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

trapped in the deep

I was fifteen or sixteen when I worked in that Real Estate office as a receptionist on the weekends. I answered the phones, and typed offers for the salesmen.  My mother’s disgusting boyfriend got me the job. That should have been the first red flag.

There was this one chubby salesman named Ron who gave me the creeps. He was about 40 years old. He was just a little too friendly. He would come up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. He tried to rub my back. I was terrified of him and didn’t even understand why. It was one of those feelings that today I have come to realize was my intuition. It was my “radar” warning me about a predator. That man had really bad motives when it came to me.

One day he came up to my desk and showed me some porn pictures. At first he was on the other side of the reception desk. He handed them to me; I took one look at them and handed them back without speaking. They looked like snapshots and they were mostly of naked people having oral sex.  Those snapshots were pretty graphic. He came around to my side of the desk and at first I tried to look away, but he told me to look at the pictures. Something about him scared me and so I did as I was told and looked at the pictures. He slowly flipped through them, and I looked at them one by one. I was horrified and terrified, but I didn’t turn away. I thought if I was strong, if I showed no reaction, that he would lose interest in me. I thought that if I just pretended that it wasn’t bothering me, he would not ask me to do those things to him. And then another one of the salesman joined in on this humiliating event. They were egging each other on, asking me if I had “ever done that” and asking if “I would like that” or if I would like to “do that”.  I was scared to death, but I never even flinched. I just kept looking at the pictures as he put one behind the other.  I was sure that I had to stay neutral to be safe. (Today that reminds me of how and why I’d learned that staying neutral would be the safest choice.)

There was a hot tub out back at the real estate office. They tried to talk me into going in it with them. They said that I didn’t need a bathing suit. They told me I could go in my underwear if that made me more comfortable. (like I could possibly EVER be comfortable in a hot tub with two disgusting older married men who showed me porn pictures)  They laughed at how uncomfortable I was when they were around me. I had this one boss there that I liked, but I didn’t tell on those men. I didn’t tell my boss and I didn’t tell my mother. I didn’t even think about telling! (Today that reminds me of how I learned that telling wouldn’t help me anyway so why bother. I was way too young to have to deal with all this stuff alone.)

They never let up on me until I finally had the guts to quit that job before they could complete their version of the grooming process.

I did not know what “sexual harassment” was. I didn’t know what sexual harassment was in the work place, or at school, or with boyfriends.  I did not know that what these nasty older men were doing was illegal. I didn’t know I had rights. I especially didn’t know why the hell I froze and just looked at the pictures! The thing that stuck out the most in my memory was that I froze and complied. I may have even laughed trying to be tough and make them think I wasn’t scared to death. I may have even mumbled the answers to some of the questions.  

And I was haunted by the question to myself about what I would have done if they had forced me to go in that hot tub with them. What if they had pushed me harder? What would I have done if they had demanded that I go? Deep down I was pretty sure I knew the answer…

Silence is consent and all I could think about was that I looked at the pictures and didn’t say no. I didn’t try to stop them. I didn’t report them. I felt as though I had actually gone along with them. For years I beat myself up over that day and the fact that I didn’t “do anything” about it. I didn’t stand up for myself. I didn’t call them dirty pigs. I didn’t say NO. 

I was so angry at myself kicking myself with questions like “Why did I freeze like that”? I bombarded myself with berating statements like “I should have…..” and “why didn’t I?”  It was many years later that I even considered that the TRUTH is that both those men should have been charged and would have been held accountable for the crimes they committed against me. This thing they were doing  was sexual abuse.

I was in my forties when I finally learned that “freezing” is what many children do when they are being abused and overpowered by an adult. I had learned to freeze and dissociate when I was just over two years old. It had become one of my main coping methods. I learned very young that compliance was the safest way to go. I had learned not to react, not to fight and I had learned that fighting or reacting would only make it worse for me. 

