The Beginning ~ Emerging from Broken
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I have been writing some pretty in depth posts about how the belief system gets messed up and altered and how the lies that we owned as the truth have shaped our belief system and imprisoned us in falseness. And I have been getting emails and questions about the “overcoming part”. There are many parts to the overcoming part which is commonly known as “the process”. In the coming weeks I hope to shed a bit more light on this.
Each part of the process has its own difficulty and each part has its breakthroughs and celebrations. The point is to pursue wholeness at each stage; to keep going forward. To keep pressing on because a little bit of freedom is just over that next wall and a little bit more freedom is over the wall after that. A little bit of freedom, a little bit more wholeness, and so on and so on. That is the process of emerging from broken.
Most of my adult life I’ve been what I refer to as a “truth seeker” or “a seeker”, which to me is the same thing. I studied many religions. I studied inspirational speakers and teachers and their work. I studied Greek and Hebrew word origins for 8 years in precept bible studies and did a lot of homework every day. I felt guilty that I didn’t feel purposeful, that I didn’t feel like I was okay or that I fit in and belonged. I practiced gratitude, and felt guilty that I deep down I was unhappy; I practiced positive thinking, I prayed every day but I never felt really right. I remember asking a therapist that I was seeing for one of my major depressions, “when am I going to just get over this stuff, (the past) I have been trying to get over it for 20 years.” He said that the abuse was part of who I was. That I might never get over it.
He might as well have shot me right there. I took his answer to mean that there was no hope that I would ever be free of the past that secretly drug me down into the depths of despair on a regular basis. My past messed with my self esteem, my self worth and my productivity as a person. It had become who I was, I was someone who had been abused. I was someone who had used alcohol and illegal drugs to cope with life. I was someone who struggled with depression and dissociative behaviours. I was someone who identified with being “unfit” and “invalid”. I was “used”, dirty, and shame filled. I was really tired. These things defined me.
I wanted to be defined differently but could not seem to ever get past the past. I wanted to be “washed clean” and all that great stuff that I heard when I went to churches, but it didn’t seem to happen for me. I could not have tried harder. For well over 20 years I was preached at, prayed over went to self help programs, seminars, conferences, well you name it, I tried it. The dirty feeling didn’t go away for very long; it always came back.
I felt like I had to hide all these feelings because everyone else said that they were “saved” or free or healed but never said exactly what that meant and I thought I must be doing something wrong, or that I was just plain ungrateful. No matter how often I picked myself up, my past seemed to be there, and I was getting really tired. But one day, on perhaps the darkest day before the dawn, I met someone who gave me hope. I met a therapist who had a different way of looking at things then other therapists I had been to. I was told that I could get over my past, I just had to learn how. I had to face it, dig down deep into my past and expose the lies that I had accepted as truth, and replace them with real truth. And so it began.
Stay tuned I will continue….. Darlene 
The Guilty Way
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The Guilty Way is one of many ways of coping that starts with the lie that says: the core of who you are is messed up, not good, not reliable, not able.
The lie might at first be spoken directly, verbally, by a parent or a relative, a friend or a preacher or a teacher. It might be communicated indirectly, more subtly, through over-protectiveness or unreasonable discipline. The lie is different than a benevolent guardian saying, “I want you to benefit from some correction and direction from me because I want you to be able to live your life to the full.” It attacks the heart; it plants deep seeds of doubt about the wholeness of simply being human.
It teaches the follower to doubt everything about themselves. Their feelings, their thoughts are never quite right, never quite good enough. They have little sense of how to navigate through their own life because how can they trust themselves? They are a beating heart that believes they beat the wrong way. The Guilty Way teaches them to survive by either following other people or following idealistic “rules” outside of themselves. It creates a constant ongoing checklist in the mind, a constant and fearful battle to figure out the next little step. Sometimes those around us who have labored in it longer than we have cheer us on. Many times they do so in jest… or more blatantly with little comments, facial expressions or reactions.
