Three Little Pigs as told by Shakespeare

January 7, 2012 Leave a comment

One of my oldest and closest friends, who understands the weird kind of stuff I find hysterical, sent me a link for this YouTube video. If you’re a fan of this type of humor, you’re going to LOVE this! 🙂

And I would kill for a vocabulary of 54,000 words.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxoUUbMii7Q

Categories: Funny

Learning Developmental Skills: Emotional Regulation

January 7, 2012 3 comments

This post is a continuation of a series started in But therapy can take us a long way: Learning Developmental Skills Part 1. In this post, I want to talk about emotional regulation. We are not born knowing how to regulate our emotions. This is a skill that must be implicitly learned by being in the presence of another attuned human being who is capable of regulating their emotions. Which is why people with insecure attachment, or who suffered neglect or long-term abuse, often have difficultly “regulating” their emotions. They were never taught how to. The good news is that this is one of the things that can be fixed by therapy. Being with your therapist in a right-brain to right-brain way (with your feelings engaged, and experiencing attunement and limbic resonance) while accessing your intense emotions can teach you how to face and handle those emotions on your own. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, attachment theory, disassociation, Emotional regulation, feelings, healing, limbic resonance, perserverence, trauma, Uncategorized

Merry Christmas and Thank You

December 24, 2011 4 comments

For those who celebrate, I want to wish you a Merry Christmas. For everyone, I wish the blessings of peace and joy of the season when Love came to dwell among us. I also want to say thank you to everyone who has read this blog, who has commented or written to me, and the many who have encouraged me behind the scenes, who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. Writing this blog has been an amazing, life-giving experience and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without all of you. So thank you.

If you need a little Christmas cheer, I encourage you to watch the YouTube video below of the Christmas Flash Mob by Journey of Faith at South Bay Galleria, that Fritzfreud posted on his blog Monkeytraps (thanks Steve!).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnt7euRF5Pg

Blessings and love to all.

PS I know I am woefully behind on new material, I promise there’s new stuff coming after Christmas. 🙂

Categories: Uncategorized

Bass Ackwards

December 13, 2011 4 comments

I was talking to a friend about therapy today and connected to a very important principle about healing that I wanted to share. We often approach healing from the standpoint of “once I heal enough to not be <insert emotion here> than I’ll <insert new behavior here>.” We want to get our feelings to the right place, then act. But it doesn’t really work that way; we need to act in a new way so that our feelings follow. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, encouragement, feelings, healing, hope, perserverence, self-worth

What I learned in therapy Lesson 5 – The relationship of love and pain

December 8, 2011 22 comments

This is lesson five of what I learned in therapy: Pain is not a part of love, love is the answer to pain.

This lesson actually came later in my healing and my work with the Boundary Ninja. I’m writing about it now as it’s been a subject that has been both coming up in a lot of conversations I’ve had lately and because I am learning to experience it as a lived truth. If forced to choose, I think I would pick this understanding as the most powerful that I learned in therapy. It is also extremely difficult to explain because at its heart is a mystery that lives at the heart of our existence. It’s not so much a truth that you understand, as much as you learn to accept. Continue Reading

Categories: abandonment, acceptance, ambivalance, attachment styles, boundaries, childhood sexual abuse (CSA), commitment, dependence, disorganized attachment, earned attachment, encouragement, feelings, healing, hope, insecure attachment, limbic resonance, love, needs, pain, safety, self-worth, transference

Lake Loop Trail

December 1, 2011 5 comments

Hi all, sorry for the gap in posting but you’ll be happy to know I have a number of excuses reasons for why this has occurred. 🙂 Thanksgiving was a very busy weekend with lots of plans (not to mention the unseasonably high temperatures. Do you have any idea how rare it is to put up your outdoor Christmas decorations in shirtsleeves in Syracuse NY?!? We just had to take advantage of the opportunity.) Then, since it is November, I came down with a sinus infection. Actually I was two days away from making it through the month without one, which hasn’t happened in years, but didn’t quite make it. The good news was, I already had a doctor’s appointment for a routine visit set up, so I was able to get antibiotics and may have actually caught this before I go into my usual follow-up of bronchitis and kicking off my asthma. Light years to go, but my self-care is getting better! 🙂 Not to mention, one of my rare visits with the Boundary Ninja. (Ok, rare might not be EXACTLY accurate, but humor me, I’m trying to hang on to a sense of progress!) And to be perfectly honest, I am having a much more difficult time writing the next entry in my Developmental Skills series (Series? What series?! How do you call one post a series? ) then I expected. So I thought that if I wander off in another direction for a bit and write about something else, I could distract myself, so that whatever subterranean level of my brain which actually produces this stuff can proceed unhampered by my conscious mind.

