responsibility | Tales of a Boundary Ninja

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

What I Learned in Therapy Lesson 4: It wasn’t my fault

November 7, 2011 Attachment Girl 16 comments

Therapy Lesson One
Therapy Lesson Two
Therapy Lesson Three

Therapy Lesson #4: I wasn’t responsible for the sexual abuse nor did I deserve any of it.

This was a VERY tough lesson. It’s a very tough lesson for most victims of abuse but especially so for people who experience long term abuse as children. So many of the circumstances around abuse and developmental truths about children can feed into the perception on the victim’s part that they “deserved” the abuse, they “asked” for the abuse or they are some kind of pathetic target for abuse because there is something fundamentally warped in them. We can have a very good cognitive understanding that it wasn’t our fault, but to get that emotionally? Long uphill battle. There is an almost incomprehensible level of shame around this subject, which doesn’t make it easy to talk about. But the only way to break through shame is to talk about it. Terrifying to say the least. Couple this with the fact that so many victims actually believe that if they get close to someone and let them know what happened, they’ll infect them with their “darkness.” So it took a very long time and being told over and over and experiencing compassion from so many people around me to learn this one. Continue Reading