When someone says that they are sick of being treated like a child, what comes to your mind? One of the commenter’s on my blog post Mother Daughter Relationship Lies said that she was sick of being treated like a child, and caused me to think about the meaning behind that statement. Such a familiar expression. What is being treated like a child like? What do we adults mean when we say that? Is it how a parent wipes your chin when you are eating a soft ice cream cone? Is it holding your hand when you cross the street? Is it being told to brush your teeth and get ready for bed? It would be pretty weird if our parents did that stuff when we were adults. So when an adult says that he is sick of being treated like a child, I get a whole different idea about what this statement means.
I have teen agers. My youngest teen doesn’t like it when I suggest things off the menu to her. She likes to read it for herself and make her own choice. My older teen says that I am treating her like a child when she feels like I am not giving her enough choice or freedom. My oldest teenager (who is legally and adult in Canada) doesn’t use this expression.
In my experience, when adults use this expression it means that a parent is treating an adult in similar ways to the way that both my daughters express this dislike above. Using voice infliction and innuendo, parents can make adult children feel like we are not capable or too stupid to make our own decisions ~ still having the mind of a child.
Consider some of the following statements; these are meant to make you wonder about your thoughts and decisions. They are meant to make you question yourself.
~ You are not really going to do that, are you?
~ You don’t really believe that, do you?
~ You aren’t really thinking that are you?
~ You are not really going to wear that, are you?
~What were you thinking when you bought that?
~What were you thinking when you said that?
What were you thinking when you DID that?
The unspoken message is “are you nuts” or “you must be stupid”.
These questions are not designed to get you to think about what you did or said, they are meant to make you feel stupid. They are meant to make you question yourself. When we were children we depended on our parents to help us decide, to make good choices. This is what I think some of us mean when we say they are sick of being treated like a child.
My mother in law had a different way of trying to get me to do things her way. She would say “Well, you will most likely be ready to buy that next year. Well you will most likely breastfeed (my son) for six months. She seemed to have an issue with how long I was intending to nurse, and finally I told her that I would MOST LIKELY NURSE HIM until he or I was ready to stop. But I was really conflicted about it, and her words echoed in my head for years because I just didn’t understand her motive for trying to make me stop and I didn’t realize that she was constantly insinuating that I couldn’t decide, like I wasn’t capable of deciding what would be best.
Other questions are designed to control but even these still indicate a suggestion that you couldn’t possibly know what is best. Here are a few:
~ You aren’t going to eat that are you?” (I am talking about when someone thinks they are helping you with your diet, or insinuating that you need to lose weight.)
~You aren’t going to go there are you?
~ You aren’t really interested in HIM or HER are you?
~ Why would you want to do that?
~ Why would you want to go there?
If our adult / child relationships were conducted like this when we were children, we become accustomed to this kind of innuendo and control. It becomes part of how we do relationship. It is so familiar that we don’t really think about it. We don’t realize how devaluing it is. It has become part of our belief system, our false definition of relationship, respect and love.
When we fight this without really understanding what we are fighting, is it any wonder why we end up struggling with depression and other mental health issues?
Please feel free to contribute to this post with comments or share how this post impacted you.
Breaking out of familiar;
Darlene Ouimet
Mother Daughter Relationship Lies
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- Aware of the Danger
It is devastating to realize how little regard parents can have for their own child when that child is you. It is deeply wounding; I was filled with self doubt about why they felt this way. They planted that doubt; they made me question my value all along. This is a difficult cycle to understand and even more difficult to escape because the roots go so deep.
One of the things that I realized in the process of recovery was that the fear of losing my parents love was still very real. Even as an adult, the thought of standing up to my mother about our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship filled me with dread and could cause my heartbeat to spike with an anxiety that I never understood. No one wants to be rejected by their own parents. What I didn’t realize is that I still had the fears from the view point of a child.
When I was a child I was pretty sure that if my parents rejected me that I would be left to die. I could not survive in the world without them. That’s not just a fear; that is a reality. I didn’t think about someone else taking care of me. I think this is why it was easy for me as a child to take the blame for things that went wrong. If it was my fault, I could try harder. If I blamed my parents, and they rejected me, then I had no hope. So I tried harder.
