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What I learned in therapy Lesson 1

October 7, 2011 5 comments

See here for Lesson 2

See here for Lesson 3

I was once asked on the psychcafe forum the the 10 most important things I learned in therapy. I couldn’t hold it down to ten. 😀 I went back and dusted off the list and thought it would be good to go back through it now.  I was in therapy with my first therapist for three separate runs of therapy over a span of almost 22 years until her retirement about five years ago. I took a year off, then started working with the Boundary Ninja (who was originally my husband’s therapist and had been doing couples’ work with us. Which is material for a whole ‘nother post. :)). Once we keyed in on my attachment problems, the work really took off. Last September, I made the decision to stop going regularly. The Boundary Ninja is a therapist of the “once a client, always a client” school of thought and his door has remained open, including emails or phone calls and when I feel the need, I contact him and go in for a session. I have went up to a four month gap between sessions but probably average seeing him about once every four to six weeks, with emails and occasional calls in between seeing him live. So this seems like a good time to revisit what I learned from the Boundary Ninja.

Before I begin discussing the lessons learned, I want to say that the most difficult thing to explain about healing in therapy is that it isn’t about “knowing” it’s about experiencing being with another person. So much of what I talk about below totally gonzo confused me when I first learned it. I used to tell the Boundary Ninja, that he was talking in Russian when he started explaining a lot of this to me. But staying with my feelings and continuing to express them through the confusion is how I learned it. And I must give credit here to my therapist who is really an incredibly gifted, compassionate man doing exactly what he should be.  Whenever you find yourself thinking that I really know what I’m talking about, I can guarantee it’s because I am quoting the Boundary Ninja. 😀
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Categories: attachment theory, healing, self-worth, trauma

Helpful Books

October 7, 2011 14 comments

I am a compulsive reader, always have been. So if a problem rears it’s head, my first reaction is “is there a book about this?” Part of it, to be honest, was an attempt to stay in my left brain and intellectualize away from those messy, confusing feelings. I really struggled with the fact that I couldn’t get through the healing process just by understanding it. The Boundary Ninja often said that if it was just about knowing the facts, that when a client came through the door, he would be able to just hand them a book “How to Heal” and say, have a nice life. 🙂 I often found that to be incredibly frustrating. Later, as I came to understand that the real healing in therapy wasn’t about what you knew, but about what you experienced with your therapist, I kept reading to keep my left brain occupied and out of the way (not to mention the fact that I just became fascinated about the brain, human development and psychotherapy). But, as the Boundary Ninja and I once discussed, it wasn’t just about distraction. My ability to understand the process and the necessity of experiencing the feelings helped me to find the courage to actually feel.

Below is a short list of books I found especially helpful along the way, with a short description of why. As for General Theory of  Love,  I’ve pushed this book so hard I really should consider contacting the publisher and asking for a commission. Big Grin
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Categories: attachment theory, books, boundaries, trauma Tags:

Dissociation and Trauma: It wasn’t really that bad, was it?

October 6, 2011 14 comments

This post is based on an exchange I got into with another member on psychcafe a few years back which ended up being a discussion of dissociation as a response to trauma. This particular member was struggling with “choosing” to disassociate in the face of stress. Her assertion was that she shouldn’t have disassociated as a child because what happened to her did not qualify as trauma, and even if it did qualify as trauma, she was no longer in the same danger so why did she keep going away? It’s very common for trauma survivors, especially of long-term trauma in childhood from a caregiver to believe that they are making WAY too big a deal of what happened to them and seeing themselves as weak or damaged if they continue to disassociate now that the abuse is no longer ongoing. These are beliefs that were reasonable to form during the abuse or neglect, but that doesn’t make them true and continuing to accept them can really interfere with healing. Fighting them is what makes healing such a “hellish bind” to quote the Boundary Ninja. Continue Reading

Categories: disassociation, healing, needs, self-worth, trauma