What I hadn’t realized as I grew up was that I would continue to believe that inaction is the best course of action well after I was old enough to say no. I could have gotten those men in trouble. I could have called the police, but I had been trained to accept unacceptable behaviour. I had been taught that I was not going to be believed OR protected. I had no reason to believe that was ever going to change.

I continued beating myself until I realized the truth about why I chose passive submission most of the times I had been abused from the age of 13 or 14 onwards.  There was a conflict in my belief system. As a grown woman I understood that silence was consent; what I didn’t realize was that my compliance and silence was also the childhood coping method that worked for me.  Silence and compliance was learned behaviour and the only way that I knew and since it was the only way all those years growing up, why would I try or even think to try another way just because I got older? Logically I told myself I “should have known better or should have done something” but the truth was that what worked for me best as a child always won out. I would freeze, dissociate and comply.  

I didn’t tell on those men because I had been groomed from a very young age not to tell. I didn’t fight because I had been taught from a very young age that fighting would only make it worse. I didn’t do anything because I didn’t know that I had any rights or any choices. I didn’t really learn my rights or choices until I was over 40 years old. My power had been taken from me from a very young age and I since I had never had any power in my own life, I didn’t know that I could ever have any.

Today, I know the truth about rights and choices. Today I have my power back.

Please share your thoughts. This post can be applied to any situation where adults misused their power over another person.

There is freedom on the other side of broken,

Darlene Ouimet

This is going to be an exciting year for Emerging from Broken. If you would like to receive updates about events, news about my upcoming book or other newsworthy updates, please subscribe to “get the latest news” button at the top of the blog on the right sidebar. Don’t forget to check your email and confirm your subscription.

Related Posts ~ Adult Victims of Child Abuse Still need to be Heard

Dysfunctional Family Law and Family Belief Systems

Effects of Abuse. Guilt, Shame and Solutions

Sometimes facing the pain seemed so overwhelming that I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to face what I had to face in order to get on with my life. I didn’t want to feel anything. I had survived by shutting down my feelings and by shutting down my needs. I didn’t want to feel or be aware; it was much too frightening.

This was the spin; the vicious cycle.

But I must have wanted to live. There was a tiny spark in me that didn’t go out. There was a tiny flame that belonged to me and a determined little flame it was. That spark was determined to live. The “how to go about doing that” was the problem. I wanted to be free but there were certain chains that had to be broken. Certain things held me back and because those chains formed when I was so young, I didn’t realize they were even there. They were familiar; they were part of me. I thought they helped me, and even thought they were “saving me”. I was afraid to break them and emerge into the sunlight. That was the spin that I was caught in.  I had lived in “survivor mode” for so long that it was all I knew. 

Survivor mode is the shut down place; not feeling, not needing, not facing the truth.  Survivor mode is the only way to get through any kind of childhood trauma. But as an adult it was in my way.  It became one of the road blocks to freedom.

Victim mentality believes that being compliant will keep me safe. Being compliant means never facing or talking about childhood trauma. Being compliant means never standing up to the abusers, oppressors, or to anyone who triggers those feelings or fears that are born out of survivor mode. Victim Mentality is a learned behavior also from childhood and being compliant was the only hope of being safe as a child; the problem is that I never grew into an adult with value when I was stuck in that way of thinking. Living in victim mentality, I perceived everyone as being more important than I was and therefore was compliant to almost everyone.

At the root of depression and low self esteem and wrapped all around my victim mentality and survivor mode was my difficulty with self love. I had not been taught my value. In fact, I had been taught to doubt my value. I had been taught that I had no real value. When I was told I had value, it was usually attached to some form of control or manipulation which carried the message that my value was only in what I could do for someone else. I had to learn to value myself. That might sound easy but in reality, self love has been one of the hardest things to learn. Even today, every struggle that I have has an element of struggle with self love at the root of it.

These three things; understanding survivor mode, understanding victim mentality, and realizing that I did not know I had value and therefore had not learned to love myself, held the keys to freedom.