Many other problems can grow out of this mindset though. When we have been kept down this way, it is easy for other people to treat us the same way; like we are less important than they are because we accept that we are less important and this sort of opens the door to other maltreatment. This was something that I fought accepting for a very long time but when I began to understand this concept I began to realize how my life was like a big sticky mess that kept snowballing into a bigger sticky mess. Everyone seemed to disregard me and there were times I was shocked at how I was treated by people.
So it was time for the untangling and rebuilding process. The tricky part was that I had to learn to refuse to be treated like I was less than anyone else. The first step was believing that I was equally valuable by exposing all the lies I believed, and replacing them with truth and then I had to learn how to draw boundaries. Now that was scary but I came to realize that if I didn’t do it, I would stay right where I was and my new growth and my hope for excellent mental health would be stalled.
Although I became aware of the way that I had been devalued by my mother and the damage it caused, for several years afterwards I continued talking to her and just ignored her jabs. I think I believed the new me would finally be good enough. I still wasn’t ready to deal with our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship but my life had already begun to change. I was speaking in mental health seminars about my recovery from Dissociative Identity Disorder and Chronic Depression and I was good at it. I was impacting people and inspiring hope that they too could overcome their mental health problems. I was impacting mental health professionals too.
I was invited to do the content edit on a book being written by a therapist about the destructive nature of power and control. I was SO excited to tell my Mom. She wasn’t impressed at all. She wanted to know why he asked me. She wondered (out loud) if I was having an affair with him. Something snapped in me. Ever since I was 6 she had communicated to me in various ways that the only thing that I was good for was sex or something to do with sex. That realization had been a big part of my therapy. Now, I was building a professional career and I had gone back to school. I was speaking regularly in seminars about recovery and my Mother, my own Mother, decided that if someone was noticing me, it couldn’t possibly be because I was smart or that I had a talent in that area; it had to be because I was having an affair and that any man who saw value in me really just wanted to have sex with me. I was so stunned that I didn’t say anything. I was silent and didn’t stand up to her. I knew that I didn’t deserve that kind of treatment and I thought long and hard about what to do about it. In my therapy process, I had taken a close look at my trust issues with others, but what about the trust issues that I had with myself? I knew that it was time for me to take action; to honour myself and step into my new belief; that I was worthy.
I was already aware of my fear of being rejected by her if I told her that she couldn’t treat me that way anymore but I also knew that if I didn’t tell her what my boundaries were, and stick to them, that nothing would change. The time had come.
Exposing truth one snapshot at a time,
Darlene Ouimet
Why Should we Love where there is Fear and Abuse?
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“Everyone was upset at me for not going to my brothers funeral. I refused to be a hypocrite. I was glad he died. That may sound horrible but it was such a relief not to have to live in fear anymore.”
That comment was from a reader on the Emerging from Broken facebook page in the same thread as the comments from my last post “Controlling Parents and Questions Abusers Ask”. This comment really struck me so I asked her permission to use it. What struck me was not the she was glad that he died, but that everyone expected this person to attend a funeral for someone she had deeply feared. Her feelings didn’t matter. All that mattered is that she do as she was expected to do. Do what others wanted her to do. This is also about obligation, and how obligation is used to control and manipulate people into doing what someone else says is the right thing to do. Her family was upset about her choice. They did not seem to care WHY she made that choice. This is one of my “why questions” that I forgot to post in my article about “Psychological, Physical and Sexual abuse WHY questions”. Why are we supposed to love people that hurt us just because they are family?
This comment reminded me of a time that my mother was extremely upset with me when I announced that I would never agree to see my older brother again. I was in my forties! I got her usual lecture about family being all important and how blood is thicker than water. (What the heck does that mean?) I asked her what her response would be if I told her that I was working in an office where one of my co-workers put me down constantly in front of the other co-workers. That this co worker spread lies about me to the rest of the office, ridiculed me and humiliated me constantly and never showed me any respect, yet demanded that I comply with his wishes. I asked her if she thought I should hang out with him after work. She emphatically replied “NO”. So I asked her what makes family any different. She didn’t have an answer for that.
It wasn’t very long after that when my mother was the one who was no longer speaking to me. Apparently she didn’t believe her own definition of family being all important. She didn’t love me by her own definition of love. There was no equality. I was supposed to respect her and love her, not the other way around. I no longer accepted the lie that I SHOULD love people who treated me like nothing.
I do not have to love, I am not obligated and there is no should. I am just as valuable as anyone else and me and my feelings deserve respect. I am not cold hearted and I do not make these decisions because I am heartless, but because I am taking care of myself now. As I began to comprehend the real truth instead of the lies I had accepted for so long and the skewed definition of love, I began to recover from all my many mental health issues.