It can tinge in almost any situation. In making choices about what to wear, what to eat, what to say… who to invite, who to call, who to visit… where to buy groceries, how often to clean the house, how to arrange the furniture… what kind of job to have, what kind of friends to have, what kind of wedding to have… where to go on vacation, what kind of bathing suit to wear, what kind of activities to do… what kind of haircut to get, what kind of makeup to wear, what kind of music to listen to, what kind of movies to watch… who to talk to at the party, where to sit in church, how much to charge your customers [if you’re acquainted with this Guilty Way as I am, feel free to add to this list in a comment!... ]
It can become so insidious and accepted that we live our lives turned inside out. We live to exclusively please others or fulfill impossible expectations because we doubt that it’s good enough for us to make choices with our own happiness in mind. We doubt that paying attention to our real desires and thoughts can lead us towards the good life. The Guilty Way wraps around our hearts like a snake, squishing out our life, our spontaneity, the vibrant, good and healthy us. And it is never quite satisfied.
More on a DIFFERENT way this Friday…
The Life Long Damage of Abuse ~Food for Thought
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If someone told you that they beat you because they loved you; would you believe it? What if you were a child? What if you didn’t ever remember a time when there were no beatings, and each time it happened you were told that you were loved, that the brutality was necessary and it was because you were so loved? The beatings were for your own good. Do you think that over time this beating would somehow get mixed into your definition of love?
And if you were sexually abused, and the abuser whispered words of love, all the while taking the innocence away from you and hurting you but telling you that it would not hurt for long, and that it was all part of love, that you will like it and it is good for you. If this happened over and over again until it was just part of life, do you think that this kind of abuse would become mixed up with the definition of love?
What if your accomplishments were never good enough? What if you were told that they were never good enough until you thought the belief actually came from yourself? And what if you never thought about where the belief came from and you labeled yourself a perfectionist.
And if you were told that you were bad or if you were told that you were always in the way? Would that influence your definition of love?
What about your view of yourself? Do you think that you would have a clear picture of who you are and what your worth is? Do you think that your self esteem would have had a chance to grow and blossom? If you were listening to an abuse story from someone else, would it be more important than your own story? Would you be more horrified by their story then you are of your own? Do you compare one type of abuse with another type of abuse, defining one as worse then another one?
The definition of a word can have a different meaning to each person according to their own personal experience with the word and the way that they were taught to understand the word. I had been taught the wrong definition of what is “good for me”. When someone says “I love you” what do they mean? What is the definition of “best”? When the definition of good, love, respect or even the definition of abuse has skewed dimensions, we can have a big problem. We begin to struggle with truth because we have been taught false is true.
Mental health can be recovered at any age; these were many of the thoughts that I discovered which greatly assisted me on the road to healing and emerging from broken. It is my hope that some of them assist you too.
I would love to receive your comments on how this post makes you feel.
With all good wishes,
Darlene Ouimet
Transformation and Understanding
By · CommentsTaking a thinking break, I looked over to my calendar. The saying for February was about growing quietly but persistently… I liked that one. Suddenly I realized that it was time to turn it over to March! Pulling it off my cubicle wall, I excitedly peeled up the next page to read this month’s quote. It read:
“The most powerful agent of growth and transformation is something much more basic than any technique; a change of heart.” ~John Welwood
In a split second, I took my pen, crossed out “heart” and wrote a different word underneath.
A change of heart… My heart has to change? How?…
It was as if I was a little girl in church again and the pastor was telling me that I needed to change my heart. Feet dangling above the floor… innocent eyes and ears drinking in every detail, every voice inflection, every verse read, every song sung. Change my heart? Make it somehow… better?
Does this mean I have to change how I feel? Yes, I guess it must be that. I have to have better feelings. So some feelings are bad, and some feelings are good. Okay… so how do I change the bad feelings to good feelings? Because that “good” heart?- that’s what I want. Oh, and having a change of heart means I need to be good on the outside too? Maybe that will help… Okay, give me the list of what’s good and I will work very hard at it. Very hard! If I can work hard enough at this list, then will I get that good heart? Where do I go for the stamp of approval? What signs can I look for to know that my heart really has changed for the better?
I don’t think the writer meant for his words to be taken in quite this way… but that is how they struck me today. Instead of the phrase change of heart, I’ll be looking at the phrase change of understanding for this coming month.
