suicidal thoughts

Greetings, gentle readers, I have missed you. I am sorry for the long silence. My doctor, in what turned out to be a VERY frustrating experience, as part of the treatment for my back/hand numbness problem put me on a drug (which shall remain nameless as I know not everyone reacts the same to this class of drugs and I don’t want to prejudice anyone against it since they might not have the same experience) which had very bad side effects which took some time to figure out. And yes, as usual, the Boundary Ninja was a huge help. Turns out that a therapist who has a deep interest in neurobiology can be a lifesaver. 🙂 Continue Reading

Categories: feelings, healing, medications, pain, safety, shame, suicidal thoughts Tags: medication, pain

Happy 1st Birthday Tales

October 5, 2012 Attachment Girl 25 comments

It has been a very long, sucky, painful day, full of misunderstandings and hurts, some caused by me, to my regret and some inflicted on me. (Yay!! While I was working on this, someone did an amazing thing and was vulnerable and we’re repairing it. Great now I’m going to short out my keyboard!) So I am more grateful than I can say to come here to my blog to celebrate a very happy milestone for me, and hopefully for some of you. 🙂 Tales of a Boundary Ninja is one year old today. This is my first blog and I was both excited and terrified putting up those first posts, not quite believing anyone would actually want to read what I had to say. Continue Reading

Categories: feelings, healing, hope, love, needs, pain, videos, Youtube Tags: encouragment, love, pain, risk, shame, therapeutic relationship, trauma victims, TWLOHA

Sitting

September 30, 2012 Attachment Girl 13 comments

Greetings Gentle Readers,

I know I have been quiet as of late. News of both my brother’s death and my aunt’s revelations have knocked me off-balance and sent me back into my past in a way that has not happened for a long time. My work schedule has been quite busy, as well as my husband’s, so on top of the emotional stress, there has just not been a lot of free time, but I saw BN Thursday morning and wanted to post an update. I’ve been working on this post for so long that the last sentence originally said “I saw BN this morning.” I am somehow….gagged. As if attempting to voice what I feel inside is so impossible, that words fail and I simply turn away, again and again. So I am going to just finish this post and put it up no matter how it sounds to me, just so that I might speak. So if I sound strange or somehow not like myself, that is probably what you are hearing. Continue Reading

Working Through

September 22, 2012 Attachment Girl 6 comments

Greetings Gentle Readers,

First, may I say thank you so much for all the encouragement and support from everyone? Knowing I am not alone, knowing that there are safe people, that there are people I can trust now, has been a bulwark against the myriad of memories being dredged up. I have so appreciated all of you who have come alongside of me with your care, concern and kind words, it has helped so very much. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, childhood sexual abuse (CSA), feelings, healing, love, pain, perserverence, safety, trauma Tags: grief, pain, poetry, trauma victims, unexpected shock

How do I fill the void?

September 11, 2012 Attachment Girl 60 comments

Dpblusee left the following question in response to the “Therapy isn’t enough” post:

I don’t believe I have ever felt true, authentic love in my life until it was evoked in my therapy (which, for me, feels more like I am perceiving it and asking for it than receiving, since the T can’t truly give the parental love, in that way as you describe, that is needed to fill the gap).

If I never received it and didn’t know what it felt like until now, where can it come from to fill the void that was left from childhood? I would imagine it can never truly be filled, so how is this wound healed?

Instead of responding in the comments, I thought this would make a good topic for a post, so with her kind permission, I am going to answer her here. For most of my life, I carried within me the sense of a terrible abyss, a void, which threatened to swallow me up and destroy me. I can still remember the shock when I realized it was no longer there, and my amazement as I shared that realization with BN. So, while there may not be a way to fill the void, I do believe there is a way to close it. Continue Reading

Rest in Peace

September 3, 2012 Attachment Girl 18 comments

I found out today that my brother died. At the age of 58, he had a major heart attack and dropped dead in front of his computer. We’ve been estranged for a long time. Not because of any major break or fight, just my wanting distance. He moved out West years ago and lives several thousand miles away, which makes it easier. At one point, the whole family, such as it is, had lost touch with him until my sister got a call that he was in a psychiatric hospital. After close to 30 years of self-medicating, he had a moment of clarity and stopped. Unfortunately, all the things he had been holding at bay with the drinking and drugs came crashing in on him. He was suicidal and his therapist told him either he took himself to inpatient care or he’d do it for him. After that he came back east for a couple of visits. Continue Reading

Categories: childhood sexual abuse (CSA), disassociation, Emotional regulation, feelings, forgiveness, healing, trauma

Fantastic Book on Your Brain and How to Get Along with it.