Darlene Ouimet
Special News Tomorrow ~ July 27th 2010, I will be a guest on Conversations Live Radio with Cyrus Webb. The interview will begin at 8:00pm EST ~ 5:00 pm Pacific ~ 6:00pm Mountain and 7:00pm central. I hope you can join us then! http://www.blogtalkradio.com/conversationslive/2010/07/28/life-coach-darlene-ouimet-and-entrepreneur-ray-faulkenberry-on-conversations-live
Controlling Parents and the Questions Abusers Ask
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The post “Psychological, Physical and Sexual Abuse Why Questions” generated a lot of interest, so I decided to do a follow up post asking the questions that controlling and abusive people ask us. The response on the Emerging from Broken facebook page was huge.
These types of statements that controllers and abusers use are designed to keep us in a fog of confusion. Remember that this type of grooming begins when we are very young and becomes part of our definition of love. We are taught “if you love me you would not fight, argue or even disagree with me”. We may also be taught that compliance is respect and respect is a demand not a choice. The problem is that so often we end up respecting abusive behaviour and we are not sure what abusive behaviour is because it starts when we are so young.
The following ‘why questions’ abusers ask can be used to control and to cover up any type of abuse. They are used to guilt and shame us into looking back at ourselves and to question ourselves, instead of them. They are used to keep the victim in a spin ~ trying to figure out the truth and never quite putting a finger on exactly what the truth is. These questions are used to control. These types of questions are abusive. They don’t make sense but we so often don’t realize that because we have been groomed to accept these false definitions of love and respect since we were very young.
Here are some of the comments that came in on EFB Facebook, about typical questions and statements that are used to control, guilt and shame, force compliance, or cause to shut down.
~ “why don’t you just get on with your life and get over that? Why do you insist on destroying our family? Why can’t you let me forget that happened?
~ “Why don’t you spend time with me anymore? Why do you look so serious all the time?”
~ “Why can’t you forgive and forget? And I am told I SHOULD love them.”
~”After all I’ve done for you why are you treating me this way? Why can’t YOU just move on?”
~ Why don’t you like me? Don’t you remember all the fun we had when you were a kid? (along with an answer ~ “no, I don’t remember all the fun and even if there was some fun does that make up for all the other abuse?.. NO”)
~”Why don’t you respect him? He was a good provider. (Is that what a father is?) You are going to have to live with the way YOU are treating your Dad.”
~ “If you loved me you would… or If you loved me you would not….”
~”You SHOULD be grateful”
~” Why can’t you think of somebody other than yourself for a change?”
~ “Why can’t you grow up and start acting like your Mothers daughter?”
~ “You MAKE me do this to you. If you would do things right the first time I wouldn’t have to….”
~ “Why can’t you see this from my point of view?”
~ “Stop acting like a spoilt brat”
~ “What is WRONG with you?”
~ “Why do you keep talking about this? Why do you blame me; your father did it. What the hell are you thinking, writing a book about it? Why are you so selfish? Do you think you are the only one that matters? What about ME?”
These questions are full of the twisted communications and insinuations hurled at people for the purpose of control. Love is not disempowering and it does not support lies. This system is very backwards and extremely devaluing. Most of these questions are what controlling PARENTS said to their own adult children. We are called selfish, because we want to expose the abuse? Because we want our lives back? We are reprimanded for wanting to have a voice, for wanting to have a chance, for telling the truth? It is more important for them to keep up appearances and to protect the abuser or the secret than it is to validate a child or adult child? Therefore we are the ones with the problem because we want to be heard? In this system there is no hope. When we do as they ask everyone stays sick. And the most difficult part to comprehend is that they would rather us comply, cover up and obey, then become the flourishing healthy adults that we were born to be. We are told we SHOULD love them but we are not taught love by them. Love has not been modeled for us. They do not love by their own definition of love; the same definition of love that we are expected to love them by.
When I went back into my past to examine the events that originally caused my depressions and dissociative identity disorder, it became apparent that there were a lot of lies involved. There was justification by the abusers, there was blame towards me, when I was an innocent victim, there was covering up, ignoring, and “that didn’t happen” and “shush let’s just forget all about it”. This is where the mental illness accelerated for me ~ with the twisting of the truth; the not being protected and the misplaced blame. The illness accelerated because one lie breeds another lie. And when this type of control works, the controllers keep upping the ante. They want more control, more compliance.
