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Archive for the ‘healing’ Category

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

November 23, 2011 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 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

Forgiveness

October 28, 2011 7 comments

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

Categories: acceptance, books, feelings, forgiveness, healing, hope, safety, trauma

Why your therapist SEEMS cruel, but really isn’t

October 25, 2011 76 comments

We all know that therapy is a unique relationship, unlike any other relationship that we experience. It defies classification in that while it shares aspects of other relationships -friend, lover, parent, colleague – it is not quite any of these things. One of its unique characteristics is a therapist’s reaction to your pain.

In most relationships, when you express pain, the other person’s natural reaction is sympathy; they feel bad for you. This sympathy is often followed by some action whose clear intent is to make you feel better or help relieve your pain. Human beings (at least sane ones) do not like being in pain. So much so that we find it painful to see people we care about, and even people we don’t particularly like, in pain. So there is an almost automatic human response of answering someone’s pain with comfort. If someone is crying, we offer a tissue or a hug, if someone is scared, we offer comfort or reassurance, if someone is angry, we try to help correct whatever is making them angry. Continue Reading

Categories: abandonment, acceptance, ambivalance, feelings, healing, safety, transference, trauma

Self Esteem

October 19, 2011 4 comments

Just had to share this. It’s from a blog called Monkeytraps (it’s in my blog roll).  I would have written a 1,000 word post to explain what Fritzfreud did in a short series of dialogue. This is so straight forward, yet incredibly powerful. The truth he portrays here is one I had to work long and hard (and have BN explain to me 534,123 times) before it penetrated. Wish I had seen this years ago.

Bert’s Therapy: Self-Esteem

Categories: acceptance, encouragement, healing, self-esteem, self-worth

What I Learned in Therapy Lesson 3 – The Goal of Healing

October 17, 2011 16 comments

See here for Lesson 1

See here for Lesson 2

Healing is not reaching a place of perfect peace and safety. It’s knowing that you can remain safe and be at peace no matter where you are.

Like most people, I went to therapy because I wasn’t happy with how my life was nor how I felt in it. So I wanted to get “better.” But the problem is that I really didn’t know what “better” was, just that it needed to be different from what I was. So, again like most people, I headed off to therapy, explained the problem as best I could, and trusted my therapist to get us headed in the right direction. Which she did. I just had no idea how very long that journey would be and how much ground it would cover. Continue Reading

Categories: ambivalance, feelings, healing, needs, safety

What I learned in therapy Lesson 1

October 7, 2011 5 comments

See here for Lesson 2

See here for Lesson 3

I was once asked on the psychcafe forum the the 10 most important things I learned in therapy. I couldn’t hold it down to ten. 😀 I went back and dusted off the list and thought it would be good to go back through it now.  I was in therapy with my first therapist for three separate runs of therapy over a span of almost 22 years until her retirement about five years ago. I took a year off, then started working with the Boundary Ninja (who was originally my husband’s therapist and had been doing couples’ work with us. Which is material for a whole ‘nother post. :)). Once we keyed in on my attachment problems, the work really took off. Last September, I made the decision to stop going regularly. The Boundary Ninja is a therapist of the “once a client, always a client” school of thought and his door has remained open, including emails or phone calls and when I feel the need, I contact him and go in for a session. I have went up to a four month gap between sessions but probably average seeing him about once every four to six weeks, with emails and occasional calls in between seeing him live. So this seems like a good time to revisit what I learned from the Boundary Ninja.

Before I begin discussing the lessons learned, I want to say that 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 the Boundary Ninja, that he was talking in Russian when he started explaining a lot of this to me. But staying with my feelings and continuing to express them through the confusion is how I learned it. And I must give credit here to my therapist who is really an incredibly gifted, compassionate man doing exactly what he should be.  Whenever you find yourself thinking that I really know what I’m talking about, I can guarantee it’s because I am quoting the Boundary Ninja. 😀
Continue Reading

Categories: attachment theory, healing, self-worth, trauma

Dissociation and Trauma: It wasn’t really that bad, was it?

October 6, 2011 14 comments

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

Categories: disassociation, healing, needs, self-worth, trauma