Archive
What I missed
Since I’ve been on the topic of how we work through our grief for that which we did not have, I thought I would share some particulars losses I ran into and what was underneath them. As I’ve worked my way through therapy and uncovered the feelings I had buried so long, I also uncovered losses I had not been able to admit, let alone grieve. This is a very personal list. I expect that some of this will resonate with other people and some of it will be not true for them or seem like a significant loss. These are mine, what I needed to mourn, and I again offer the disclaimer that not everyone will need to do this the way I did. But I am hoping by being more specific about some of the issues I faced, that the process might be more understandable, even if my reasons to mourn do not resonate with you. Continue Reading
Happy 1st Birthday Tales
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
Evidently I’m Human
Just a quick update so as not to leave anyone in suspense. I saw the Boundary Ninja yesterday and it helped immensely, although I am now aware that I am grieving. So much for numbness. I walked in and pretty much exploded all over his office and covered the emotional spectrum: love, hate, pity, grief, compassion, anger, sadness, hurt. You name it, I think I felt it. As it was with my father, losing male members of my family seems to be the perfect definition of ambivalence. From the way I exploded once I knew I was with BN (I started sobbing at the beginning and couldn’t manage to talk for at least several minutes) I think I needed to really feel safe, the kind of safe I really only feel in BN’s office in order to allow myself to feel. Continue Reading
A Blog I Think You’d Like
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.)
I could learn a lot about brevity from her. 🙂
Keeping Our Hearts Safe
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.”
Tales of a Boundary Ninja 
Recent Comments