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Emerging from the drug haze
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
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
Working Through
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
Enraged
I just got off the phone with my sister, who just returned from my brother’s funeral. I expected to discuss the trip, the services, the family, my mother, my sister and my brother. What I didn’t expect was a major revelation that would leave me so angry I was shaking from head to toe and using language I didn’t know I knew. Evidently, my mother called my aunt, my father’s sister, who is the only member of his family she is still in touch with, to let her know my brother had died. My aunt had also lost her eldest to cancer a number of years ago and I suppose my mother felt a certain sympathy. While they were talking, my aunt conveyed a crucial piece of information 55 years too late to do any good. Continue Reading
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.”
Diminished
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
Erotic Transference
Update: This post has drawn a lot of traffic in the time it has been up, leading me to believe it’s a topic that a lot of people may wish to discuss further. If you have questions about anything in this post, or questions about things not discussed in this post, please feel free to ask a question in the comments or send me the question privately at the email address in the right column. Thanks! – AG
I got a request from a reader to discuss erotic transference, so I thought I would share a few thoughts. I do want to be clear that although I have done a lot of reading about erotic transference, most of what I write here is based on my own experience and so may not be all that universal. I also think that erotic transference can be a very complex thing encompassing several different dynamics in the relationship. Our sexuality is a very powerful, integral part of us and therefore a lot of things get played out in this area; issues around power, love, desire, longings, sensuality, self-worth, and attractiveness to list only a few. And all of these things are going to be even more highlighted in the therapeutic relationship since the therapist carries so much symbolic weight. Continue Reading
Tales of a Boundary Ninja 
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