My Freedom ROCKS!!

I have decided to throw my Freedom Rock in the pond in our pasture right here on our farm over 1800 miles away from the child abuse that I suffered but where the emotional abuse of my childhood continued even as an adult and where my depressions increased until I no longer believed there was any hope for me. This is also the place where I did my healing. This is the land that I rode my horse on for hours and days on end, walked for hours meditating and contemplating what had happened to me and the false messages that I believed because of it. This is the land that I raised my kids on and the land where I took my life back.   

My freedom ROCK is going to be based on the following quote by Alice Miller

“The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our lives; with cruelty or with tenderness and protection.” Alice Miller

I made a decision quite a while ago that I was done treating myself the same way that I had been treated by others. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Enforcing that decision that I was “done discounting me” has been a whole other ball game. In the beginning I came to realize that I had put myself last so much and for so long that I never even considered what I might have wanted and when asked I didn’t have an answer. The learning curve on this one has been huge for me. Even in wholeness I didn’t listen to myself, just like I had not been listened to. I had to learn to listen to myself and validate what myself was trying to tell me. If I was tired, I had to learn to let myself rest. If I was hungry I had to learn to nourish myself with healthy foods. I had to learn to “catch” the con job that I was doing on myself, telling myself that something good, was not so good.  

In the process of emotional healing I constantly had to reassure myself that I was on the right track. I had to validate that I had been mistreated. (I had been blamed for my problems for so long that I believed I deserved everything that happened to me.) I had to convince myself that I deserved better than the ways that I had been regarded and disregarded for most of my life. I had to start the healing process validating that there was damage that I deserved to heal from. I had to learn to treat myself according to the true definition of love.

And that is a process that I also had to learn to apply to the way that I regarded and treated me.  

I love chocolate and potato chips and convinced myself for years that they were a treat and a comfort that I ‘deserved’. After I ate them however, I never felt good. My reward was really a punishment and I could see flashes of the past intertwined with the ways that I had learned to treat myself. Many of the “rewards” that I had received in my childhood were actually punishments too. Rewards that had “obligation” attached to them and rewards that had a price tag caused me to get my definition of “reward” mixed up. Sometimes rewards were a payment to make up for something bad that happened or a pre payment for something bad that was about to happen. Compliments used for the purpose of grooming me to be compliant made me very wary of compliments; even compliments from myself.  All these things went into the grid of my belief system.  I learned to treat myself the dysfunctional and disrespectful way that I had been treated by others.  I broke agreements that I made with myself, I lied to myself and as a result I no longer trusted myself.

This past year I have been getting deeper at the roots of the trouble I’ve had with self care. I have been looking at where it all began and my own history with “self love and self care”.  I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the way I’ve treated myself and the roots of that treatment and my belief system around that self treatment.  I noticed that I broke agreements with myself. I became aware of how often I lied to myself, conned myself or convinced myself that something that wasn’t good for me, was really not bad for me or that there was a “good reason” to justify it. I saw where I had learned to treat myself that way. I realized that just like with everything else in my life, I had learned it very young. I learned to discount me, just like I had been discounted. And I learned to try harder with myself just like I always tried harder for everyone else but in the end I was never good enough for me; in the end by my own actions, I didn’t show myself love.

About seven months ago as a result of paying closer attention to the way that I regard myself, I started to make some changes in the way that I treat myself and I have been learning to listen to myself when it comes to self care. In the first couple of years of recovery and emotional healing I learned to re-parent myself. I am taking that process to a deeper level now because my understanding is at a deeper level.

SO, my freedom rock is going to be about nurturing my relationship with me in a deeper way and letting go of “self abuse” and self disregard. I am going to take my rock and write my vows to me on it. I am done with discounting myself and my needs. I am going to continue to listen to myself and keep working on regaining my own trust.  

I promised myself that I would finish my book and create a companion work book so that I could generate an income from the full time work that I do here in EFB. The first book has been sitting on my desk waiting to be sorted through for almost a year because I put this website, my blog posts and answering the comments BEFORE myself and my needs. I take breaks when I am burned out instead of before I get burned out, and I spend over $200.00 a month out of my own pocket to support this website. I always told myself that it is my passion for wholeness that drives me to do too much and put the bigger projects that I always had in mind on the back burner but in fact it has been my expectations of myself that have gotten in the way of my completing those projects like my books. It is putting others needs before my own needs, just like I was always trained and taught to do in the past. It is a “left over false belief” that my value can be “proven” by my actions.

One of the readers here shared that she was going to draw a “box” on her Freedom ROCK to represent that she was no longer in it, and she was throwing that BOX into the deep. That really resonated with me as I so often talked about “the box” in the first few years of my emotional healing and could really relate to having been in the box that abuse, neglect and unreasonable expectations from others put me in for most of my life.

I am going to draw an empty box on my Freedom ROCK too.  My box is going to represent “the part of the box” that I still had part of myself in even in recovery. It is going to represent the letting go of unreasonable expectations of myself. It is going to represent that not only have I empowered myself to stand up to abuse and refuse to accept not being treated as equally valuable FROM other people, it will also serve to remind myself that I won’t accept it from ME anymore either!

My freedom rock is going to represent MY declaration of freedom and Wholeness when it comes to self care and self love!

Please share your thoughts and your Freedom ROCKS stories here.  If there are freedom ROCKS stories shared on other freedom ROCKS category posts I might add them to the comments in this post so that people can come and read them all in one place.

Inspiring hope, freedom, wholeness and celebration of life!

Darlene Ouimet                                                             

There are some great ideas for freedom rocks shared in the following related posts and their comments; Freedom ROCKS about page

The Motivation behind Freedom Rocks by Mimi 

What freedom rocks means to me by Lauralee

Texting with my Daughter Katie

I have three amazing and wonderful children. They were all under the age of 12 when I started this specific type of emotional healing journey that I write about here in Emerging from Broken. 

I have worked at being close to my children. I decided when each of them were born that I would be intentional in the way that I did relationship with them. I was intentional about what I communicated and how I showed them love and acceptance.  My main goal in the beginning was to inspire them to be who they are in spite of living in a world full of people living a dream someone else had for them. I had a slight concept of the millions of kids (like me) who tried to “fit in” by being what they perceived others wanted and by being / doing what they thought others would “love” them for.

Mothers Day articles and dysfunctional mother daughter posts along with dysfunctional and toxic parent child relationship posts are the most popular posts that I write when it comes to the search engines like “Google”. (not so much when it comes to sharing with social networks such as Facebook) My blog posts on this subject are found in search engines hundreds of times a day. There is a lot of pain in the world around toxic mother and child relationships.  This year I became aware of some new things about motherhood; the emotions I had to face as a mother caused me to reflect even MORE deeply on the way that my own mother treated me. And it was painful.

