Helpful Books
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. 
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Commitment
This is poem/dialog I wrote when I really started to trust the Boundary Ninja to not abandon me and see me through my healing (a promise which he kept). When I started working with him, I both craved and deeply feared moving closer in relationship. This dialog was actually an attempt to articulate the limbic resonance between us, the unspoken questions I asked with my feelings, and the unspoken answers he provided with his consistency. It was also an internal recognition of the priceless gift I was being given.
Dissociation and Trauma: It wasn’t really that bad, was it?
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
Tales of a Boundary Ninja 
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