I was talking about therapy with a friend the other day and how endless it can feel, when I was reminded of a story which is the perfect analogy for therapy. And that is the story of the Lake Loop Trail. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, ambivalance, healing, hope, perserverence

But therapy can take us a long way: Learning Developmental Skills Part 1

November 23, 2011 4 comments

This was going to be the second part of a discussion on how therapy is not enough. I talked about how therapy isn’t enough to make up for the loss of the unmet needs of childhood which are impossible to meet now because we are no longer children and unable to take in the kind of love and care on a deep enough level to completely wipe out the loss. Even if someone was willing to re-parent us, the behavior a parent exhibits towards their child is not appropriate for an adult. But the second half of the equation, that I wanted to address here is the developmental steps that were skipped or distorted by not having our needs met or being taught certain skills because our parents did not know them either. This is also a big part of why therapy can be so painful even though no one is doing anything wrong this time around. I had been planning on covering all of the developmental learning in the rest of this post but as I outlined what I wanted to say, it became evident that the post would become a twee long even for me. So instead, this is the beginning of a series. 🙂 Continue Reading

Categories: attachment theory, boundaries, dependence, earned attachment, encouragement, feelings, healing, insecure attachment, limbic resonance, needs, safety, self-worth

Therapy isn’t enough

November 21, 2011 27 comments

Therapy isn’t enough. Never has been, never will be. The Boundary Ninja would often say that to me when I would bring up my pain about his boundaries. I had all the classic complaints. How could I work through what I needed to in only 50 minutes a week? How do I open up when I need to and then pull it back together to walk out? Why couldn’t he hold me and comfort me when I was in pain? Why couldn’t I see him outside of therapy and know more about him? Why couldn’t I live under his desk? 🙂

Now the first time he ever told me therapy wasn’t enough, I must confess gentle reader, that what went through my head was “What the f***?!?! If you know that, then why in hell am I here?! I have no f***ing idea what you’re talking about?!?” Took me a long time to express that (I do believe I cleaned up my language when I asked. But maybe not, I could sometimes really rip loose in the BN’s office. Mainly because the first time I ever used the “F” word in front of him, when I calmed down I apologized for my language. He informed me, in no uncertain terms, that I was never to apologize for that, adults talk that way when they’re angry, we sanitize things too much and I should express myself however I needed to. I have often wondered if he ever regretted saying that. :)) He said many times to me (he had to repeat most things to me about 13563 times as I am slow to catch on) that therapy isn’t enough, and honestly, I thought it was extremely puzzling for a long time. I mean, I heard the words, but had no idea what he meant by them. But I eventually learned their truth. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, ambivalance, attachment theory, boundaries, dependence, disorganized attachment, earned attachment, feelings, healing, limbic resonance, needs, self-worth, transference

Why won’t my therapist just tell me how this works?!?

November 16, 2011 13 comments

I don’t know about anyone else, but one of the most frustrating things about therapy for me was the fact that I was working so hard to get it “right” but the Boundary Ninja refused to cooperate. In any way. He’s a very stubborn man. Or perhaps determined might be a better word.

When I started really working with the Boundary Ninja on an individual basis, I was consumed with the worry that I was being a nightmare of a patient, way too needy and that he was just sitting across from me keenly anticipating the day that I would finally leave. I was consumed with worry about how I was doing in therapy. Was I getting it right? Was I being a good patient? Was I working hard enough? Did he actually like me or was he just tolerating me for pay? I’m sure most of you could come up with a long list of your own. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, ambivalance, boundaries, dependence, feelings, needs, self-worth

Another Poem

November 10, 2011 4 comments

I just saw the Boundary Ninja on Monday. I have been running into some significant transference and triggering in some relationships right now and wanted to sort through it. I am planning on writing about it at some point when it’s clearer than it is now. 🙂 I stopped going regularly to therapy in September of 2010, but have been back for single sessions every couple of months when I’ve needed to work through something that came up. This was the first time that I have seen him that I made another appointment before leaving. Usually I leave without an appointment and just email him to ask for one when I need it. Continue Reading

Categories: acceptance, ambivalance, Boundary Ninja, dependence, earned attachment, feelings, limbic resonance, transference