This year my oldest daughter Katie (she is my middle child) went off to the University of Lethbridge to study Neuroscience. Although it was an exciting time for both of us, feelings of pride and love mingled with fear and insecurity. There were so many unknowns! But life ~ at least life without restrictions has a way of going forward in spite of those fears.

The University of Lethbridge is only a three hour drive away so my daughter Katie was able to come home on many of the weekends. During mid terms and finals however, she would stay at the University to study and then sometimes I didn’t see her for almost 3 weeks straight.  And I could “feel it”. I felt an absence and a longing. Sometimes my chest would ache with missing her. Sometimes I would get up and pace the room, rubbing that empty spot and marveling at how my heart actually hurt with missing my baby.

Both Katie and I were surprised at the degree and depth of the homesickness that she experienced. I was scared that she wouldn’t miss us at all actually.  Without realizing it I had braced myself for rejection. I was afraid that she wouldn’t need me anymore and that she was all grown up and independent now. Perhaps she would even rejoice in “getting away from me”. I thought university kids were supposed to be celebrating their freedom from parents and calling their parents “lame” and all that sort of thing. I realized that I had been really afraid that Katie would go off to University and never think about me again. And that fear came from the experiences that I had with my own mother.  Not because I left home at 17 and never wanted my mother again, but because my mother never wanted me. My mother didn’t pursue me, but in my mind I blamed myself for that for so long that even when it came time for my daughter to leave home deep down I believed that she would not want me anymore either.

Katie wasn’t shy about expressing her homesickness which also surprised me. She wrote status updates in facebook about it all the time. She even posted a few screen shots of our text conversations. I had feelings that I had never had before such as an unbridled excitement that perhaps I had succeeded in achieving a really loving and mutually respectful relationship with my daughter!  

Katie and I had this one conversation on text messaging during her finals in the second semester where I told that I missed her so much that my chest hurt and she said that hers did too; she told me that it felt like her heart was crying. YES ~ that was the best way to describe it.  Another time I told her that it felt like something was missing in my chest and she said “It’s me! Its me that is missing” and YES ~ Katie was exactly what was missing.  

As time progressed I became aware of other thoughts just niggling below the surface; thoughts about my own mother. I wonder why my own mother never missed me? I moved out when I was only 17 years old. I moved across the country when I was 19 years old and my strange mother never seemed to give me a second thought.  She made “keeping in touch” my responsibility. She never showed any kind of vulnerability towards me by any sincere expression of missing me or having even in having any interest in me. I saw this all in a new light when I missed Katie so much my heart ached. I had to face the pain of being rejected by my own toxic, seemingly narcissistic mother in a new way when I acknowledged how much I missed my own daughter.  The “why questions” came flooding back. How could my own mother have been so cold?

This is a very painful truth. The deepest and most painful truth that I have had to face in order to overcome depression, dissociation, post traumatic stress disorder and all my other struggles with self esteem, living fully and finding freedom and wholeness has been to face that my toxic mother didn’t care and my emotionally unavailable father was never interested in me. By their actions, they didn’t love me. This realization came in layers over the years that I have worked on setting myself free. I have to constantly remind myself that understanding the people who hurt me is not part of the solution in the way that acknowledging and healing from the damage is. 

I missed Katie and acknowledged the pain of those feelings quite a few times this past year before I allowed myself to think about that pain in relation to my own mother. The deeper realizations are still so painful that sometimes I just don’t see that new level of acknowledgement right away.

It has been painful to comprehend that my own mother did not love me; my mother doesn’t LOVE me, the way that I love my own kids.  

BUT it is also a reason to celebrate! I love my kids and I have learned how to have relationship with them based on equal value and mutual respect! I broke the cycle of neglect and parent child dysfunction!  I don’t expect my children to fill a hole in me like my own toxic mother did. I don’t emotionally neglect them or neglect them any other way. I went a step farther in my healing and broke the belief that parents have more rights and more value than their children have. I have modeled equal value for all people in my own family and my kids want to have a relationship with me.  Not only am I free of the oppression I used to live in, but they are free to live in wholeness too.

This Mother’s Day I am celebrating BEING a mother! ~ A real mother; a functional mother, a loving mother.  I had to re-parent myself for several years in this process of healing. I had to become the mother I never had (to myself) in order to become the mother I am to my own kids. I am proud of my kids and today I am proud of myself too!

Happy Mother’s Day!  Even if this year you are only celebrating the mother that you can be to yourself, please share your thoughts.

Darlene Ouimet

Remember that this weekend is the Freedom ROCKS global rock tossing event for freedom and healing! Check out the Freedom ROCKS about page here, and check out the freedom ROCKS category button for updated posts and stories.

Freedom ROCKS

Our survivor and EFB global community event “Freedom ROCKS” will this coming weekend on May 12^th and 13^th.  Today I am happy to have Mimi share her story about what Freedom ROCKS represents to her. I hope you will consider sharing this no cost virtual event with others. For information on how you can get involved see the Freedom ROCKS about page here. ~ Darlene

 The Motivation Behind Freedom ROCKS! By Mimi

Hello Everyone! My name is Mimi, and I am excited and honored to celebrate “Freedom ROCKS”.  For me this event will represent taking my life and power back, once and for all. I am 43 years old, and for the majority of my life, I’ve been in the shadow of my abuser; under her thumb. I have continually tried to fit into the perfect little box she designed. The box had very rigid walls and came with fine lines and stringent expectations. Nearly every decision or thought of my own has been run through my internal filter that separated out ideas or actions that would be viewed as impressive, acceptable, weak, wealthy, good enough, strong, mentally ill, poor, unacceptable, trashy, classy, lazy, smart, foolish, stupid, entitled, guilty, judged, loathed, an embarrassment, dependent. The list goes on.

There has been a black cloud over my head that enveloped all these implications and consequences for as far back as I can remember. The cloud has prevented me from living a life of independence, self love, self acceptance, self esteem, affection, freedom, equal value, and that list goes on as well. It meticulously dictated a life of anxiety, fear, depression, self hatred, self injury, rage, mental illness, addictions, withdrawal, social fears, phobias, uncontrollable emotions, and an overall sense of being caged up. I’ve carried this baggage along in life and it has affected every close relationship I’ve had, my professional life, my decisions, and my education.

