Archive for Father Daughter
Parent Child Relationship What a Confusing Mess
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I wrote a blog post a few days ago called “Parent Child Relationships ~ When Loyalty costs too much, about parent child relationships and when my parents split up, that triggered a few new things in me. I intended to write about how my mother leaned on me when I was 12 years old, because my Dad left us and my intention was to focus mostly on her actions and how they affected me and how dysfunctional our mother daughter relationship was. BUT I found myself getting really angry at my father. In some ways I feel like I never really had a father and I’ve known for a long time that whatever smidge of a father daughter relationship we had, it wasn’t much. Writing that post however was emotionally draining and I knew that I needed to process the feelings and anger that was coming up for me. Memories and feelings were coming at me from all different directions and so as I have learned to do, I sorted them out and separated them from each other in order to get a better understanding.
Here is how it played out;
~I was angry at my mother (in that instance) because she made me feel responsible for the outcome of her. But the anger at her self centeredness and selfish behavior came up too. I have always felt guilty for feeling that way.
~I was also angry at my father for moving her and us so far away from everyone that could have supported my mother. I had not really thought about his part in it to this degree before. With the anger came many other memories and flashes of memories that I had never thought about in this depth before either. Sometimes I tend to think I only have to look at the “REALLY” bad stuff in order to move on but this is not true.
Mixed in with both of those realizations was the deep down suspicion that I might have been able to save their marriage… that maybe if only I had been a better kid ~ and all that type of stuff. I felt like I had failed my mother somehow, and my father never noticed me anyway, which I thought must have been MY defect. I thought that if I had been “different” or “good enough” he would have noticed me for sure.
Right away I reminded myself that the defect in our father daughter relationship was HIS. He didn’t try. His lack of interest in me had to do with him as a father. Not with me as a daughter.
Next thing I did was get the “my fault stuff” out of the way by looking at the truth about the marriage breakup itself and assure myself that I have nothing to feel guilty about. I asked myself these kinds of questions:
~What was MY part in the event? ~ Well actually it had nothing to do with me (other then my pain of my parents splitting up and getting a divorce) and this was a truth that I never considered before. I had NO failure or responsibility in it at all.
~What could I have done differently? This is a question that I heard in 12 step programs since I was 18 years old. I took it out of context though and used it to hurt myself, reprimand myself, and reaffirm the belief that I always had a choice and the outcome was always something to do with me. In this case, there WAS nothing I could have done differently. I could not say to my mother when I was at the age of 12 ~ “MOM, do not make me responsible for your life. I will not support you in this way, you need professional help.” I didn’t understand any of that back then; I didn’t even have any context to put it into. But in the mind of a child, I thought there must have been something that I could have done, and I somehow failed to figure it out. I believed that this was my downfall, my defect ~ that I could not figure out how to fix things or stop things that really I had NO control over, but when you are made to feel like you are always responsible for the outcome of everything, and if that outcome is a beating or sexual abuse or being ignored, your ideas of what you can “do differently”~ get warped. I carried that old belief with me into my adulthood. I had to start taking this information into consideration and I had to become aware of it, in order to change my belief system.
It’s like there is this missing space between childhood and adulthood that needs to be looked at. And this works to the controller or abusers advantage too. We don’t fight them when we are kids, and as soon as we are in our twenties, (sometimes younger) they start preaching at us that we are adults now and our outcomes are our choices. Our messes are ours. It is SO dang hard to sort out!
In this case there were several things that I needed to look at separately; the anger and disappointment in my mother, the anger and disappointment in my father and what I believed to be my failure. In looking separately at the mother daughter relationship stuff and the father daughter relationship stuff and separating it all out from my failure stuff, I was able to get a clearer picture of all three and where my belief system worked against me. This helped me to get a clearer picture of the whole truth, the real truth and it also exposed the false truth that I had accepted all those years since I was 12.
I hope that I have been at least semi clear in illustrating how confusing this whole thing is to unravel. This has been just one snapshot of how I take something apart in order to see the truth, and how many other things get in the way of doing that. Please share your thoughts.
Exposing Truth, one snapshot at a time.
Darlene Ouimet
Note: I had these same deep down beliefs about the sexual abuse, emotional abuse and parental neglect; that I should have been able to figure out something to STOP them. Up until about 6 years ago, I never believed that I had “no choice”. As an adult I was taught and accepted that I was accountable for the events and the results in my life. I applied that teaching to my childhood and to the past without realizing it and it automatically reinforced the belief that I had since childhood that it was my fault, that I had a choice and that I was responsible. Several years ago I realized all my adult struggles resulted from the child hood events that molded my belief system and that I HAD to figure out the missing pieces of the puzzle in order to recover!