I learned everything in this process of recovery and achieved all forward motion by looking backwards. I had to examine the results of being devalued and understand how I had come to live in victim mentality. I had to take a look at how I survived, so that I could see that I survivor mode, although necessary back then, was no longer necessary anymore. In order to learn my own value, I had to take a look at why I didn’t know my value. I had to take a look at how my self esteem got “broken” and went missing in the first place. It was there that I realized where all the depressions and dissociative identity originated. It was there that I began to see how to replace the missing links in my childhood so that I could overcome depression, low self esteem and dissociative identity disorder.  

It was there that I found so much HOPE that there really was freedom on the other side of broken.

And that was when I realized that my fear of the pain of facing that stuff was also in my way. Perhaps the pain would not be as bad as the pain that I finally realized I was already living in? I had to take that chance. Of course it paid off and I was right. The pain in the process, which is more acute but never permanent was never as bad as the constant although more subtle pain I had always been submerged in.

Facing those details was what set me on the path to overcoming low self esteem, overcoming all the abuse and the resulting depressions and dissociative identity disorder and most of all, overcoming the false belief system that defined my life and had determined my course up till that point.

Please share your thoughts. Please feel free to use any name you wish; It is important to me that you feel safe here.

Another Snapshot of Truth on the Journey to Freedom

Darlene Ouimet                    

Join Emerging from Broken on Facebook

All donations to this work are gratefully appreciated and very much needed. Please consider the donate button on the right sidebar or contact me through the contact form. ~ Darlene

For Related posts Click the Bold Links in Blue

On the blog post about the feelings of loneliness in recovery a commenter wrote about “going blank” when she is asked how she ‘feels’ or what she “thinks” about something.  This is something that used to happen to me as well and it is another one of those pretty common reactions that people have.  The reaction of going blank or freezing at the question of “how do you feel” has an origin; it comes from somewhere and like all reactions it was something that I learned to do in order to deal with people.  Freezing or going blank for me became a coping method and a way to survive but there is a reason that my mind learned to shut off and react like that.

I didn’t know how I ‘felt’ about anything either.  I didn’t know why I had trouble expressing my feelings, I just did.  And I had learned to ignore myself at such a young age that I didn’t know I was ignoring myself anymore. It was just how I lived and how I learned to survive or get by. Sometimes I could think in my own mind that I felt happy, or I felt blue or down, but I could not tell anyone else about my feelings.  I would freeze at the question.  The question was “unsafe” to answer.

In my post “Stop Crying or I will give you something to cry about” I talked about the message that we got as children when were told “to stop crying or else.” My feelings were invalidated. In being told that I didn’t hurt or that I didn’t have a reason to cry I was being told that I was wrong to have those feelings and I concluded that my feelings were wrong and therefore invalid and that I did not have a right to my own emotions so I shut them down and turned them off and that was how I learned to invalidate and then ignore my own feelings.

I also learned to be afraid of the consequences of my feelings; being told that they were “wrong” and having the threat of more punishment or more pain if I don’t stop “feeling” those feelings, I became afraid of my feelings too.  I was afraid to feel anger because there might be a negative consequence so I shut that feeling down.  SO I became afraid that the feelings were wrong AND that there might be consequences to having those wrong feelings. THAT resulted in being afraid to FEEL ANYTHING and it also made me doubt my own feelings when I did feel them.

SO when someone asked me “how do you feel about that” or “how are you feeling?” I didn’t realize it but my first reaction was FEAR.  Without realizing it consciously, I was afraid that my feelings were wrong, that I had no right to them and that having them might lead to a negative consequence.  All that fear was operating under the surface because of my childhood history and the fear dictated my reaction and my response.  Deep down I was thinking “what do you want me to say? Instead of knowing and acknowledging my feelings, I was wondering what the “right answer” was to the question and I was considering what the safest response would be.  I didn’t wonder how I actually felt about very many things anymore because years earlier my feelings had been defined as wrong and I had been defined as unworthy of having them.

This is what happens to children who have been invalidated or who have had their feelings invalidated. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know what I was feeling; I was also afraid to acknowledge my feelings in case they were wrong.  Survival for me had become about making sure that I didn’t do or say the wrong thing.