We grow up and we are often attracted to controllers and abusers… it’s familiar; it’s what we know. By the time I was in my late thirties the confusion and the fog was so thick that I couldn’t see the truth at all anymore; I easily bought the lies, I conformed to the requests, I complied and I tried harder. My mental health grew increasingly worse. I had no idea what love was. This is how my belief system got so messed up. And it was in sorting it out; realizing the false from the truth that I recovered.
Please feel free to contribute any of your own stories or the questions used on you.
Busting through the fog,
Darlene Ouimet
The Fear of Setting Personal Boundaries
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- The Ring
“Drawing boundaries is one of the hardest things that we do. We are so afraid of the consequences of standing up to a controller in our lives. I was afraid that if I stood up to my mom, I would never get the diamond dinner ring that she promised would be mine. I realize that this sounds really “off” to me today.” Darlene Ouimet
That was the comment that I posted on the facebook page for this blog yesterday and it generated a fantastic discussion, so here is the long version of it. I was so afraid of my Mother but if you had asked me why, I could not have come up with an answer but lets just say that our mother daughter relationship was one sided at the best of times.
I didn’t give much conscious thought to why I let people walk all over me. I had these fears that I didn’t totally understand about what would happen if I told my mother that I was sick of her pushing me around. She had this diamond dinner ring that she had made for herself after my parents divorced. It was made out of the diamonds from her weddings rings from my father. I loved it for its sentimental value, something left over from their marriage, and it was a beautiful ring too and my mother promised me that it would be mine one day.
When my mother re-married I hoped that she would give me the ring, but instead she kind of dangled it in front of me for the next 16 years or so. I didn’t think much about it, until one day when I was visiting her and we were sitting on her bed looking through her jewellery box. The ring was in there. She hadn’t worn it for years but she still didn’t want me to have it. I tried it on; it was such a pretty ring, and it fit me just right. After a few minutes, I put it back in the jewellery box, but my mother didn’t notice. She started frantically looking around. She looked at my pockets; I am guessing to see if I had snuck it into my pocket when she wasn’t looking. She looked all around the bed and floor and since I realized that she thought I had taken the ring, I just sat there stunned, not saying a word. Finally she looked at me and in a stormy voice she asked “Darlene, where is MY ring?” I told her it was in her jewellery box. Before she even looked in the box she demanded “WHERE?”
Something in me snapped that day. She knew I wanted that ring, and she used it against me, but now she was willing to think that I might steal it to get it! I was hurt but I was disgusted too. She had no reason to think that I might just take it. I have never done anything like that! I would have understood if she wanted to keep the ring for her own sentimental reason, but to taunt me with it, and then accuse me of stealing it was just too much. I vowed that I would never want that darn ring again.
So it was interesting when she gave it to me for my birthday a year or so later. Why did she decide to give me the ring then? I had finally decided that I didn’t want it. Could it be that the ring didn’t serve her purpose anymore and that the ring no longer had any power over me?
By then I was in therapy and well into what I call in my head “the real process of recovery”. I remember opening the gift box and thinking my first thought which was “OH MY GOSH she finally gave me THE RING”… and my second thought “well you just gave me the only “thing” I ever wanted… now what are you going to hang over my head?” At some level this thought proved that I knew her motives with regards to that ring.
I had some weird feelings when I got that ring and although I wore if for a few months, I have trouble wearing it anymore because it reminds me of how many years that I put up with people having control over me and how I took it. It reminds me of how my own mother treated me like I was inconsequential. It reminds me that her illusions of being a fantastic loving mother are more important to her then I am! In my new healthy mindset that sounds WRONG to me on so many levels.
I don’t think this was just about a ring. I think the ring was just a symbol of the real fear, which was that if I stood up to my mother, she would remove herself from my life and for most of my life I was pretty sure that I did not want to risk that consequence.
This is just one small example of the thoughts and the fear of abandonment that I harboured below the surface. I hope that you can relate in some way to this story and please feel free to share one of your own.
Exposing truth one snapshot at a time;
Darlene Ouimet
Psychological, Physical, and Sexual Abuse WHY Questions
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Sometimes we get stuck on the “why’s” and the why questions. We can talk endlessly about what happened, we can realize that it was not our fault, we can face the pain of having been devalued, used, unprotected, powerless and disregarded, but the why questions still remain.