Understanding. After I wrote it, I thought about that word. I pictured something strong standing up on the inside of me, strong legs and strong arms holding up my heart, holding it in place, letting it breath, letting it pump and flow and give and receive and BE alive. Understanding. Knowing that way before it got so confused with other people’s versions of “good”, my heart was good. It was born that way. It’s not my heart that needs to change. The thing that creates the vitality of transformation is a change in the underpinnings of what I believe about myself and a new understanding of where the faulty underpinnings came from in the first place.
~Carla~
The Process of Normalizing Abuse
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Darlene Ouimet CTACC
Something happens that causes us to somehow live with abuse. Something happens either over time or because of one single trauma, that is not dealt with properly. If it is an abuse that happens in childhood, then it isn’t up to US to deal with it properly, it is up to the adults in our lives to help us deal. There are a few things that teach us to live with being abused, and even encourage us to accept it. It could be that we are not protected from it or that it somehow gets normalized; it could be that we are convinced that we deserved it, asked for it, or liked it. It could be that we were threatened and then slowly brainwashed into believing any of the above. Something happens that causes us to eventually accept abuse as part of life.
When I was a child, I learned through a series of behaviour modification techniques how to behave. I learned that when I was sweet natured or when I tidied my room, that I got a wonderful smile and approval from my mother. When I went to bed without a fight, there was peace. When I ate what was on my plate without complaining, I didn’t get yelled at. When I tried to skip eating the potatoes, I got forced to eat them. If I didn’t fight with my brothers, everything was fine, and if I did, I got in trouble. I learned there were different degrees of “trouble”. There was the kind that got me sent to my room and there was the kind that got me a spanking. There was also the rejection kind which I hated. My mother was proud when I was polite and courteous and smiled at people and she was displeased if I talked back. You get the picture. This is how most of us learn which behaviours are good and which ones are bad or wrong, and most of that kind of learning isn’t the problem.
But what happens when a child lives with mixed messages about right and wrong? What happens when there is abuse which is wrongly justified? What happens in the mind of a child when something like this happens? I get this picture in my mind’s eye of a huge circuit board (the belief system) with the wires getting plugged into the wrong spots and the sparks just start flying as everything begins to break down. That is what happens to a child’s mind. That is what happened to my mind. There are mixed messages, wrong messages, lies, confusion and pain. I am told that I am imagining what happened. I am told that I am exaggerating. Sometimes I am ignored. Other times I am made fun of. Eventually living with the mixed messages, the devaluing and being told that I am wrong becomes my normal. Eventually the abuse also becomes “normal”.
My world became familiar and even comfortable in the sense that the way things were was what I was used to. My belief system was formed, but it was full of false truth.
Any kind of abuse or devaluing behaviour can lead to leaning how to accept being treated indecently. This normalization process is not caused only from sexual or physical abuse; learning to accept abuse as deserved can happen from ANY type of abuse inflicted on a child and that will set the stage for ANY other type of abuse to be accepted later on.
Darlene Ouimet
Beyond the Resignation Wall
By · CommentsExcerpt from A Clash of Kings, pg 97, by George R.R. Martin
“Sam squinted up at the Wall. It loomed above them, an icy cliff seven hundred feet high. Sometimes it seemed to Jon almost a living thing, with moods of its own. The color of the ice was wont to change with every shift of the light… The Wall stretched east and west as far as the eye could see, so huge that it shrunk the timbered keeps and stone towers of the castle to insignificance. It was the end of the world.
And we are going beyond it.”
In a previous post, I described the process of breaking through the walls that hold us back, how the light shines through the cracks and we can see the lies that these walls are whispering to us, the lies that keep us trapped inside.
There’s this one big wall that I keep coming up against time and time again. Sometimes I break through it. Other times, I give up. I peer beyond this wall. I know there’s so much to thrive in beyond it! It is a place full of opportunity, growth, joy. But when the lies start whispering it looks all the more unsafe, unfamiliar, there’s not as many people, there is too much to learn. When planning to pursue something new, I sometimes take a few steps in but then start believing (what I see now I’ve believed my whole life) that because I find this new thing so difficult, I just musn’t have what it takes to do it. I am incapable; I MUST just be inherently flawed.