Looking back at my life through that grid of understanding, it is no wonder that I struggled with such deep depression and dissociative identity issues.  It wasn’t safe to be alive! It wasn’t safe to be me.  It wasn’t safe to feel OR to acknowledge my feelings.

Getting my feelings back had a lot to do with realizing why I had shut them down and how they were controlled by others in the first place.

In my next post I will talk about the way I processed the question “what do you think?”

Please share your thoughts on “how do you feel about that” or about anything this article triggers in you.

Darlene Ouimet

Related Posts: Taught to think or taught not to think?

Loneliness in Recovery and Emotional Healing

Stop that crying or I will give you something to cry about

Learning to feel feelings isn’t always easy ~ by Lynn Tolson

I have this “to do” list. I tell myself that I am going to get “this much done” each day. I have it all mapped out.  But I don’t stick to the plan. I get distracted, I want to chat on the phone, I want to read a book, I want to spend more time on facebook talking to all my peeps and updating the Emerging from Broken facebook page.  I want to catch up on Twitter.  I tell myself that all these activities are part of the greater goals that I have to spread this message. But the truth is that I am not respecting the path, plans and goals that I set out for myself to accomplish in the first place.

I break agreements with myself all the time.  If I was me, I wouldn’t trust myself anymore… (Oh wait.. I am me.)

So how does that happen? How did I get to this point where suddenly I only do some of the action steps on my to do list when I have taken the time to set them all out in a neat orderly fashion, I am well on my way to accomplishing many of my goals and am fully determined to accomplish those pending tasks? Why would I hurt my relationship with ME? Especially since I have worked SO hard on my recovery, my healing and on learning to love and value myself.

When a child like me, lives in a dysfunctional family system, the child does not grow up with a sense of their own value in place.  I developed a lot of “trust issues” because I had been treated with disrespect and my feelings had been disregarded.   I had no reason to think that anyone was going to ever treat me with real respect and regard, so I built a wall up against other people in order to protect myself from danger, pain and even disappointment.  This is part of survival.

But at the same time when we are abused or devalued, we come to accept that we are NOT valuable and not loveable and as I have mentioned in countless other blog posts, we come to accept that it must be some defect in us and we try harder.  We are accustomed to trying harder. And most of us have never stopped trying harder. Trying harder was a big part of how I survived.

I was constantly ASKED to try harder by the very ways that I was taught it was “my fault”.

Sometimes in my adult life, trying harder has been like this “default mode”. Trying harder to please others is something I had always done and it was a really hard belief system to break out of. Sometimes trying harder to make others happy and to fit into to what they want was a way to avoid facing the pain of the past too. Trying harder allows me to stay in the spin of the whole false truth system. As long as I am in the spin, I don’t have to face the truth; that for some reason my own family did not come through for me and that I was a big disappointment to them. Even once I recovered enough to know that those things weren’t true, that I wasn’t a disappointment but that they were dysfunctional, facing that pain of being unaccepted and in many ways rejected is lots of work and it is very scary.

And my mind was very good at helping me to survive so my mind didn’t really want me to face the pain. Even when I started to face the pain in the first year of my emotional healing process, my mind would scream at me to stop, turn back, this isn’t safe! I learned my survival methods from a very young age. Survival methods are the systems that we learn that enable us to cope, to avoid the pain, and they work for us as children. They saved my life. My mind convinced me to stay in “survival mode” because it seemed safer in survival mode, then it would be to come out of survivor mode and face the pain.

In my process of recovery I learned to let go of survival modes and embrace the life giving truth. The truth that I had never known before.

Breaking agreements with myself allows me (and forces me) to keep trying harder only this time I am trying harder with me, in the same way I tried harder with everyone in my past who defined me as not good enough.  Even though I broke my pattern of trying harder with everyone else, and defined myself as good enough, worthy and wonderful there is still this pull backwards to the familiar comfort zone of the survival mode. SO sometimes in this one area of my life I venture backwards.  It feels safe because it is about my own relationship with me and I can tell myself that I am not letting anyone walk on me.  BUT when I do it, I am devaluing me, just like they did! I am telling myself that I need to try harder again. I am setting myself up to give myself heck and call myself a failure!