I was not the same as my siblings. They somehow managed to stay within the lines most of the time. They were high achievers. I was a disappointment in every way I can imagine. I consistently made poor decisions according to my abuser. I was bullied, verbally, and emotionally abused, and neglected because I couldn’t measure up. There were a few times I was physically abused as well, but for me, that didn’t leave the marks on my soul quite like not being good enough, or loved and accepted for the person I am. I was the scapegoat. I was brainwashed to believe that my abuser came before me. Her emotions and her pain were more important than mine. I had no value. I was to put everything aside to attend to how things affected her, even when it came to my own illness. My thoughts and feelings meant nothing, and I was trained to believe that. Until last year, I did believe it.

The rigid rules were established to maintain appearances, at all costs. If we were well dressed and closed mouthed, all was well. It was called tough love by my abuser. The mixed message was, there was no “love” in it; only “tough”. My life has been absent of affection, words of love or encouragement, support, and acceptance by my abuser. If child rearing and/or tough love means providing a roof, food, and clothing, then my parents did a stellar job. (my father was a raging alcoholic who left when I was 11. His only representation in the family dynamic was one of alcohol and violence). Affection, human touch, acceptance, and loving words and hugs were replaced by insults, demeaning insinuations, lies, gossip, manipulation, triangulation, projection, brutal consequences, and confirmation that I was a big nothing on a direct flight to loserville. In the secret dialogue within the walls of our home, my abuser convinced me that she was all I had, that her opinion of me was accurate, and that all of my family, extended and immediate, agreed with her. I had no one to turn to who would believe MY story. I have finally learned that the only person who needs to believe my story is me.

The key attached to my freedom rock represents a locked door. Behind that door is a closet that holds all of the insults, manipulation, lies, gossip, abuse, powerlessness, false beliefs, pain, and every self abusive thought or action they represent. Attaching the key to a rock means it can never resurface. It will sit at the bottom of the lake drowning out all the whispers of disapproval, lack of acceptance and love, and it will drag the black cloud down with it.

Please join me and others in the event that will symbolize our freedom. Knowing we’re all doing it together forms a network of strength and support for each other. Together we can celebrate freedom, because FREEDOM ROCKS!!

With Hope,

Mimi

As always please feel free to share your comments with Mimi and I and the other readers here. Think about what Freedom ROCKS could mean to you.  For more information about Freedom ROCKS and how you can participate see the Freedom ROCKS “about page” here. Stay tuned for more posts and info. You may want to sign up for updates in the right side bar. (look for the confirmation email when you sign up)  There will also be updates on the Facebook Page for Emerging from Broken ~ Darlene Ouimet, founder of Emerging from Broken.

Related posts ~ Going forward; Looking back ~ the process of emotional healing

Not being Heard and finding my Voice

I saw this poster on facebook that said “PTSD isn’t about what’s wrong with you; it’s about what happened to you.” I believe this is a true statement. I believe that we can achieve all positive results through facing what happened; facing the trauma and the damage that trauma caused.

I believe that this is true for all depressions too. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is the best term I have seen to describe depression. The name itself indicates that there was a trauma. After the trauma there was damage. The damage caused stress. Stress manifests itself in many different ways; depressions, dissociative disorders, physical illness and sleep disorders just to name a few.

But something happens when people actually try to face what happened. Looking back I can see how hard I fought facing it and how much I wanted to stay in the dark about the bottom line truth of it all. It’s human nature to try to protect ourselves when the truth is too painful. When we are kids it is much easier to cope by not thinking about the trauma and just “blocking it out”.

Quite often there is a terribly negative response from other people in our lives, especially from family when a survivor of trauma wants to face the facts and the truth about that trauma. When we try talking to our parents or our siblings, these people who are close to us may try to convince us that it is better NOT dealt with.  We are encouraged by many to let it go, leave the past in the past, put it behind you and the list of these unhelpful trauma directives goes on and on.

Therapists will even jump on board and suggest that you have to “forgive your family” or that we should “try to understand them”, or that these parents “did they best they could” and the problem is that all this is said BEOFRE the trauma itself has been examined and validated.  

The only way to get over a post traumatic stress disorder is to face and validate the truth about the trauma and quite often that includes facing that our parents let us down and that our emotional needs were neglected or even ignored. Sometimes it is even worse than that and we have to face the possibility that according to their actions, they didn’t even love us. Sometimes facing this stuff is more painful than the trauma itself was.

My family was so impatient with me whenever I even hinted at the past. I still remember my mother with her exasperated “OH DARLENE” and her impatience with my difficulty at not being able to put the past behind me. But the truth is that it wasn’t OVER yet. I had not gotten over it yet and that was mostly due to the fact that the trauma itself was NEVER validated. 

I had been dismissed;

I had been shushed;

I had been ignored;

No one ever said to me “oh Darlene, I am so sorry that happened to you. It must have been frightening for you. It must have been a nightmare.  Is there anything I can do?” None of this was said when it trauma events happened and none of it was said when I was ready to talk when I was an adult.  The reactions that I did get communicated to me that I was a failure BECAUSE I needed to deal with it and that somehow I was the one that was disgusting and despicable.

No one held me while I cried. No one soothed me ~ no one validated that anything out of the ordinary happened, so there I was with this unresolved trauma (a post traumatic stress) and I was being told that I needed to let it go; just get over it. Leave it in the past without even a few instructions on how I might go about doing that. All of it was shoved under the carpet and ignored. But I had to cope with those traumas. I had to go on living with the trauma and the wound that had been inflicted on me. The damage was there and it wasn’t going away.

I was left trying to figure out a way to comprehend why no one seemed to think that I was important or valuable enough to give some validation or assistance to. I had to figure out why I wasn’t loved enough to be worth that safety. And that is post traumatic stress disorder.

My constant depressions were seen as a weakness.  When I finally had to take medication just to get through a day it was viewed as the proof of my insignificance as a person and proof that I was the problem after all.  No one wanted to consider that one invalidated difficulty after another from as young as I can remember, was at the root of my problems.  No one considered that my issues may have been due to a lot of post traumatic stress disorder.  No, they just saw me as weak. Too weak to cope with life on life’s terms.  And I was too weak to deal with all of it because I was still oppressed by these same people.

Even therapists told me that what happened to me was over now and that there was no point in re visiting it. It was over.  I told a therapist just one small thing about my mother and the left over pain from something that happened when I was 6. I told him that I had been trying to “get over it” for over 20 years. He gently told me that I would never get over it and that my goal was to “get through it”.  He gave me anti depressants and suggested making myself do one fun thing each day. That was the only answer he offered to help me “get through it”. I felt my world crumble that day.  And I write “emerging from broken” because he was wrong. I got over it. I found the way to completely get over it and not just “get through it” and I don’t need his anti depressants anymore either.

