Back From Vacation
Hi All,
I am back from a quite lovely vacation with my husband. It was our first empty nest vacation (my younger daughter headed off for her freshman year this fall) and while we missed the children, it was wonderful to just be the two of us. We did very little, which is my definition of vacation. 🙂 Laid by the pool, read some books, watched some movies and talked about all kinds of things. Very refreshing. Although you’ll probably have noticed that the longer I was on vacation, the less got published on this blog. So thank you all for your patience. 🙂
Forgiveness
This is based on a (very long) post I wrote on the psychcafe in response to another member asking about forgiveness. Forgiveness was something I struggled with for a very long time (I still can!) and I thought some people might find it helpful to read.
Disclaimer/Trigger warning for religious material:Â Â This is very much written from the perspective of my world view as a Christian and I understand that not everyone reading will agree with all the values that I discuss. I am also painfully aware that some people have undergone childhood abuse presented in religious terms and therefore might find this very triggering. But in order to explain what happened I have to refer to those beliefs and how they affected me. All I ask is that you accept that they were my values so this was how I saw it. I think the larger principles about forgiveness translate pretty well across other world views.
Back in 2000, I was still struggling with forgiveness. I had done a lot of trauma work which had finally allowed me to recognize my anger (ok, rage). But as hard as I was working, I couldn’t let go and forgive (I have a strong belief that forgiveness is a necessary thing, although now I believe that it can take a lot of time depending on the severity of wrongdoing, and in some ways is an on going process for the rest of your life.) My husband and I had just taken a really great Sunday school class at our church (best we ever took actually) on parenting. There was one section that addressed the commandment “Honor thy father and mother.” The couple teaching the course (it was a video tape series) talked about everyone being called to obey this commandment. But depending on how we raised our children, we could rob them of the joy of obeying that command. That honoring your mother or father can be a joyful, easy thing to do or it can become an onerous duty. When I heard that, something in me was struck like a bell: “that’s it!! I’ve been robbed of the joy of honoring my parents.” But along with it came the deep sense that in order to be faithful to the call of God on my life, I needed to do just that, honor my mother and father, no matter how impossible it looked from where I was sitting (and it looked utterly impossible from where I was sitting). I didn’t believe that God would give me a commandment and not the resources to obey it (ok, I did struggle with the feeling He was trusting me too much. 🙂 Continue Reading
Why your therapist SEEMS cruel, but really isn’t
We all know that therapy is a unique relationship, unlike any other relationship that we experience. It defies classification in that while it shares aspects of other relationships -friend, lover, parent, colleague – it is not quite any of these things. One of its unique characteristics is a therapist’s reaction to your pain.
In most relationships, when you express pain, the other person’s natural reaction is sympathy; they feel bad for you. This sympathy is often followed by some action whose clear intent is to make you feel better or help relieve your pain. Human beings (at least sane ones) do not like being in pain. So much so that we find it painful to see people we care about, and even people we don’t particularly like, in pain. So there is an almost automatic human response of answering someone’s pain with comfort. If someone is crying, we offer a tissue or a hug, if someone is scared, we offer comfort or reassurance, if someone is angry, we try to help correct whatever is making them angry. Continue Reading
A Little Friday Silliness and Possible Absence
This is probably not a bad reflection of my attitude about medications as well as being very funny! Enjoy.
Is it Peace or is it Prozac? by Cheryl Wheeler
And another good one by her, which highlights the absurdity of how we think about ourselves.
NOTE: I am heading off on a two week vacation on Sunday for some sun, rest, relaxation, and hopefully lots of reading. My Kindle is brimming over with all kinds of treats. Having never been a vacationing blogger before, I am not sure how much it will affect my posting here, but just in case, didn’t want to worry anyone if I end up not being very active. Take good care all and see you soon!
Self Esteem
Just had to share this. It’s from a blog called Monkeytraps (it’s in my blog roll). I would have written a 1,000 word post to explain what Fritzfreud did in a short series of dialogue. This is so straight forward, yet incredibly powerful. The truth he portrays here is one I had to work long and hard (and have BN explain to me 534,123 times) before it penetrated. Wish I had seen this years ago.
Encouragement
There are two videos that I watch regularly because they remind me of all that is hopeful in humans. Our striving after life and connection that can be dimmed but so rarely extinguished. So when I need a lift or a warm fuzzy I watch one or both of these. Continue Reading
What I Learned in Therapy Lesson 3 – The Goal of Healing
See here for Lesson 1
See here for Lesson 2
Healing is not reaching a place of perfect peace and safety. It’s knowing that you can remain safe and be at peace no matter where you are.
Like most people, I went to therapy because I wasn’t happy with how my life was nor how I felt in it. So I wanted to get “better.” But the problem is that I really didn’t know what “better” was, just that it needed to be different from what I was. So, again like most people, I headed off to therapy, explained the problem as best I could, and trusted my therapist to get us headed in the right direction. Which she did. I just had no idea how very long that journey would be and how much ground it would cover. Continue Reading
What I learned in therapy Lesson 2
See here for Lesson 1.
See here for Lesson 3
Lesson #2: I don’t need to be scared of my feelings or overwhelmed by them. I learned this by watching the Boundary Ninja not be overwhelmed by them.
By the time I started working with the Boundary Ninja (OK I give, I’m using an acronym 🙂 BN) I had done significant work in therapy, recovering memories, processing trauma, learning about boundaries and most importantly, in learning I had my own voice. Throughout this, anyone who knew me (for over three minutes) would have probably described me as a very emotional person with a wide range between my highs and lows (for the geeks in my audience, if I were a sine wave, I would have a high amplitude. :)) So you can imagine my total shock that the most major discovery I made working with BN was how very far I stayed away from my feelings. They were often in lockdown, shut away, and kept as far from me as possible. This dynamic was so pronounced that I was in my late 40s before I actually realized I was a right-brain dominant person and that I actually had a creative side. I had fled SO far over into my left brain to stay away from my feelings that I had gotten an engineering degree. (I worked as an engineer for eight years, then left the work force for five years when my first child was born and when I returned became a technical writer.)
Continue Reading
Tales of a Boundary Ninja 
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