Archive
Encouragement for Those Who Are Weary
Greetings gentle readers,
I ran across an old song I haven’t heard in years that I wanted to share. I loved the song when it first came out in 1979 (for those of you born after that year, there is no need to point out how long ago that was, I was a senior in high school. Trust me, I know how long ago that was. 😀 ) but it speaks even more strongly to me today. It has been such a struggle to learn about how to handle the inevitable pain of life, in some other way than futilely attempting to avoid it. One of the best lessons taught to me by BN is that while pain is inevitable, the answer to pain is love. (See The relationship of love and pain and Love is the Answer for more detailed explanations of that truth). The love we find by connecting to other people, by sharing our burdens, by holding each other up. That is where we find the strength to face life challenges. Continue Reading
Retirement of a Therapist – Part II
This is the second in a two-part series. For part I, see Retirement of a Therapist – Part I
When we left off, I had brought you to the point of finding out my therapist was retiring, my mixed reactions and my struggle to recognize that this was a major life event. I remember vividly at beginning of our next couples’ session, I very casually (VERY CASUALLY, who me? affected?) told BN that my therapist was retiring. He reacted very strongly and with a lot of concern, much the way someone would if you told them someone close to you was dying. I felt so pulled towards his reaction (maybe this was a major thing?) while simultaneously wanting to back away (don’t make me face how painful this is). Ambivalence about the loss and its magnitude was pretty much a constant throughout the process. To BN’s credit, he tried on a number of occasions to try to get me to open up about my feelings and I would minimize my feelings and change the subject. I’d NEVER get away with it now, but we didn’t know each other as well then. I think BN was still learning how hard he could push me at any given time and while I felt drawn to him, trust was still a distant gleam over the horizon. Continue Reading
Peeking out of the Cave
Greetings Gentle Readers,
I have missed you all. This break has stretched longer than I anticipated. The situation that precipitated my hiatus is ongoing, but things are much more stable. Of course right about the time things got more stable, we hit the holidays. 😀 My husband is working a lot of overtime right now and some things are changing at my company that may require longer hours of me as well. I also have surgery for my carpal tunnel planned in January. So I am going to dip my toe back in here by sharing a few poems I found very moving. The first is an angry, passionate poem about rape which I found both very moving and very validating. The second link is Anis Mogjani’s Ted Talk, where he performs a number of his poems, all of which are both thought-provoking and life-affirming; I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
Due to the schedule complications mentioned above, I am not sure how regularly I will return to posting and would appreciate your continued patience with my response times (or lack thereof 🙂 ), but I at least wanted to poke my head out of my cave and make it clear I was still here!
Coping with Grief and Abandonment Part II
This is the second post in a two-part series on Grief and Abandonment, see Coping with Grief and Abandonment Part I.
I’m sure it will not surprise any regular reader of this blog to realize that BN was a huge part of how I coped, even between appointments. BN has a very generous contact policy, I am allowed to call him 24/7 including when he is on vacation. If I leave an emergency message with his service, he calls back within an hour. If he is on vacation and doesn’t answer the service in a certain amount f time, his backup (a wonderful, warm, empathic man) calls back, but always offers to have BN also call; it’s just a longer wait than usual. (I have higher standards for contacting him when he is on vacation but have done it. Earliest I have ever called is 8 AM and the latest is 10:30 PM although BN has made it clear that 2 in the morning is ok if I need). We very rarely do any processing during phone calls but when the grief threatened to overwhelm me, or the fears that BN would also abandon me, would rise up, then a short phone call would help to ground and reconnect me. Most of mine are under three minutes and it’s not unusual to keep it under one minute. BN once referred to my “patented one minute phone calls” when I was worried about calling too much. 🙂 Often it wasn’t what he said but just the sound of his voice and experiencing that he was there that would do the trick. Continue Reading
Coping with Grief and Abandonment Part I
GE asked the question below on the Ask AG page:
im wondering if you are wiling to share some of the strategies you used to cope with grief and abandonment feelings when things got rough during your recovery.
As I said in reply over there, this is an excellent question. Since I see grieving our losses as being at the heart of our healing, we should probably learn how to grieve, right? I have been grieving, one way or another, for a large part of my time in therapy, so this might turn out to be a bit of a laundry list, but I am hoping that everyone might find something that they can use in their own journey. Continue Reading
Tales of a Boundary Ninja 
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