This is such a painful lie to be stuck behind. My true heart says “I want to go beyond! That’s where all the good stuff is, the stuff I’ve dreamed about my whole life! I deserve to be there! I must be able to do it!” But the old rut says, “But it’s so hard. You’ll be uncomfortable. There’s pain to go through. People might think you’re crazy. You’ll mess up and look silly.”
The athletes in this year’s Olympics were champions against that lie (and YEAH Canada!!). A friend of mine pointed this out to me this week. They work and work and work towards a goal, going through all the ups and downs along the way. It’s no bed of roses; there’s no official place of “perfection”, of arrival. They embrace the journey and celebrate the progress towards or the achieving of their dreams.
So the simplest truth dawned on me. A thing won’t work unless I work it. Imagine a car sitting in your driveway. A person could look out there and say, “Hm, look at that car. It’s not driving; it’s just sitting there. It mustn’t work.” But… it’s plain that that’s not the whole truth! A thing won’t work unless I work it. A vehicle exists to serve me, but I have to drive it, get in and learn to work the controls, learn to keep moving forward. We work as a team.
In the world of thriving, there are many new things to actually put into practice, and I will fail from time to time. But my inexperience does not define my capability. It is simply inexperience, plain and simple. In the world of capability, I DO have what it takes to travel the path with all its ups and downs. Understanding this truth is totally freeing… The goals I envision for myself inspire hope in me again, and the resignation Wall loses its power.
PUNK ROCK GOTH and EMO TEENS~ labels are dangerous
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- Same Girl ~ Different Day
I would like to thank Cindy Leigh for her comments on my post “Punk Goth Rock Star Faces Society. My response back got so long that I decided to make it a whole post. If you have not read the post you can find it here, as well as the comments from Cindy Leigh.
I think there are a lot of parents, grandparents and people in general with this same fear about clothing style. First of all I think that kids dress to express themselves in many different ways and for many different reasons. For some it is creativity, even art. For others the clothing is the wall they put up to kind of steer people away from looking inside of them, beyond the clothing; the clothing or the style is the defense or the protection and it serves a worthy purpose. Sometimes the way that a teenager dresses is even a cry for help or a cry to be seen as in need of help. For many it is simply the way they want to look. But this is not what I was getting at.
I try not to decide why kids dress the way they do and try not to pre-judge them for it because I have come to realize that other people defined me with their judgments and that did an incredible amount of damage. I had to learn how to think for myself and even what to think about myself when I was in my forties! I strive to meet people where they are at, and try to accept them however they present themselves. I find that this is empowering for teenagers, and they seem to trust me easily.
I myself used to be pretty “gothic” but I was nothing like my daughter. I dressed in a lot of black because I felt black. I felt hopeless. Black helped me hide. Black was a feeling for me. I was depressed, and my daughter isn’t. She is bright and happy. We have had a few conversations about these posts the past few days and she said that if she had to “label herself” which she never would, she would say that she is Punk with Emo influences. She corrected me that she is not Gothic at all. (oops) She is very clear that this is her clothing style and that she dresses the way she feels comfortable dressing. So you see even calling her Punk/Emo is a no no, because even that is labeling ~ which is defining! It gets complicated!
In our society, we good people talk so much about “reaching out with love…” but what does that mean? If we have already decided what is right and what is wrong, then we can actually do more damage when we reach out to others if we intend to eventually share our judgment. We react to “the looks” of people out of fear, but think about where that fear comes from. Think about where our judgments come from. They have their basis in fear, a fear that we have been taught.
My post was really not about Goth, Punk or Emo clothing. My post was really about acceptance. It was about letting my daughter be who she is, instead of who I think she should be or how I think she will be happier and safer if she looked different, because when I tell her that, I am actually telling her that her looks are wrong and bad, she feels like I am telling her SHE is wrong and bad.
My post was about trust and love and remembering what all the judgment that I lived with did to me. It was about how I came out from under the oppression of being told how to live, how to think and who to be, when no one ever looked at who I was or appreciated ME for me and how I had to learn all that as a grown woman with children of my own and how much of my life passed me by. My post was about trusting my children, and trusting myself as a parent and it was about empowering others to be who they are and celebrating the individuality that each of us has to offer the world.