~Why did my mother seem to take pleasure in humiliating me?
~Why did my own mother publically tell men they could sleep with me? She even told my cousin that he could sleep with me because I was on the pill.
~Why would an adult sexually molest a child?
~Why did my mother’s boyfriend come into my room when I was a young teen, and why didn’t my mother believe me? Why did she blame me?
~Why did my mother hit me with a belt and then say that she was going to give me something to cry about?
~Why didn’t my Dad do anything to protect me? Why didn’t he notice?
~Why did my teacher hate me and threaten me every day until I was too sick to go to school? Why didn’t my parents believe me when I told them?
Thanks to the Emerging from Broken facebook page readers for participating in this post. Here are some of the questions that came in from readers on our Facebook Page:
~“Why are churches so closed minded about sexual abuse? Why do they put programs in place to prevent abuse, but not put programs in place to help victims?”
~“Why is it that in churches they tell you that if you read your Bible and pray, all the things from the past sexual abuse will just go away. They think you don’t need counseling or anything; you just need to get over it. Why is that?”
~”Why are the accomplices (those who ignore or allow or even assist in the abuse or hiding the abuser) are not charged or punished in the case of sexual or domestic violence abuse. Maybe more would speak up if a precedent was set. I know a lot of these people were/are victims or survivors too, but that is no excuse not to protect your own child.”
~ “Why is it that you feel as though you have just told someone you were abducted by green aliens when you talk about being sexually abused? They look at you as though you just said something that only a delusional person would say. AND that you have the audacity to put them in a position of having to respond.”
And this last question along with a very personal comment; ~ “Why is it that sexual abuse is one of the most heinous crimes out there, but most of the abusers never serve a maximum sentence? My father got out on good behavior; of course he did! There are no children in prisons to molest so he was on his best behavior! “
These questions are really just a handful of the “why questions” that we all have when it comes to having been abused, hurt or devalued in any way. Some “why questions” have possible answers but do they make us feel any better? When we hear that some people don’t care about their own children, but only their own selfish desires it only adds to the frustration that we already feel. Some why questions have no answers and sometimes the reason that we keep looking for answers is not just because we want so badly to understand but also because we believe that if we could understand that we would be able to move on. But think about that for a minute.
There is a danger in getting stuck on the WHY questions. Part of my victim mentality was made up of always seeking to understand others, and what that transferred into was that I made excuses for some of my abusers; there are as many excuses as there are abusers but really do any of the excuses help? I whispered in the dark to myself that my mother really did care, she just didn’t understand. I assured myself that my father didn’t know so he couldn’t do anything about it and that deep down he loved me as much as he loved my brother, it was just that he wasn’t interested in me because I was a girl and I assured myself that all fathers are this way. I told myself that some of my abusers were in an “altered state of mind” and really they just had no conscious clue what they were doing. I felt sorry for some of the women abusers that I had and told myself that surely they too had been abused and therefore it was not really their fault. I thought that I needed to try harder to “love” them and do what they wanted so that they would stop hurting me.
And as I have said so many times before I had been groomed and trained to believe that the reason that I was devalued is because I was not as valuable and because I deserved no better. I was convinced over time that I had done something; brought it on myself. I tried to understand my mother and I felt sorry for her, so I excused her behavior for many years and in excusing it, I allowed even more of it. I thought that if I found the reason “why” I could find the proof that really they did love me and then I could excuse them if only I understood. In reality, I was still looking to prove to myself that it really was my own fault or that I was still missing the “key” that would make them stop hurting me and start accepting me.
I had to let go of the why questions for a while. I had to in order to heal.
Today I still have why questions, but I also know that some questions don’t have answers and even more important than that, if there was an answer, it wouldn’t change anything, it would not make it alright, and it would not heal me.
Please feel free to add your own “why questions”,
Darlene
Victim Mentality (What Happened to Prince Charming?)
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Okay I admit it! Deep down I had dreams that prince charming would arrive and whisk me away on his beautiful horse and save me from the sad life that was mine. I was sure that being loved and treasured by the right guy was the answer that would solve all the problems and sooth all the hurt. As soon as that guy showed up, everything would be okay and I could start my real life. (Man oh man I waited a dang long time before I gave that dream up.)
But I had been victimized; I had a victim mindset and I was attracted to broken men. I was attracted to guys that needed me to rescue them, and for some reason I believed that if I did rescue them, then they would love me enough to make my life worth living.