Parent Child Relationship When Loyalty Costs too Much
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When it comes to parent child relationships I often feel as though I struggle to explain or communicate the difference between how I felt about the past when it was in the past, how I felt about it when I was in the healing stages of it and how I feel about it now. This comes up a lot on the blog and on the facebook page for Emerging from Broken so I thought I would write about it.
This blog gets hundreds of views every day. The comments don’t reflect that though, and I get these private emails from people who don’t want to write publically, especially about parent stuff. By some of the questions that I get asked, I understand why this is; most of us have really big loyalty issues when it comes to our parents and our parent child relationships. This has to do with several things; our belief systems, our upbringing and the way that society frowns on anyone revealing family secrets ~ even if the whole family could recover from the pain of the past if they were revealed ~ some things are just taboo.
I sometimes wonder how different my life would be today if my mother were willing to pursue wholeness and freedom herself? How different would it be if she were willing to work on our mother daughter relationship stuff with me? But sadly this isn’t the case.
I know one thing for sure, it would not change the past. What happened, really happened and it was dysfunctional, devaluing and abusive much of the time. So my decision was to get on with the present and future and to do that I ended up having to deal with the past. (Again) But this time I went deeper then I had gone before. I ventured into previously uncharted waters. The truth about my parents and just how dysfunctional the parent child relationships were.
When I talk about anger and blame towards my abusers as well as my parents ~ anger and blame were a necessary part of my healing. I had to look at the truth ~ almost from a neutral point of view if I were ever going to heal from it. I can only say this in retrospect as I didn’t realize that this would be a key before I did it.
I was so wrapped up in should and should not’s and because I believed expressions like “if you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future you are peeing on today” I was stuck. So I had to look at what my life story was as though I was looking at it through someone else’s eyes. Some of the events of my life were shocking and yet I didn’t think so. I felt guilty for feeling even a glimmer of hurt or anger towards my parents, especially my mother because I felt so sorry for her. It was almost easier to just accept the blame for our difficult mother daughter relationship.
If someone else told me the exact same things had happened to them (that had happened to me) I was horrified. I could feel justifiable anger, outrage, shock, disgust, sadness, sympathy compassion and love, but I could not feel these things for myself about my own life or about the things that had happened to ME. I can’t stress enough how convinced that I am that taking a look at my life story through different eyes was one of the biggest keys to the eventual restoration of my emotional health and overall mental health. This was also one of the biggest keys to overcoming depression. Seeing things from a neutral view point, was a huge key to my overcoming dissociative identity disorder and the integration of all my “alter personalities” and a major key to my wholeness and freedom.
As a child, I surrendered all my power over to my parents, teachers, and elders. When those people treated me with less value then I deserved or abused and controlled me in ways that were not acceptable, I complied and surrendered even more of my will. I had no choice as a child. It wasn’t a decision I made, it was survival and it was necessary. But this became my way of life and when we live under dysfunctional control, we become accustomed to living under dysfunctional control. This becomes a habit that is familiar and even comfortable. I grew into an adult in this familiar comfortable fog and I continued to give control to the abusers or controllers. Often when we are adults this control and abuse is psychological and emotional when it comes to our parents but none the less is in not really love. It is not a healthy, functional, love based parent child relationship.
But there I was in it anyway and in order to survive and cope I convinced myself that it wasn’t really wrong. “My poor mother didn’t know any better.” (true but so what?) Until I had nowhere else to turn and I was an emotional mess and I realized through getting some help to navigate through the false and the true, I suddenly realized that if I remained “loyal” to my parents, and if I didn’t want to look at this stuff that had happened to me at their hands through the lens of truth in order to place the burden back on them and realize that this was not my fault, then I was actually giving them control over MY recovery and my will to recover, in order to protect them. (as we have learned to do our whole lives)
This isn’t about loyalty. I was fighting for my life, and I had to get really honest. I had to accept the past the way that it was ~ the plain honest way that it was without the loyalty and excuses that I consistently made for them all my life. What I am trying to express in this blog is about emerging OUT of victim mentality and into wholeness and freedom and real relationship.
In love and in truth,
Darlene Ouimet
Foundation of a Dysfunctional Mother Daughter Relationship
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Today I’m highlighting a snapshot of where the dysfunctional mother daughter relationship began between my mother and I. The emotional abuse and dysfunction began before this event, but this was the point of no return.