Breaking agreements with myself allows me to visit that familiar survival mode, where my own mind lies to me and tells me that survival mode is still the safest place to be.  And since that is yet another lie that my brain accepted into my belief system long ago, it is high time that lie is corrected and expelled.

Today I realized that breaking agreements with myself is like having one foot in the past when I want to strive for increasing freedom and recovery!

Please share your thoughts.

Darlene Ouimet

Join Emerging from Broken on Facebook

a childs mind

The belief system that I am constantly speaking of does not form all at once or form completely from one event. This is where it gets complicated. Other events factor into it, some of them normal healthy childhood events that may have familiar feelings attached to them, and it is really easy to lump them all together.

When a child is devalued, abused, or discounted, it is a matter of necessity, (survival) to build an understanding or comprehension, and that comprehension becomes like a filter that we look through. Child sexual abuse, being put down, called a liar, made fun of and ignored, and being physically harmed all became part of my history and the way that I processed that history became part of this “grid or filter” that I viewed all events through.

Being ignored on the playground at school brought up familiar feelings of rejection.  My mind searched through my history for a reason that I had been rejected, and quickly related it to the feelings surrounding a trauma event. (Continued….) Imagine sneaking a cookie from the cookie jar and getting caught. Maybe a stern reprimand was issued. Maybe you felt ashamed and the shame felt like the other shame from the trauma event. They felt similar. The shame and guilt was familiar and this time they actually applied. Angry labels like “sneak”: and “thief” were applied and accepted and we hung our heads. If we denied taking the cookie in the first place the label liar was also added and it was easy to take that “regular childhood cookie sneaking event” and add it to the “proof” that the guilt and shame from actual trauma events was also deserved. 

I have a really significant memory of a time when I got “caught” doing something naughty and shameful.  I still remember the feelings of shame that I felt that day. I was not often allowed to have a friend over, and on this day my best friend was not only allowed to play at my house, INSIDE the house, but we were going to bake cupcakes. This was a very special day. My friend brought her easy bake oven with her and we were happily baking cupcakes. We decided to make cupcakes in the big oven and I felt all grown up putting the icing on them when they had cooled down.  We each got one, and there were cupcakes for my brothers too.  I do not know why I did this, but I took a bite out of my brother’s cup cake and tried to cover the missing bite with extra icing. I got caught. My mother was very angry with me, and my friend got sent home. I got a spanking and sent to my room. I had ruined our special day and everything had been going so well. I felt the guilt and shame of that day for years and years. It is one of my clearest childhood memories and in later years I often wondered about the significance of that day and why it has stuck with me for so long, as if it was the most horrible thing that I could have ever done, so I could not put behind me.

Today I believe that the significance of the cupcake day was that that was the day that I accepted all the guilt, shame and blame for most if not all of the trauma events that had ever happened to me, and would ever happen to me. It was just a little trigger day. I was deeply ashamed, (which I understand) but I linked it to the other events that were abusive to me. I connected it to the feelings of shame and guilt that I had about being neglected and traumatized, giving equal weight and putting them on a parallel scale with this time that I really did do something wrong, not realizing that there was a difference between the guilt and shame that belonged to me, and the guilt and shame that didn’t belong to me.

The “bad feelings” felt so similar that I added them to the grid or filter that I’d developed to measure and analyse things through and came up with the wrong conclusions; that the trauma events of being sexually abused were as equally shameful and guilt filled as the day that I took that bite out of my brother’s cupcake and tried to hide it.

Other fairly normal innocent childhood “mistakes” got added to that increasingly confusing recipe and they all blended together to form my false belief system. A false belief system that I never considered was false, but thought all along was the truth about me.

How does this post strike you? Does it make sense that a false belief system can form this way? Do you see how a childhood “mistake” could be the proof that we use to take the blame and shame for things that really are not our faults? Please feel free to share.