I had this idea that if I did all the right things and soothed their pain, I could prove how much I loved them and they would love me back. I never noticed that I had this same belief about my parents. I didn’t realize that I believed that love is something that comes from doing something “good enough” for someone else. I didn’t know that deep down I thought that I was missing some key thing which is why no one would rescue me from my pathetic life.
Have you ever made excuses for someone because you knew that they had been hurt by life? Have you ever stayed with a boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife, because you wanted to somehow communicate that you would not hurt him/her like the rest of the world had. Have you ever had a deep desire to prove to someone that not all life is bad, that not all people will hurt each other and that you could be the one person who understands; that one person that could make the big difference?
I had a few relationships like that.
I made these kinds of excuses for others. I seemed to have a soft spot when I knew that someone had had a tough break in life, and I felt sweeter towards them. At the very heart of my heart, I wanted to be understanding and I wanted to think only the best about others; I didn’t want to believe that they might actually intentionally hurt me, so I let it go when they did. I believed these people when they said “You know I would never hurt you on purpose, I love you, you know me” So I was cheated on, hit, forced to do things I didn’t want to do, degraded, devalued, stood up and so many other things and when I complained I was told there was something wrong with me and that I just didn’t understand. They assured me that they loved me so much. I adjusted and I believed, just like I believed my other abusers; just like I believed my parents.
Something that comes to mind when I think about all the boyfriends that I “understood” and believed I could love into wholeness and ease their pain with my amazing love powers, is that I never cut myself any of that same slack. I was always willing to be the one who tried harder. I was always willing to say “oh that’s okay honey, I know you didn’t mean to hurt me”. But I was also always willing to chastise myself and tell myself that I was a bad person. I never thought that I deserved that healing love power myself.
I didn’t consider that I deserved to be loved and saved by ME. I didn’t even think that if I loved and cherished myself, that my dreams of feeling and being “good enough” would come true. I didn’t consider that if someone cheated on me, degraded and forced me, that I didn’t have to take it. I didn’t have to TRY HARDER; I just needed to get out.
Today I don’t have that same definition of love and I certainly don’t think it is up to me to rescue, sooth, restore value or carry all the burden of the relationship. I have learned to value and respect myself and to look at myself with the empathy that I have always had for the ones who treated me like crap. I declared my own value and I embraced it and believed it. When I finally figured out how my value had been defined by others, and where they were wrong and why I believed it, I was able to re-wire that belief system and eventually I knew who I was and what my value really was. It is others who treat us like we are not good enough to be loved; it is not that we are not good enough to be loved.
Darlene Ouimet
My Dual Thought Process in Therapy Sessions
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Everything felt NEW in the process. Everything WAS new! I had been so protected by my coping methods for so many years. When I started what I call “the process that worked” In my intake session with a new therapist, we talked about some of my coping methods, and my therapist mentioned that we would work on letting go some of my self control. I thought “I don’t think so, no freaking way” but I smiled and nodded. The truth is that I had no idea what he was talking about but it didn’t sound like something I wanted to try. I realize today he was talking about my coping methods. When I began to consider letting some of them go I quickly became very aware of my trust issues. For me, the therapy room became the tiny world where I would try out my new tools, new thoughts, new hopes and dreams. It would also be where I would face my fears, my false beliefs and the truth about my life and what had really happened to me.
As soon as I made the decision to really engage in the process of recovery, the fears came up in a big way and those trust issues were more evident than ever before. My first fears about learning to live in a new world were about my tiny new world ~ the therapy and the therapist. First of all I had to know that I could escape the therapy room, it I needed to. Each session I checked around for the escape routes. There were two doors one leading outside and into a beautiful garden and one leading out of the office itself. I made sure that I could reach the garden door if I had to run. Sometimes I had to sit on my hands; I thought I would get violent. I was afraid to get angry, I was afraid to “do the wrong thing” and I was afraid that if I did the wrong thing that my therapist wouldn’t like me. I could not relax; I was so sure that I would make a wrong move, and if I did, then he would make a wrong move. I was afraid of the therapist, but yet saw him as my last hope. Looking back my adventures in therapy were a tiny mirror of how I lived my life. Everything looked fine on the outside but inside it was chaos.