Today I embrace my individuality, I celebrate who I am and know what my gifts are. I would like to pass this freedom and wholeness on so I celebrate each of my three children’s individuality and try to encourage them to find and embrace their gifts and their uniqueness.
And at the end of the day, we all like each other.
Darlene Ouimet
The Truth
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It’s that stuff that makes us grow, helps us heal, helps us see. It transcends time, weaving its way through our childhoods, our presents, waiting for us in our futures (in the next second, and the next and the next…) It always leaves its candles burning, stars of light dotting our paths in every direction.
The truth leaves us forever changed. It comes and sits down in our living room or our kitchen and has a conversation with us. It welcomes every thought, every feeling, every doubt, every cry for help. It challenges us. It comforts us. It says, “There is a better way.”
Sometimes it is a whisper through stillness, a subtle sense in the far distance that knows if it comes any closer it will scare us away. It stays constant and unchanging. We move and it moves with us.
Sometimes it is a thousand trumpets! It bangs on our door in the middle of the night and says, “HEY! You were looking for me! HERE I AM! (oh, were you sleeping?…)”
Sometimes it runs to us, spanning miles and leaving its enemies conquered in its wake. It is valiant.
Sometimes it is just there. In the words of a friend, in listening to a child’s questions, watching the clouds, beholding a flower or a pet or cooking a meal, in a book or a blog or a song. It speaks out from such everyday things; it surprises us with how close it exists, how readily it speaks… candid, calm. It cries. It cheers. It watches. It sees.
Sometimes it is hidden. The lies we were told and the lies we believed encrusted it, and we pick up a chisel. We have to work at knowing it. Chip away this and this, and we glimpse it and keep chiseling and we sweat and we grow new muscles; we know there’s only one way.
We test it. We mull it over. We chew on it. It becomes part of who we are. Sometimes it tastes so satisfying, and this scares us at first! Sometimes we sit and look at it with hungry eyes for awhile, questioning if… we are worthy of it? Sometimes we can’t accept it because we aren’t ready. Sometimes we wolf it down! Sometimes it lands on us and explodes like fire. Sometimes it’s a seed that takes years to grow.
It reaches out to us in the long rays of a sunny morning and blankets us in the soft light of a night’s moon. It is the light that illuminates our souls and makes us shine.
Psychological and Emotional Abuse ~ How Self Doubt Grows
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Do you ever wonder how we arrive at a place where we don’t trust ourselves? Why do we doubt ourselves? Why do we think that someone else must know better than we do, what is best for us even when we are grown up? And before we get to that place what happens that causes children to so easily accept that they deserve to be treated badly?
This is a story that I hear every day in the lives of others who struggle for freedom and wholeness. This is just one example of how I learned to doubt myself. I guess you could say that I was encouraged to doubt myself from a very young age by the way that I was raised.
I was a very quiet, compliant and sweet kid. I never caused trouble or got into trouble. But for some reason I was completely ready to believe that I was indeed a problem and I carried this belief with me into adulthood and into every relationship I ever had. When I was in grade 5, which would have been when I was 10 years old, I had a teacher who hated me. I don’t remember thinking that she hated me back then, I was too busy trying to please her.
This teacher humiliated me in front of the whole class. She regularly threatened to cut my long braids off if I so much as touched them. When my homework was correct, she told the class that my father must have done it. She said that she didn’t know why I was so slow. I disgusted her! She said a lot of horrible devaluing things that damaged my self esteem and I was deathly afraid of her. She seemed to just spit her venom out at me.
When I told my parents, I was told that I must be exaggerating; that I should respect my teacher. They accused me of lying! There was no protection OR validation to be found from my parents. I didn’t try very hard to get them to listen to me. They had been telling me for years that I was overly dramatic and that I liked to talk to hear myself talk, so I knew that I was wasting my time. Furthermore, I was willing to accept that it must be my fault. Somehow I had done something to make this teacher hate me. I was causing her stress somehow. I believed it.
I was taught to respect my elders by being told that I was lying, that I was exaggerating, that I was dramatic. Worse yet, these statements were made by my parents in smiling gentle tones so I could be told that I misunderstood those reprimands. Respect came to mean that everyone else is right; I am wrong. I believed that I was less valuable then others because I was not heard. I was dismissed. There was no equality. I didn’t even get a say. These things defined me, they became about who I was; a liar, dramatic, an attention seeker.