Another Snapshot on the Journey to Wholeness

Darlene Ouimet

Related Posts ~ How One Truama Led to Several False Beleifs         

The little Girl who Cried Wolf ~ Belief System Development

Lovely Hope

I am really excited to welcome guest writer Carla Logan today! Carla and I have become great friends on this journey to freedom. In her process of recovering from Dissociative Identity, (the multiple personality disorder kind) Carla has focused on getting to know each of her alters as individuals, which was very different from the methods that I used to overcome dissociative identity however we have discovered that the destination for all those who travel from broken to wholeness is always about the journey back to self. We celebrate the common goal and our mutual successes. Please share your comments and thoughts with us in the comments section. 

 ~ Darlene Ouimet, founder of emerging from broken.   

 D.I.D. and the Essence of Who I Am by Carla Logan

 There seems to be a common experience among abuse survivors, we don’t seem to know who we are, as a person.  What is the essence of who I am?  Where do I find myself?  What about me is real and what is not?  There is a disconnect that happens inside us, not only from the world around us and how we see and feel and interpret it, but also from ourselves in how we see and feel and interpret who we are.  There is so much junk to peel away and so much about our true selves to discover.

 My own struggle with this has been through the world of Dissociative Identity Disorder and it has been filled with turmoil and fear and self hatred, not only throughout the course of my life, but especially throughout my recovery process.  Discovering at the age of 46 that I had separated parts of self operating independent of the whole, was utterly devastating. I didn’t know what to do with this. I didn’t know how to feel about myself.  What to believe about myself.  I didn’t know how to find the real me in this newly discovered cast of characters who had all played the role of me all these years of my life, each in its own unique way.  Which one was the most true representative of me? 

 As I started to learn of my ‘alters’, started to find out their ‘personalities’, their way of seeing the world and responding to it, their way of representing me to the world, well, the more overwhelmed I became.  How could this have happened to me, and how is it that I lived 46 years without knowing about it, and how do I even begin to find myself now?  Because some of my alter personalities were so outrageous in the way they responded to life, I was terrified that the most outrageous might actually be the real me!  What if this is true?  What if the most wounded and most outrageous part is actually the real core me?  What will I do?  How will I come to terms with this?

 What I have only recently discovered, after a lot of hard, gut wrenching work in getting to know each alter and in facing the abuse that caused this fragmentation of my SELF, I have gained so much compassion for each part of me, for the pain each part endured on behalf of the whole; for the years of suffering; the years of loneliness; the years of anxiety, fear and confusion - I have come to see each of these alters as precious, as my heroes, as my allies over the course of my life, keeping me going, keeping me alive, keeping me moving toward the day when I would be strong enough to face my history that created this coping mechanism, one that allowed my survival. 

 And in finding this compassion and respect for each of them, I have found compassion and respect for ME.  Because THEY ARE ME.  All of them.  And I am not afraid to own them, I am not afraid to incorporate them, I am not afraid to have any one of them represent me.  They have given me my life and they have paid their dues and they have earned their right to be who they are IN ME.  They (the alters) are now each finding their healing and when they do this, they will find their freedom to come home, to come home to being ME, all the best of ME.

 I have found myself in each one of my alter personalities and am looking forward to the day of integration, where they will all be welcomed as ME; leaving not one of them behind.  I am looking forward to that day, when I will have no fear for them and no fear for me.  This is healing. 

 And my hope for all survivors struggling with a fear of knowing themselves is that you will find the compassion for self that is needed for healing.  When you find this, you will find your true SELF and welcome that true SELF without confusion and without fear, but with love. Your true self has been there all along, waiting for acceptance from you.

Carla Logan

Note from Darlene:  Please feel free to contribute your own stories, feelings, thoughts or whatever you want or need to share. Remember that Dissociative Identity Disorder is not just about multiple personalities. It can simply be about disconnection from the self.