My therapist pointed out the escape routes in his office. I smiled nervously. Part of me was wondering if he knew that I had already planned my escape which meant that he would know that I didn’t trust him and that might hurt his feelings or make him angry; the other part of me immediately wondered why he was pointing the escape routes out to me. Was he going to do something to make me want to run? Was he going to try to trick me into trusting him? He told me that trust was something that came with time and that I didn’t have to trust him with anything until I felt more comfortable. Looking back, he explained this really well, but in my mind I heard that I should not trust him because he was human and that I might need to run. I had had problems with therapists in the past. A few of them made passes at me or made it clear that they were attracted to me. Part of me was pretty sure that I had caused the attraction and had sabotaged any help that they could have given me. I was afraid that I was going to do it again. I wanted help but I didn’t believe that anyone could help me; furthermore, I didn’t believe that I deserved it.
Even though I planned my escape should the need arise, I was absolutely sure that I would not use it even if I had to. I had frozen so many times before that I didn’t even trust myself to protect myself.
I wanted recovery but I was afraid of it. I wanted to trust someone to be able to help me, but I had learned my whole life that people rarely could be trusted. This is a difficult spot to be in when in counselling therapy because these trust issues and this mixed up thinking get in the way. A therapist can’t help you if you don’t or can’t tell him what is going on but the problem in most cases and certainly in my case was compounded by the fact that I didn’t really know what was wrong and I was pretty sure that the problem was me. I was afraid to tell the stories in case he validated that the problem was indeed me, and once again, I was afraid that he wouldn’t like me, therefore reject me and then my last chance would be gone. I was also afraid he would like me (inappropriately). There were two distinct sides to everything that I thought, although I was not really that aware of it then. Round and round I went, all my thoughts spinning and swirling in my head; most of them opposing each other. I had a lot to sort out and there were days when I wanted to give up ~ “Stop the world, I want to get off.”
Everything was hard. My therapist somehow picked out one thing for me to start with. The process was really truly difficult but the combination of wanting recovery so bad and some of the things that this therapist was saying enabled a little seed of hope for recovery and even a seed of hope for wholeness to take root and that is what kept me going. I fought for my life just a bit more then I fought the process at first. Eventually I fought the process less and less. Little by little the therapy helped, I got stronger, I learned how to feel and deal. I learned how to listen to my dual thought process and figure out the truth and false of each side of it. I learned how to stop spinning and sort my thinking out. It wasn’t super quick but it happened!
My therapist told me that we would find the jewel that was unique to me, the gem inside me. (I thought he was the one who needed therapy but I smiled and nodded.) But once again, he was right. I found the jewel inside of me. And guess what? We all have one.
Life is more colourful without the spin,
Darlene Ouimet
- on the rocks
Dysfunctional families are dysfunctional early on. We may not realize it early on though because we have no other frame of reference. When we look back at our lives, we are unaware of getting stuck in some of our childhood fears. I talked a bit about this in my last post ~ Dissociated Identity as a Coping Method for Mental Health
Feeling the feelings is very scary especially if you don’t realize when you are facing them with the fears of a child. I used a cave analogy a little while back in a post about how navigating recovery is often like trying to feel your way through a pitch black cave with a faulty flashlight.
I had another image of the cave this time looking at it from the outside. It just flashed through my mind a few weeks ago; I was sitting on a picnic blanket in a beautiful field of wildflowers on a breezy sunny day. It was quiet and peaceful and I was all alone. I was surrounded by food and was using both my hands to eat, while I stared wide eyed in fear, into the mouth of the cave.
Something about that whole image bothered me, and it kept coming back to me over and over again in my minds eye. My wide eyed staring at the mouth of the cave seemed logical, I understand the fear or hesitation that I have about going in there, but the chipmunk eating (which I figured was just nervous eating) was what didn’t seem to fit right. The way that I was using both my hands seemed odd to me. When this image had flashed in the back of my mind for a couple days straight, I noticed that my shoulders were bare and that I had a little sundress on. I looked a little closer at this image in my mind and I realized that I was about six years old in this scene, sitting by myself in a beautiful felid facing the mouth of a pitch black cave which represented my faulty belief system.
Although I have faced many “fears of the unknown”, for some reason facing the cave this time was really scary until I realized that I was six; in my mind, I was trying to face this fear of dealing with more false truth and belief system stuff as a six year old!
I think this is a good illustration of the process of recovery. We usually think we are facing things at our current adult age, but the things we are facing that happened when we were children we seem to face with the same mindset we had as children at the time of the incident which formed the false belief.