Twelve step programs told me to see what I could have done better and although I don’t think that the original writers meant to suggest that we as children could have done things better so that we were not abused, that is the way that I heard it because I had been raised with the belief that I could have done better and that if I was better or more worthy I would not have been ignored or dismissed or even abused in the first place.

It was when I faced the trauma that I got better. It was when I found out that it was what had happened to me that caused me to struggle with life on lifes terms that I found understanding and compassion for myself. It was when I began to comprehend the magnitude of what those traumas caused me to believe about myself and when I validated that those beliefs were lies about me, THEN I found hope for freedom from depressions and post traumatic stress disorders. It was when I validated my pain, my right to be angry and changed those lies to the truth that I began to live again.  It was when I saw where and how my worth and self esteem got so damaged that I was able to repair the damage and reclaim my worth and my value.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a great name and diagnosis for what was going on with me. After the trauma I was under a great deal of stress and I could not put that stress behind me until I dealt with the damage the trauma caused. Today I don’t suffer from PTSD or from the disorders I was diagnosed with either; Bi-Polar Depression and Dissociative Identity Disorder. 

But it is the treatment for it that I am passionate about…..

Please share your thoughts about diagnosis, post traumatic stress disorder or about facing the truth and don’t forget to sign up for updates about the no cost freedom ROCKS survivor community event and how you can be part of it! (see the about page here!) People all over the world are getting involved! Let’s get ready to throw a freedom rock! Check the emerging from broken facebook page for updates too.

There is freedom on the other side…..

Darlene Ouimet

What “Freedom Rocks” Means to Me by Lauralee Hunter Rivet

Freedom ROCKS ~ Lauralee

Nobody grows up wishing their life would be hell; we expect it to be normal. Well, mine wasn’t. Let’s just say I went to hell and back MANY times. My life was never normal; I grew up around drugs, alcohol and had an incestuous father who molested me. I remember wanting to die, and yes I did try to die but I guess God didn’t want me yet. I hated God at times for putting me in this situation, I blamed him. But that was wrong, because no matter how bad your life is and I can attest to this 100%, you CAN get out of it. There is ALWAYS a way. I never turned to drugs and alcohol, I got off the merry go round and so can you.

I thought of the throwing the rock idea one day after my brother died on October 30th, 2011. The “family” called me, hours later of course, to tell me about my brother. I met with my mother and sister first; after 10 years without any contact with them it was hard. I cried, went to the funeral home, paid for the funeral and then I was in “mother” role again like I had been all my young adult life. I took care of my mother, slept there with her, moved her to a new apartment and took care of her for a month. Then the drama started. My sister who likes to call me princess, I think she has a lot of jealousy towards me, (she is the eldest and I am the youngest one in my family) would talk about my mother and my mother would talk about her and I felt like I had just gone to a gun fight armed with a knife. I was back to the same crap as before. I couldn’t do it anymore; I was done with being talked about and used.

Finally I said to my “mother”; “if you knew I was dying would you come to my house this year for Christmas or would you go to my sister’s?”  She said “well obviously to yours” then I said “well call your daughter and tell her you’ll be at my place”

Her response was silence at first, then the big excuses. And that is when I knew I had spent 10 years, waiting, wanting, hoping and wishing my mother could just love me and validate certain things. Thank God this all happened; not my brother dying of course but the rest and it may sound crazy but it made me FINALLY realize that it`s just NEVER going to happen. I no longer waste time hoping and wishing for that. I don’t need negative toxic people in my life.

So I thought about how I could get rid of certain people in my life and out of my mind. The first thing that came to mind was the thought of tying a key to a rock and then throwing it in the river, lake, ocean or whatever body of water is close signifying closing the door and throwing away the key. Then I thought about pollution, so I dropped the key idea and am going to write on the rock (I may need the Berlin wall haha) the names of all the toxic people that I no longer want in my life and mind.

On the weekend of Freedom ROCKS (May 12th and 13^th  2012) I am going to take my rock, say a little prayer, think about why I am doing this and then release the rock and all of my emotions towards those people and be free of them. Now this may sound crazy to some people but for me it’s a way of releasing that bond and getting rid of the negativity of certain people.

After I throw my freedom rock into the water, I going to stand back and take a deep breath and let myself feel the weight of the world fall off of my shoulders. I am not sure what type of emotions I will feel; I will keep all of you posted of course but I am sure that the emotions will be strong. I look forward to the day this happens. I am taking my daughters and husband with me to watch and experience this with me. This “throwing of the rock” is very important for me; some may say “well it`s not going to change anything in your life” but they are wrong, for in my mind, and the mind is pretty strong, it will change my life. All those toxic people will be at the bottom of the river for me, where they can never hurt me again.

As I said, I promise to keep you posted here on Emerging from Broken to let you know how it felt and went for me.

Throwing the “freedom rock’ can and will have a million different meanings for other people;  as long as it brings you comfort and releases some anger, resentment, bitterness or hurt then it did its job for you.

I wish all of you nothing but peace, happiness and love in your lives, and remember ~ YOU CAN.

A very wise lady here on Emerging from Broken gave me an AHA moment during one of the low points in my life; She told me a story about the crab in the bucket; The crab is trying to crawl out, to get up and away but the other crabs are just pulling it back down because they don’t want anyone to escape to the freedom they themselves would love to have. All the crabs clamoring to get some freedom, each one pulling the other one down as they try to rise higher themselves.

I realized that the crabs were my family. I managed with perseverance to get myself out of that bucket and run as fast as my little legs would take me. I am the little crab that could, the little crab that did and the little crab that would. Thank you once again for that visualization Darlene, you are the best.

Lauralee Hunter Rivet

As always, please feel free to leave your comments for Lauralee or about what Freedom ROCKS could mean to you.  For more information about Freedom ROCKS and how you can participate see the Freedom ROCKS “about page” here. Stay tuned for more posts and info in the next week or so ~ Darlene

Related Posts “My Mother doesn’t love me and the Process of Grieving”

The greatest Adventrue is Healing

I heard so many things against speaking about the past.  Questions which are actually statements and judgements more than they are actual questions such as “why do you want to talk about your problems in public” or “why do you want to air your dirty laundry in front of the whole world?” These judgements always concluded with some version of “you are only making yourself look like a fool.” Statements like that carried with them the all too familiar indication that the speakers (the judges) were concerned for ME; that they truly cared about what was “best for me”.