Related posts: Dissociative Identity Disorder and Reconnection with Discussion

Coping methods and trying to escape myself  With Discussion

Emotional Abuse and Identity Hunger by Carla Dippel

Staying with Me

No matter which coping method issue that I look at within myself I have determined the core of it to be related to trying to leave myself. There is a disconnection from myself that I developed when I was a child; it was my way to escape and I became attached to it. Every time I examine one of those “still tangled threads” I keep coming back to this disconnection that it seems I actually seek; escaping myself. I am convinced that at least one of the reasons that I am attached to this “leaving myself” is because when I was a child, dissociation is what worked for me.

Now I have to remind myself that any form of coping method, although it may have worked at one time, is an escape from me that doesn’t work anymore.

I used to have dissociative identity disorder. I had the kind that was once called multiple personality disorder. The name of it was changed to dissociative identity disorder because lots of people leave themselves or dissociate from themselves and from their identity without actually becoming someone else or having alter personalities. Although I did have alter personalities and I did switch, I have found many similarities to others with dissociative identity disorder that were simply just “dissociated”.

Recovery for me has been about coming home to myself. It is a journey back to me and it is not an easy journey because for about 43 years I tried my hardest to get away from me; dissociating was the way that I did life.  Somewhere between leaving me and coming back to me are the actual steps that I took to get the wholeness that I have today and that is what I write about.

As I take this recovery journey, I become more and more aware that the answers are within me, but when I forget that I start looking for answers outside of me.  I mistakenly think that validation from others is going to help me. I think that having more friends is going to help me. I think that having the most popular blog on the internet is going to help me or losing weight and getting fit is going to help me and I chase those things for a time and come up feeling disappointed and not knowing why. I have to remember that that my validation does not come from outside of myself.  

When I stay totally present it is as though I become “too aware” of myself. Life without coping methods means mega increased self awareness. When I become really aware of myself, I am subconsciously afraid that I might find out that I’m a disappointment, a failure and just plain not good enough.  In the past I took on all that self blame and shame and I needed to keep dissociating because I was too scared to be me, because I thought “me” was so bad. Deep down I am afraid that with too much self awareness, all those memories about being unlovable and unworthy might come rushing up to the surface. The fear has always been rooted in being afraid to find out that the beliefs I adopted about myself as a child, the beliefs that were “taught” to me through actions, abuse, and the behaviour of others, might be true.

I have not switched personalities for several years now and I rarely dissociate the way that I used to either. I have found myself and my purpose. I live my life with passion and conviction and go after my goals with determination. I love my children and I work on my relationship with each of them and on my relationship with my husband almost daily.  I love life. I love the freedom that I have found but sometimes I get going the wrong way too and I suddenly realize that I am facing something I haven’t faced before. And usually when I take a closer look I realize that I have tried to disconnect from myself again. I find myself, and then I get scared and try to leave myself, all the while trying not to admit that I am trying to get away from me again.

It is as though I believe that I can leave myself, in order to deal with myself, without having to feel anything myself. It never works, but I still try.  So for me, this journey is about remembering to STAY with me and that is about self love, self acceptance, self validation and self empowerment.  

 “They” said it was me… But they were wrong. And I have to keep reminding myself that they were wrong, because none of this leaving myself or trying to escape awareness of myself, is conscious. It happens without thought.  And so becoming more conscious is actually the goal. The more I face the fear of being present with myself, the more I realize that the fears are not real. I am afraid of lies; lies that I have spent years undoing and replacing with the truth.

I long for connection, freedom and peace but it is only in coming back to me that I find the freedom and peace that I long for and it is only in self connection that I get to keep it so that I can give it away. The good news is that the more often that I connect to myself, the more I remember that the keys to freedom are within.

And it is key for me to catch myself when I try to leave myself.   

What are your thoughts about this topic? Have you ever related a coping method to escaping yourself?

Darlene Ouimet

Founder of Emerging from Broken.

Related Posts ~ Keys to Living in the Present

Tomorrow I will start to face the pain

But HOW do I Recover?