August 20, 2012 Attachment Girl 1 comment

I am presently reading a really good book on our brains and how they work. I’m still reading it, but already know it’s worth recommending. The book is The User’s Guide to the Human Mind: Why Our Brains Make Us Unhappy, Anxious, and Neurotic and What We Can Do about It. The author, Shawn T. Smith, Psy.D., is a psychologist whose blog, Ironshrink, I have followed for a while. This is his first book and wow, did he hit the ground running. The book addresses the basic premise that our brains have evolved not to make us happy, but to make sure we survive. But we now live in a different environment than that in which our brains evolved and so have life and death reactions to situations that aren’t. I wish I had been able to read this book awhile back. The author lays out , in a very clear and concise manner, why we think and react the way we do and how we can learn to step back from our feelings and be more deliberate in how we act. How we can learn to live with our brains, instead of fighting them.

This is a book written for laymen and very clearly so. It also contains a lot of simple, easy to implement, mindfulness exercises to teach you how to take control of your brain and your feelings so that you can choose how to react based on your values. For anyone struggling to heal from disorganized attachment and all the trust struggles that can occur based on their history of abuse, this book is a treasure. It provides a lot of insight into why we behave as we do, normalizes that behavior and offers solutions for coping with our maladaptive beliefs.

Categories: books, disorganized attachment, feelings, healing, psychotherapy blogs Tags: psychotherapy books

The Paradox of Shame – Part II

July 29, 2012 Attachment Girl 27 comments

Greetings, gentle readers, thank you for your patience in waiting for the followup. 🙂 This is the second half of a post started in The Paradox of Shame – Part I.

The level of shame and embarrassment surrounding finding out about BN’s relationship with this author was almost indescribable and I found it extremely difficult to actually GO to the appointment. I basically managed by refusing to think about it that morning. Every time I started to think about what it would be like or imagine what I would say or BN would reply, I would just shut it down in order to stop myself from being overwhelmed to a point of not being able to function. And I kept focusing on my breathing and slowing it down. It helps that I’m the best terrified driver in the world. Being in therapy for so long, has given me plenty of opportunities to practice. 🙂 Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, art, boundaries, earned attachment, Emotional regulation, healing, hope, love, self-worth, shame Tags: art, boundaries, insecurity, self-worth, shame

The Paradox of Shame – Part I

July 26, 2012 Attachment Girl 6 comments

Shame has been a constant theme throughout my healing, but I have found it to be really dominant as I have begun to risk more and live more fully. When I was recovering, I finally realized how ruled I was by fear. Fear was all about me, imprinted on a cellular level; present in the air I breathed. When I finally realized how permeated by fear I was, I was scared to stop being scared! I can still get scared, but fear is not the omnipresent backdrop of my life anymore. Being less afraid has led to being able to risk more. As I risk more, I find myself reacting with shame when I run into new difficulties. Happily, this has led to my discovery that BN is also a first class shame buster.

The true purpose of shame is to keep us safe from violating the taboos and rules of our “tribe.” For so many human generations, our very survival depended on our ability to be accepted by and attended to by a group of people. We are a social animal, who thrives by being with others. Our needs cannot be met without relationship. We cannot know ourselves outside of relationship. Failure to conform to the mores of a group could result in being driven forth so that an individual did not threaten the well-being of the group; but being driven forth was often the equivalent of a death sentence. So our need to “fit in” is extremely strong and other people’s disapproval can affect us deeply. Which is why a sense of shame is such a powerful motivator to control our behavior as it is literally experienced as a matter of life or death. Continue Reading

Categories: abandonment, ambivalance, art, books, disorganized attachment, Emotional regulation, feelings, healing, pain, self-worth, shame Tags: insecurity, shame, therapeutic relationship

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

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