When I faced the cold hard truth, I began to comprehend the actuality reality; I realized that their concern was never for me. I didn’t need to make myself look like a fool, they did that for me all of my life. I think of the times they delighted in finding ways to embarrass me or humiliate me in front of others. In fact I think that some of their motives were based on discrediting me in case I ever revealed the truth.  They were not concerned about MY dirty laundry. They were only concerned about what I was exposing about THEM. They didn’t want me to expose THEIR dirty laundry.  And I think this would be a good time to add that if they didn’t KNOW what they were doing was wrong, if they didn’t “know any better” then WHY did they know that they needed to keep me quiet about it?

The biggest reason that people persuaded me not to talk about child abuse and dysfunctional family stuff was either because THEY didn’t want to be exposed or because they knew that if they sided with me or even if they validated me, then they would have to face their own dysfunctional family stuff. They were not trying to help me live a better life in freedom and wholeness with their “just let it go” directives. They were concerned with covering their own butts and staying in denial by not facing the truth and so they could keep getting away with all the stuff that everyone knows deep down is wrong.

The legal definitions of child abuse and neglect were a huge eye opener for me. But an even bigger eye opener was when I realized the lengths that so many people went to, to make sure I kept quiet.  Like I said, if they did not know their behaviour was wrong, they would not have spent so much energy making sure it didn’t come out in the open. 

I wish I had found a website or like this when I was searching for answers all those years. Nobody was talking about holding family accountable for abuse or about exposing abusers… everyone seemed to be talking about forgiveness or letting go of the past. “Live for today” and “acceptance is the answer” but nobody wanted to talk about WHAT we were supposed to accept! Were they really telling me to accept that people messed with my head, discounted and devalued me, took advantage of me, taught me that something was “wrong with me”, abused, mistreated and objectified me, and telling me that I should just “get over it”? In that dysfunctional recovery system, everyone endorsed “keeping the silence” and no one wanted to talk about spending some time actually validating the dysfunction first. I was never able to put the past behind me until I actually validated the damage that was done. There are even therapists out there that will refuse to work with you if you want to talk about the past!

I spent over 25 years of my adult life trying to let go and let God and get over it, accept it, forgive and feel sorry for the sick people in my past and I ended up having increasingly difficult chronic depressions.  I spent only 2 years facing and validate it and all the results that I ever could have hoped for were achieved. So what is so wrong with my way? At least I am living proof that it worked!

I speak and I write EFB because it is my story and MINE to tell. I celebrate the permission I give myself to tell my story after years of being silenced.  It is validating for me and for others to hear the benefits of living in truth. Finding, facing and embracing the truth is what set me free from oppression, depression and the low self esteem that hindered me all of my life before I faced the lies so I could embrace this truth.

I will speak my truth. I will tell my story. Look at my life today! I am free. I am living a full and happy life bursting with wholeness and freedom in the sunlight of the truth and no longer in the shadow of the lie.  The fact that they are not happy for me is actually more proof of the dysfunctional system they live in. Like crabs in a bucket, clambering over each other to get out but only pulling each other back down because really, no one wants another little crab to escape into freedom if the darkness of the bucket is the fate of the rest. Well too bad for them. I finally stood up to them and stood up for me. I finally chose ME over them. I escaped. I don’t live in that darkness anymore and it feels GREAT to have the sun on my face!

Note: speaking up for myself and drawing boundaries does not always mean that I have to confront controlling and manipulative people; in many cases they walked away from the relationship as soon as they sensed that I had caught on to the disrespect and devaluing treatment. They skulked away like guilty dogs, which tells a tale now doesn’t it?  

Please share your thoughts about being told to leave the past in the past.

Another snapshot of truth;

Darlene Ouimet

Legal definitions of Child Neglect and Child Abuse and also see US department of Health

Related Posts: Standing up to Damaging Advice and Unhelpful Trauma Directives

Forgive the Abusers ~ A bit of a Rant

Manipulative and Controlling People and some abuse tactics

Who says it wasn't that bad?

It wasn’t that bad. What happened to me wasn’t “that bad” and I told myself that for YEARS.  When I was in my early twenties and struggling with trying to quit the coping methods of alcohol and drug use, some of my memories of child sexual abuse were coming up and I was trying really hard to get rid of them without resorting to alcohol or drugs. At that point in my life I had never told anyone (outside of family but they didn’t validate the abuse OR me) what had happened to me.

One day I was having coffee with a friend of mine who I had met in a 12 step program. In an attempt to mentor me and validate an issue that I was struggling with he told me that from as young as he can remember his parents sandwiched him in between themselves while they had sex. He told me that he can never remember a time growing up when he didn’t have sex with both his parents. He told me that by the time he was 5 he liked it and by the time he was a young teenager, he loved it. He didn’t know it wasn’t “normal”.  It was his normal.  And now he was struggling to learn what the truth about “normal” actually was and to overcome the damage that had occurred in his life. He was having all kind of relationship problems as a result of child sexual abuse.

Although I felt extreme compassion for him, I didn’t hear any of what he was trying to communicate to me. He was trying to communicate that it wasn’t his fault and that his body reacted to being sexually stimulated. He had been sexualized from a very young age. All I heard was how horrible his childhood was and how horrific the child sexual abuse that he endured was. And the biggest thing I “heard” was that what had happened to me did not compare with what he had survived.

 I remember thinking “what the hell do I have to complain about? It wasn’t that bad for me.”

I found so much comfort in that statement.  I told myself things like “at least my parents didn’t do ‘that’ to me.” It was as though I believed that because they didn’t take me to bed with them and have sex with me from as young as I could remember that the things that did happen to me were irrelevant. I could just forget the abuse I suffered because it wasn’t “that bad.” I could just be grateful that “that” didn’t happen to me.  I used the extremely abusive and dysfunctional family situation that my friend told me about to cancel any right I had to feel hurt by the dysfunctional family situation that I had lived in just because I decided that it wasn’t “as bad” as what he went through.

I told myself in an almost reprimanding way that If he lived through that, then I can live through the “little bit” of pain that I had in my own childhood.  Every time I thought about my own childhood and the abuse I suffered, I thought about his situation of horrific child sexual abuse and I minimized what happened to me. And I used his situation to trump mine and to discount and discredit my pain and my hurt. I used his story to invalidate my own story.  I told myself that I was a wimp, told myself to suck it up, told myself to be grateful that what happened to him didn’t happen to me. I invalidated my own rights, so I could stay in denial of the child sexual abuse that DID happen to me. 