Healing and Holidays

Throughout the years of trying to change, I tried many things; in fact I tried almost everything that was suggested to me to try. Seminars, self help books, 12 step programs, I tried holistic medicine, cleanses, meditation, medication, vacations; I tried diet plans, fitness plans, naturopathic medicine, homeopathic medicine, you name it I likely tried it. Most of them became another obsession and another way to escape. And I am not saying that any of it was useless, just that none of it got me that much farther ahead. ALL of it was pointing me in the right direction towards emotional healing, but it just wasn’t the entire answer.

(NOTE: Something I noticed in the editing process of this post is that I opened this post with; “Throughout the years of trying to change” ~ See how deeply it goes? I never considered that I was trying to HEAL, just that I was trying to “change” as though I needed to “change” in order to be “okay” when in reality I was trying to give up coping methods without understanding why they were born.)

I was thinking about all the things I had tried attempting to enhance my recovery because of the quote I posted as a mental health tip on the emerging from broken facebook page. This is the quote: “Do not wait; the time will never be “just right”. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.”  Napoleon Hill

I thought about this one thing that I told myself when I was trying to stay out of this coping method that was escaping into a fantasy life that I really loved to live in. The fantasy world was what I thought to be a “safe escape” but I was spending so much time there that I knew it was becoming self harming and destructive and that it wasn’t really helping me get where I really wanted to go.  I tried very hard to notice when I was going into that fantasy world, trying to catch myself before I was immersed in the depth of disconnection from reality. And I remember that for a long time I would tell myself “just this once more”.  I would promise myself that I would only escape there one more time.  I would plead and convince myself that it was not harmful, that it didn’t hurt anyone… that one more time would not really change or damage anything.

I did this with almost every coping method that I ever tried to give up.  I did it with binge eating. I did it with purging when I was bulimic. I did it with skipping my fitness programs when I was finally doing them for the right reasons. I even did it when I was going into a self berating spin and trying to learn to stop myself from beating myself up. I told myself that I would start tomorrow. Tomorrow would be the first day of my new life. Tomorrow I would make the necessary changes.

I did almost anything I could to avoid progressing into “better mental health”.

And when I finally noticed that I was doing this avoidance technique, I finally started looking at what I was avoiding. Why was I so afraid to STAY in reality? What was I avoiding taking a look at? What exactly was I trying so hard to escape from? WHY did I have so many coping methods?

And the answer, (or at least the root of the answer) of course was ME ~ I was trying to escape me. I was trying to avoid facing me but NOT for the reasons that I thought; 

Deep down I really truly believed that I was the problem and that was why I could empathize with you and see your value ~ I could validate you and try to convince you that you didn’t deserve whatever happened to you, but I could not see that for me. The reason I was so afraid to face reality was because I was afraid that I would find out that I HAD NO REAL VALUE and I was avoiding finding that out.

I had to stop running from that fatal lie and when I did, that is when everything began to change. That was when I began to emerge from broken. That was when I finally turned that corner and began to progress into the new life that I live now.

How does this resonate with you? I find this stuff MUCH harder at holiday times of the year. Please feel welcome to share your thoughts and comments.

Darlene Ouimet

p.s. this is a process and I am not perfect.  When I was almost but not quite finished writing this blog post, I jumped up and grabbed some crackers out of the pantry. I got some raspberry jam and cream cheese out of the fridge and proceeded to make myself an afternoon snack. When I thought about what I had been doing when I decided I needed the snack, and that I wasn’t really hungry, I realized that for some reason sharing this post with you made me want to escape. And that is very much what it looks like for me ~ I suddenly feel like “running”.

Do I worry about it? No….. well at least not nearly as much as I used to… it is all part of the process of emotional recovery. I often feel insecure about writing the things I write and lately I have been looking at some of the unhealthy ways that I deal with those thoughts and insecurities.  And so today I decided to actually tell you. =)

Due to the depth of the comments on this post I wrote a follow up post which you can read by clicking the post title: “Before I faced the Pain I had to face the lies”