Realizing that I am facing fears of a false belief that I adopted when I was only six helps me to be gentler with myself. I can use self talk to reassure my inner child that she is not alone. Becoming aware of my mind/age also helps me to understand where this particular fear started; I was around six when my mother started to teach me about sexuality. Our mother daughter relationship had some faulty foundations. Another benefit of realizing my mind age is that instead of looking at my fear of dealing with yet one more thing from the standpoint of an adult and reprimanding myself for still having these issues, I was able to realize that I am facing this with the thoughts, fears and understanding of a six year old ~ a six year old who was being taught that her looks and sexuality would serve her in a world that she was not ready to live in. I developed fears about not looking good enough, and because I was also sexually abused, I developed fears about looking too good. I was able to understand the confusion that still exists inside of me. I was able to breathe a sigh of relief because now that I know I am facing the cave as a six year old and I have been through this process before, I know how to re-parent myself and begin the process of getting me and my six year old self through it.
Emerging continues…
Darlene Ouimet
When we find ourselves facing our mental health struggles, we usually realize that avoiding feelings is one of the biggest reasons that we develop coping methods. Sometimes avoiding feelings is the only way to survive the trauma. I realized when I was in my healing process that my dissociated identity disorder was one of the ways that I coped with everything. I had fragmented or broken into alter personalities so that I didn’t really have to feel because “they” (the alters) did it for me.
The way that I understand how this fragmenting takes place is that when a child experiences a traumatic event that is way too much to cope with, a new personality is born to take the memories and feelings and is in a way, separate from the core personality. In my case these other personalities began to deal with certain situations for me. For instance I did a lot of traveling in my twenties, and there was one alter that took over for all of my airport adventures. I didn’t realize that I had this other personality, but I did realize that I was completely different when I traveled. I had all this amazing confidence and wondered where the heck it came from. To this day since I have become whole, I feel very weird and uncomfortable in airports.
Different personalities took care of different situations. That was how dissociated identity disorder worked for me. When I got scared or even just uncomfortable, I disconnected from myself and the situation, and an alter personality took over for me. The purpose of “the alters” was to take care of me, my fears and my feelings. I was no longer able to deal with life, so they got me through. They took on the feelings and the memories as though they were separate from the real me.
There is an upside to it; these alter personalities got me through, they were how I survived. “They” dealt with everything for me, and as I got older, I even recognized a few of them and appreciated what I thought were just radically different sides of me. They got me places that I was afraid to go, they helped me do things that I was afraid to do.
There was also a downside to it; my life was a mess, I was not happy and the bottom line was that really, even with the alters, I still couldn’t cope. In becoming aware of some of my personalities, I was afraid of a few of them and the things that I-they would do often scared me. I was confused a lot of the time and had a lot of noise and chatter going on in my head. I never felt like me and I had these imposter issues. Sometimes I did things that “I” would never do, which was really confusing.
When I look back on my life with multiple personalities, it all looks very hazy as though I was on drugs or something. It was crazy and exhausting and when I got married and started having babies, I was so afraid of my strange behaviour that I completely shut down and eventually I never wanting to do anything or go anywhere and the depressions that I had on and off for most of my life got worse.
When I went into therapy, finally willing to face my dissociative behaviour I was terrified to learn how to live without dissociating but I was also sick of being sick and confused all the time. I had lost hope of ever living without depression and I hadn’t considered depression or dissociation as being types of coping methods. In a way I felt defeated, and in that defeat I think I surrendered the armour that I had built around myself, the ways that I coped and the walls that I had built around me, to protect my real self from the world. I gave up and I think it went a long way towards healing.
It turns out that coping methods are a lot of work! In the end it is far easier to just be one whole person. By facing the past and feeling those feelings I was able to heal. The reason that I used so many coping methods was really about the scared child inside me. I was still viewing the world as a powerless child because due to the circumstances of my upbringing, I was not able to grow up properly. By talking a look at the belief systems that I had adopted, I was able to go back and re-parent myself so that I could grow up and begin to view the world as an adult. When some of the wreckage of the past was exposed and seen for what it really was and the building of a new foundation was underway, eventually I didn’t need all those coping methods and my real life began.
Keep striving to go forward ~ You are worth it!
Darlene Ouimet
If you would like to contribute to this post, as always I invite you to leave your comments.