I told myself “But it wasn’t every day”

I told myself “But it wasn’t both my parents together

I told myself “But there was far more emotional abuse than any other kind of abuse…”

I told myself “But it wasn’t “violent” sexual abuse”

And I told myself “but I deserved the beatings…

But but but…

People comment on this blog all the time saying “Oh my gosh Darlene, it wasn’t that bad for me.” Sometimes people tell me that they don’t think they have a right to call what happened to them “abuse” or that they feel as though they don’t have a “right” to feel as though they had been wronged in childhood. And these feelings are common! I had them all too. It wasn’t “that bad” for me either. In fact even today when people write to me saying that they are grateful that their lives were not as bad as mine was and go on to tell me of their childhoods, my first reaction is “WHAT? You think what happened to me was worse than what happened to you!!”

 Denial is a funny thing. Denial enabled me to avoid facing the damage that happened to me. Denial was one of my favorite survival tools.  When I hear these kinds of statements today, I think about my friend who told me his story of family dysfunction, incest and child sexual abuse and how I thought the same things. That it wasn’t “that bad”.

Most survivors of child sexual abuse, domestic violence, and psychological or emotional abuse will all say the same thing when reading about someone else’s child abuse stories. They will say to themselves or to the other person; it wasn’t that bad for me. It wasn’t “that” bad. 

It was when I finally faced what that statement was doing for me that I reached a new level of healing and understanding.  Like a coping method, that statement allowed me to stay in denial of the truth that I had been abused, devalued, discounted, not protected as a person.  I had to set aside the story about my friend and the child sexual abuse that he lived with almost daily, and validate my own life experience. I had to face and validate that what happened to me was just as damaging to me as what happened to him was damaging to him.  It WAS that bad.

Abuse is abuse and for the record, emotional abuse, verbal abuse and psychological abuse is no less damaging then physical abuse or sexual abuse; the damage is done to the person ~ the value of the person being abused is diminished. The value of the “victim of abuse” is defined as not worthy of more, not lovable, not important.  The self esteem is squashed, tarnished, broken, harmed and torn apart.  And it is the damage that has to be validated and faced in order for healing from that damage to take place. 

There is no “not that bad” when it comes to being devalued or discounted. There is no “it wasn’t that bad” when it comes to helpless powerless children.

Please share your thoughts on this topic.  It might interest you to know that even while I was writing it I was still reminding myself that what happened to me WAS THAT BAD.

There is freedom on the other side of broken;

Darlene Ouimet

Related Posts ~ Sexual Abuse ~ Devalued, Discounted and Unprotected

I organized my world around trauma and abuse

Also see the colored words within the body of the article for other posts

Navajo Proverb: You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

In the March Article “The Unheard Invisible Child; Being Seen and Finding my Voice” here in Emerging from Broken, a commenter asked a very popular question.  Here is the query;

“Now that I’ve found my voice, I have this strong desire to voice my anger towards my family. To tell them that they are wrong with how they have mistreated me. However, I don’t want to put myself in a position to be hurt again. Based on past experience, they will not hear me and will deny the truth & blame me for misinterpreting them. It’s been that way since childhood.

I’m an adult now and I deserve equal respect but like you said I have to “give up being heard from the people that silenced me in the first place”… I want to assert myself directly to my mom for something hurtful she recently told me, but what will this accomplish?… I will not be heard. Asserting myself and not being heard is insulting! However, if I don’t assert myself, isn’t that sending them the message that they can say whatever they want to me with no regard for my feelings? Please clarify…”   

Here are my thoughts expanded from my original reply;

I constantly hurt myself by accepting devaluing treatment from other people. I didn’t realize that it had become normal and acceptable to me. For instance take the phrase in the query; “I’m an adult now, and I deserve equal respect.” The false belief in that statement is when we become adults we deserve equal respect but the truth is that we always did deserve equal respect, even as children. Respect and authority are not the same thing. Adults have more authority over children, but in the true definition of love ~ respect and equal value have nothing to do with age or social status. 

When I finally accepted that the fact that they never heard me before was a pretty good indication that they were not going to hear me now, I decided to stick up for me; not so that they MIGHT hear me but because I needed to validate myself. It wasn’t so much about asserting myself. It was more about empowering myself. For the first time in my life I knew that I had a choice in the relationship with them. That brought a new clarity; I realized they had a choice too; they could try to hear me or they would reject me again. They could choose relationship with me which includes mutual respect or no relationship with me which is rejection.

Deep down I was afraid of rejection because I thought rejection would serve as proof of my biggest fear; that they didn’t really care and that I really was “nothing”, just like their actions were pointing to all along.  Accepting abusive and disrespectful treatment without question helped me avoid the actual truth about their actions.  But the truth set me free. The fear was never as bad as the reality.

On this journey to emotional healing and recovery the boundary is drawn in the heart. (which means that when I got it, they got it) When my family and friends knew that I was no longer going to bow down to them, many of them withdrew. They didn’t want me to change; they didn’t want me to regard myself as equally valuable. I realized that in their view there was really no relationship in the first place unless I was beneath them. That truth stung but it also clarified things for me and it spoke clearly; their actions and attitudes highlighted their disregard for me as equally valuable to themselves.

I was unwilling to live defined as beneath anyone anymore.

Not speaking up for me was sending the message that they could treat me how ever they wanted and I decided that those days were over. I made my new self empowering decision and I decided to take a chance on the outcome of standing up for myself so that I could live in freedom from the bondage they had me in. Taking a chance did not depend on them finally hearing me but I did have to decide to accept the outcome either way.

So much of my recovery and overcoming the past has been about looking at things differently. I knew my mother would not value anything I had to say in standing up for myself so I didn’t speak for her to hear me. When I said that I had to give up being heard by the people that silenced me in the first place I meant that I had to believe that being heard by them was the answer. I had to look at what I wanted to accomplish in a new way. I spoke so I would hear me. I had been focused for so many years on the end goal being for “them” to hear me. I think I started to get a glimmer of understanding that even if they heard me, the damage would not be fixed without doing some personal healing work. When I changed my focus on the end goal to healing and emotional recovery for myself, instead of “being heard by them” I was able to speak after all those years on MY behalf.

Not being heard IS insulting. And by looking at the truth of the whole situation I finally had the self respect to understand that I don’t have to accept that treatment anymore.

In the case of my mom I only got to say about three things on my own behalf and because I was still full of fear I kept it pretty mild but it was enough. It was validating. I took a stand. I said I was done with being treated the way she treated me. She asked if we could just forget about all of it and just start over. I said no. She said that in the past we had always been able to sort out our difficulties. I replied that actually in the past I always conceded. I always gave in to her and let her be right. I always backed down but now I told her that those days were over. I told her that I wanted to have a “real relationship” where each of us had mutual respect and equal value.  Much to my surprise, she listened to me. She even suggested that we might try therapy together.  I let myself get excited. I felt a new hope.

