power | Tales of a Boundary Ninja

The Repair Part II

August 18, 2013 Attachment Girl 19 comments

This is the second part of a two-part series, for the first part see The Repair Part I.

I ended the last post having just done a bang up job of expressing my anger at BN. I told him that it had felt good to just let rip with that, but it also felt very wrong. He told me that it was really ok I was angry at him, that my anger was real and it was safe to express it, that it was important for me to learn that being angry didn’t mean that I couldn’t appreciate and value the relationship nor would I destroy it. When he said that I became conscious of a very deep fear. I sucked in some air and told BN that I needed to ask him something. Would he be able to hang onto that for me? He asked me what I wanted him to hang on to. I told him I needed him to remember that all of the gratitude and respect I had expressed for him weren’t gone even though I was so angry. In one of the most powerful moments in the session (which is saying a lot, trust me), he looked straight at me and said “AG, it never even crossed my mind to think that. “ Cue waterfalls. I seriously started sobbing in relief. I told him I had been so scared that I had lost him. He told me that I could not lose him, he was right there.

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

Enraged

September 13, 2012 Attachment Girl 28 comments

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

Categories: abandonment, pain, power, responsibility, trauma

Great article from a new blog I just discovered

February 3, 2012 Attachment Girl 6 comments

I found a new blog by a psychotherapist (h/t to WG of Therapy Tales fame) which I found to be really interesting. She had one post on the purpose of payment in the psychotherapuetic relationship that I found both illuminating and reassuring. (For the record, I have slipped into both the “how pathetic, I have to pay to have an intimate relationship” and “this isn’t real, it’s simulated because I pay you” interpretations.) I think a lot of people might find this helpful to read. If you like this one, you might want to check out the other posts also, there’s a lot of good stuff. I’ll be adding her to my blog roll. 🙂

what a shrink thinks: What You Pay For

Categories: money, needs, power, psychotherapy blogs, responsibility, transference