I got very sick that year. I suppose the stress affected me physically, but there were some things about my illness that caused the paediatrician to gently pry into my emotional life. He asked my parents to leave the room and I remember that he talked to me; he wanted to know about me and he listened to me and it came out about my teacher. I don’t remember all the details, but it resulted in him ordering them to take me out of the class that I was in. He said that if they didn’t, or if the school would not co-operate he would get a lawyer. The teacher was emotionally and psychologically abusing me.
I felt guilty that he stuck up for me. I felt unworthy. Deep down I was pretty sure that I was the one that was causing the problem and that now I’d caused my parents embarrassment; they would have to go to the school and get me out of that class. This was a horrific time for me and my dissociation took a different turn that year. I can still remember the internal fight, I constantly questioned myself about whether or not I had made the whole thing up and then in the same breath consoled myself with the fact that my parents told me the teacher confessed everything in a meeting.
I learned to doubt myself way before this teacher abuse thing. I had learned to doubt when I was being abused and where the blame lay by the actions, reactions and teachings of the adults in my life.
Darlene Ouimet
The Power of Acceptance
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This week I felt a real mixture of things. Restlessness… mixed with this sense of acceptance of exactly where I am right now. I’ve never been in this kind of place before. I’ve felt content at certain parts of my journey, but this contentment was usually dependent on an outside condition, a person or something that I felt defined me as me. And it didn’t last.
So this acceptance is something different. It’s rooted from something deep down… It’s starting to happen more and more. Sometimes it unnerves me. For most of my life, I relied on pain to motivate me. Guilt. Shame. I pushed and pushed myself to achieve or be some kind of idealized person, striving to satisfy other people’s expectations of me, the church’s expectations, what I thought God’s expectations of me were… (more on guilt in another post!)
In my process of healing, I am learning to trust my heart. A huge part of my old belief system was this belief that I was inherently bad at my core. I believed all my motivations and intentions were purely selfish and that I couldn’t trust myself to be good without really trying hard to be good, to act good. Digging out this lie and believing instead that I am good deep down without having to try changes how my growth is motivated. Though I still struggle with that old belief system from time to time, I am becoming motivated to continue growing now because I believe I deserve to be truly happy and fulfilled, not because I feel so guilty about how bad I am.
Acceptance of my current place, my current stage, my current “being” is very powerful. I’m saying to myself, “Here is where you are, and you are good. If you didn’t change a single thing about yourself from here on in, you would still be okay. You don’t have to work harder to increase or prove your value.”
I remember just after I had come home from college I was struggling with this truth. I had gained 20 pounds over my last year there. I had always believed I had to be slim in order to be okay, so this extra weight caused me a lot of anxiety. I remember the feelings, looking at myself in the mirror from all angles, needing to buy bigger clothes, feeling my stomach when I laid in bed at night, trying to test if I really was “fat”… Sometimes I would actually grab my waist in anger until it hurt. I felt disgust towards myself.
I decided to start exercising to lose the weight. But something powerful happened before that habit really started helping me. I was starting out on one of my first walks outside and suddenly just knew that I had to let go of this self-hatred related to my weight gain. It was dragging me down, making my efforts counter-productive, like a big iron plow I was dragging behind me all the time. I remember this feeling of acceptance washing over me, acceptance of exactly where I was at. I actually physically hugged myself and somehow in that moment was able to let go of the slave-master, self bullying way of motivating myself to change. The compassion that was living deep down inside awakened and overtook me at just the right moment, freeing me. Coming to that place of acceptance totally changed how I felt inside. I carried out my new exercising habits with this attitude of love for myself rather than hate and guilt.
I believe we were all created to thrive, and as I continue to remain true to my heart and where it is leading me, I will never stop growing. I don’t have to be afraid of feeling content in the “now.” This acceptance isn’t resigned or numb or deadened. It’s part of how I love myself. It’s an inspiring place to be, having a dynamic of peace mixed with a dynamic of being excited to move on to the next thing. Each stage of growth involves a plateau afterwards (and sometimes before!), a place to celebrate and rest and regroup for the next stage of the journey.