At the end of the call she told me to think about what we had talked about and let her know what I decided… My heart kind of sunk.  I had already let her know what I had decided. This was the same old “power play” where she put the ball back in my court and made it all up to me to carry the responsibility for the outcome of the whole mother daughter relationship between us.  I quickly recovered from my shock and reminded her that I had just finished telling her what I had decided and that this time it was up to her to consider if she wanted to work on our relationship WITH ME. A real relationship takes two.

That was the last conversation that I had with my mother. But that is okay. I have grown and flourished since that day. The truth set me free. In the years that followed I have seen the truth about our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship and I have grown stronger in my understanding. My mom had a choice. She chose denial. She chose not to give up her power. She chose to let me go. Perhaps she chose “being right” over being with me, I don’t know, but I have found the sunlight in my own life. I have blossomed into who I was meant to be and I am fulfilled. I have no regrets about standing up for my equal value because now I trust myself with myself. I have no more depression or oppression. I don’t jump when the phone rings. I overcame dissociative identity and multiple personality disorder. I have more confidence and self esteem than I ever thought possible.

Realizing that my own family would rather not bother with me if they had to listen to me or respect me was really hurtful. But the truth that I had to realize is that they had been hurting me for years. The pain was not new; I had been trying to cope with it for over 40 years.  My entire life I had been told that I had misunderstood them. They denied all accountability for any problems in our relationship and insisted that the problem was me.  The difference now is that I stopped believing it.

Please share your thoughts.  Please feel free to use any name you wish in the comment form if privacy is a concern. Only the name you use will be visible to other readers.

There is freedom on the other side!

Darlene Ouimet

Related posts: To Confront or Not to Confront; That is the Question

Facebook Parenting for the troubled teen ~ how kids are devalued

Adult victims of Child Abuse still need to be Heard

Conflicting feelings of Rejection when the abuser withdraws

freedom ~ my grown son T.

I was not always who I am today. I was not strong. I was not independent. I was not an individual. I was not often happy. I was not a voice in the darkness and although I always had a desire to advocate for others, I was not effective.

I had to become effective in my own life before I was effective in the lives of others.

I was a victim. Some would rather I say that I was a survivor but in truth when I started this process I was still a victim. I was still a victim because I was still oppressed. I was still under the law of other people. I was still compliant and obedient. I was still defined by those other people and my true identity was suppressed.

I was lost, withdrawn and depressed. I was owned by many and disrespected by most.  I had three kids and when my oldest, who was 12 at the time started to treat me like I was ‘crazy’ and started using my depression as proof that I was crazy ~  just like his father (my husband) did, I knew that I had reached the end of what I could cope with. I was giving up on the fight for my life. The only decision that I had to make was how I was going to end it. I had to decide if I was going to escape, or if I was going to fight to find the solution one last time.

At first I had decided to leave my family. I thought that my husband and my three kids would be better off without me because I believed that I was the problem. I believed it deep down in my heart and soul because that was the message that I had always been given, all of my life and I never thought not to accept that message anymore.  The truth had been distorted for me since the beginning. I didn’t even question the truth as I knew it.  I believed the problem was “me” and I really believed that if I left my family, their lives would be so much easier; so much better.  I decided out of love for them that I should quietly go. But something nagged at me and today I know it was a glimmer of “the truth”.  It was NOT best for anyone if I were to just go.

I realized that for a very long time I learned to do what others wanted because I had been so totally convinced that what they wanted for me was ‘right’ because I had been so manipulated all my life. This was part of taking my life back from my oppressors. I started to look at what might be right for me. I started to think about what I might want and what was ‘best’ for me. I learned that most times “best” is best for everyone and not just best for me; it always comes down to the motive. What had happened to me most of my life was never best for me; it was just what someone else selfishly wanted.

As I started to look at HOW I had come to believe that the problem was me, I began to realize that I had been controlled and manipulated all my life by people who asked me to “try harder”. Trying harder was a default mode for me. As long as I believed I was the one that had to “try harder” I accepted that success in relationship and whether or not I was loved was all up to me.   

I write about “Emerging from Broken” from real experience. I lived functioning at a fraction of the level that I function at today. I survived living under the oppression and suppression of others. I survived by believing that if I did what “they” want and if I am who “they” want me to be, I would be loved. I was so brainwashed in victim mentality (that if I did what they wanted they would love me) that I could not see a solution other than leaving the world that I lived in.

I found a way to leave the world that I lived in by facing the damage that had been caused to me. I didn’t have to “go” anywhere. I literally stepped out of it by seeing how dysfunctional and harmful that it had been and still was.  I learned to validate my pain and declare that I had a right to my feelings, I had a right to my voice, I had been wronged and it WAS NOT my fault.   I finally owned my truth and discarded the lies that I had been encouraged to believe my entire life by realizing exactly what those lies were and how those lies were all designed by others who wanted to keep and maintain control over me. I learned to take care of myself emotionally.  I learned to love myself. And through all of this, I found myself. I found the original me and I embraced myself. I welcomed myself into a whole new world and a whole new existence.

I stayed with my husband and my children and we rebuilt our lives. I took the lead even though it was a fight for the first two years. No one in our home wanted anything to change but I wanted healing and I was willing to risk everything in order to obtain it. In my victim mentality I had actually taught my husband and kids to disregard my needs and even my opinions by disregarding them myself. They didn’t trust that I could model “emotional health”.

My husband had to do his own healing work and he did; I finally embraced the truth that it takes two to have a relationship and I was finally able to communicate that to him. I was no longer willing to carry the burden of relationship all by myself. We repaired the damage that had been done to us all of our lives and that we had in turn passed on by accepting and living in those false definitions of love. When our individual healing work was underway, we worked really hard to repair the damage and dysfunction in our marriage relationship and then in the relationships that we had with our three children.

Years have passed since I made the decision to face the pain and take my life back from the people who stole it from me. I live, really live each day now. Our three children have flourished living in the truth and without the oppression of the lies that we all used to live buried under.

Welcome to Emerging from Broken; the greatest and most rewarding adventure of my life. I look forward to meeting you on the journey from surviving to thriving.  

This article has been an emotional one for me to write. Tears sprang to my eyes several times; my determination to face the pain, acknowledge the damage, heal and take my life back surprised even me. I did not know that I had this amount of strength and persistence when I started this journey but today that is how I know that you can do it too.

As always, please share your thoughts.

There is freedom on the other side of broken,

Darlene Ouimet

I convinced myself of many things in order to cope with child abuse, emotional abuse and being defined as less important than others in my life.  

I was unable to cope with the truth so I changed the truth to suit me. I learned how to view “unhealthy attention” as though it was healthy and validating in order to cope with my dysfunctional world the way that it was and by doing so I was able to pretend that my world was actually functional. I found a way to believe that I was special.   

But in order to feel loved and to believe that I had at least some degree of self worth, I had to change my understanding of the word “special”. I had to warp my definition of that word in order to fit it to the actual circumstances.  The things I accepted as “proof” and validation that I was “special” became pretty sick and unhealthy.

I remember when I was about 13 or 14 years old, my mother started commenting about the way men were looking at me. I remember that it was embarrassing to me. She would whisper to me in the grocery store “Darlene, did you see the way that man looked at you??” She told me that I was attractive to older men as though this was some great gift I had.  I felt uncomfortable about it, but at the same time I felt validated by my mom. I felt like “finally!! I have done something right!” She looked so happy when she told me these things. She looked pleased with me. It was important to her that I was attractive and she was saying that I was. I found some value for myself when she commented on these “older men” who were looking at me with appreciation.  

I thought I was special because my mother wanted to take me out to bars with her to pick up men when I was 17. I thought that meant that I was attractive; SHE thought I was attractive. I thought she was validating me and I longed for her approval and acceptance, so I accepted this as the way I could get it. 

I believed that I was special when I was sought out by older men when I was too young to be in any kind of man/ woman relationship with them.

My mother usually took me to hotel bars; bars where men were staying on business trips. The men that hit on me in the bars I was in with my mother were married men. In my youth and naive way of thinking I thought that I must be “really special” if they were giving me attention when they were married. This kind of thinking sounds really sick now but it comes from the situations that I was put into without knowing that this kind of thing was not “normal” or right.

I remember the duality of the way that I processed this kind of dysfunctional relationship that I had with my mother and the men that were hitting on me. On the one hand I thought I was special. On the other hand I was scared of what might happen.  One night this man hit on me and it was clear that he was married; he was wearing a wedding band for one thing.  But he asked me to go out to the lobby of the hotel with him.  He made a phone call to his wife while he had his arm around me. I was SO uncomfortable. I wanted to run. On the phone he asked his wife about her day and about the kids while he was stroking my arm and rubbing my hip and he kept smiling at me.

Thoughts were firing through my mind at warp speed. I didn’t really know what the hell he was doing and I felt dirty, but there was the thrill of danger, mixed with the relief of acceptance and approval. At the same time I was wondering why my mother wasn’t worried about where I was. I felt sick to my stomach and I felt powerless. I felt like a hooker, but somehow the whole thing felt like a compliment. I felt special; I felt like I had some kind of exotic power that this man would take this RISK “for me” in that way.  At some level I knew he was using me but I was too young to understand the cheap thrill he was getting talking to his wife with a 17 year old girl tucked into his side.  He winked at me which scared me and reassured me at the same time. I wanted to walk away but I didn’t think, (didn’t know) that I had a choice. When had I EVER had a choice? How would I have learned that I had a choice? I didn’t want to be rejected by him; I didn’t want to disappoint my mother. Where the hell WAS my mother?? 

And under all of these thoughts, I had just a whisper of a feeling that I wanted to avoid feeling more than anything else. I couldn’t face the truth that both this man and my mother had absolutely NO regard for me at all. I was just a means to an end for that married man. Perhaps he thought he would get me in bed at the end of the night? I was nothing to him. I was nothing. I was just some object some “thing” to distract him from the tedium of being on a business trip out of town with nothing to do in the evening. I was just a good story to tell to the boys at home. He had to have known that I was just a kid; even though I was in a bar I could not legally have been less than 19.  

And to my toxic mother I was just someone to go to the bar with. I was likely a good man magnet too. What did she care about what could happen to me? As an adult it took me YEARS to face that what my mother was doing was wrong (not to mention illegal!) and that her actions showed how little regard she had for me. This was all about her.

Talk about an example of dysfunctional mother daughter relationship.

The world might have judged me accountable for being in this situation if the world had known about it so to protect myself, I couldn’t tell the world. I had to keep it to myself. In my world the girl always got blamed. That man was married and fooling around on his wife but I would have been labeled as the tramp that had enticed him. I would have been judged as a home wrecker and a slut.  I knew that stuff already so I went along with him… smiled at him while he sweet talked his wife as he winked at me somehow knowing that I wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t expose him and that I would submit to this objectifying treatment.  In order to comfort myself, I told myself that this defined me as “the special one” in the situation.  

By the time I was 18 years old I had lived without value long enough to believe that there was something wrong with me. I was full of shame and disappointment; full of self loathing, full of self disgust. I wasn’t even legal age yet and I believed that no one would ever love me. And even though I believed that all I needed was to be rescued by a man, I didn’t trust them anymore.

This story represents the how I took a situation and broke it down in order to understand my belief system and how it formed and how this situation resulted in being one of the ways that I came to view myself. Because of circumstances that I didn’t know how to process, I decided that I was special because my toxic mother thought that I was attractive enough to take to bars when I was underage. This conclusion was a lie. That didn’t make me special at all. Believing that I was special because a married man was attracted to me and therefore used me to boost his ego was not a healthy self view and it was a lie about me. The way he acted didn’t define my value in a good way at all. I was coping with the fact that my mother was using me and putting me in a very dangerous situation by reassuring myself that her actions defined me as special. And the pain that I had to face was that her actions defined me as nothing. Not important, not worthy of respect or protection, not loved, and certainly not special.  The truth is that my mother and I had an extremely dysfunctional mother daughter relationship.

~Just a little more context ~ Although this was nowhere near the first time that my toxic mother had taken me to bars with her, (she had started doing that when I was still living at home) I was living with my boyfriend at the time of this occurrence and on this night he was in jail serving time for impaired driving. I told myself that my mother must have thought that if I was old enough to live with a man then I was old enough to drink in bars with her.

But here is the funny thing and the conflict that I never saw the truth about; the reason that I was living with my boyfriend was because my mother had told me to get out of her house for staying out too late twice.  I wonder why I wasn’t old enough to stay out late, but I was old enough to go to bars and help her pick up men?

Like I said, my mother and I had an extremely dysfunctional mother daughter relationship.

Please share your thoughts on this subject of the fear of not being special and switching the truth around in order to avoid the truth and cope with the pain.

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet

For Related posts on Mother Daughter Dysfunctional Relationship or Toxic Mother Daughter Relationship please see the “Mother Daughter Category”  ( also see links (the words) in highlighted bold print throughout the article)

Seeking understanding and validation from the WRONG people