Just a couple of months shy of my 13th birthday, my parents separated. That in and of itself isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a kid, but as in everything else in life it all depends on how it is handled. Kids need a little help handling that kind of a thing and neither of my parents was very helpful. For my mother it was all about her. For my father it was all about him.
My father had just been transferred and we had to move from Montreal Quebec to Mississauga Ontario and away from all the friends we had. My mother didn’t have any support. Even long distance phone calls back then were an expense that we couldn’t afford. I am not sure why my Dad picked that time to leave, but that is the way it was. My mother had a serious breakdown and since my mother was susceptible to having mental health breakdowns and serious depressions, it wasn’t surprising.
I was the only girl in the family. I am not sure what my brothers went through. I don’t remember if I ever talked about it with them or not. As for me though, my mother leaned on me. I became her confidant her support and her friend. It might not have been so bad if she had not been suicidal.
We lived in a newly developed neighbourhood in a beautiful new house. It was so new that many of the homes were not finished being built and there was no grass in yet. We were living in a construction site and there were huge holes, wooden ramps and plank sidewalks. The ground was uneven everywhere. My mother would go walking in the dark of night and because everything was so new, there were no streetlights yet. I pictured her weeping and stumbling around the neighbourhood alone in the dark. I pictured her that way because she told me that wandered around in the dark and she was hoping she would fall in one of those construction site holes and die. I felt so sorry for her. I wanted to help her; I wanted to be the friend she needed to support her through that time in her life. I believed that the whole burden of whether she lived or died was on my shoulders. I was only 12 years old.
This one incident impacted me and the rest of my life in such a huge way. What 12 year old would refuse this burden? How was I supposed to deal with this? What choice did I really have? Looking back my father was not exactly the kind of dad that I believed would have taken care of me if my mother died, I mean if you think about it, he was the one who moved her away from all her friends just a few months before he left her and I don’t recall even one time when he talked to me about how difficult this was or even asked me how I was doing. Why didn’t he see how distraught she was, and why didn’t he realize that I was staggering under the burden of her dilemma and thinking that it was up to me if she made it or not? What would have become of me if my mother did commit suicide especially if my father didn’t care? And finally, why did my mother forget that I was only 12.
This incident laid the foundation for the rest of the dysfunctional mother daughter relationship my mother and I had to play out. I suppose that this laid the foundation for the nonexistent father daughter relationship I had with my father too. Things might have been tough before, but now they were disastrous.
If you are interested in more history regarding my mother daughter relationship stuff, please visit the mother daughter category button under the header graphic. This story is an example of emotional abuse by both my parents. Stay tuned; I will continue.
Please feel free to share your viewpoints or your experiences. As always I truly appreciate your comments.
Darlene Ouimet
False Love and Relationship Lies that Control
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“If we repeat a lie over and over we will eventually accept the lie as truth. Furthermore we will believe it to be the truth” Napoleon Hill
Think about this quote from a different angle; if we are told over and over again that we have false memories, that we were or are too needy, that we are wrong, difficult, an instigator or trouble maker or even if we are repeatedly told we are crazy, what impact does that have on our self image? What about our mental health and self esteem? If we are told that our expectations were or are too high or that we deserved what ever happened to us such as beatings or punishment or public humiliation. I was told that I couldn’t take a joke that I was too sensitive and this was their excuse for their behaviour, which makes it still my fault or weakness ~ oh the list goes on. Do you think that this could be at the roots of depression, anxiety or stress disorder?
I didn’t think about this before I “emerged from broken” because I was too busy trying harder, trying to be what they wanted and trying to get approval and love, that I didn’t realize that **I** was not really the biggest problem at all.
When I talk about living in the truth, and standing up to abusive behaviour, there was an order to it. First of all I had to realize what the lies were. Was I really crazy? Was what I was upset about really an unreasonable thing to be upset about? Was I needy? Were my expectations really too high? Did I really have false memories; did I make up or even exaggerate the abuse and the way that my feelings were discounted or the way that I was humiliated in front of others? Is respect a two way street? Was it right or fair that the burden of the relationship should have been completely on my shoulders? I didn’t think about the truth this way before. When I was able to really see that these were all the lies that I believed about myself by acknowledging specific situations and seeing them through a different grid of understanding, I was able to see their origin and begin to change my belief system about them. This is key.
It isn’t so much that I confronted the people who held me back and devalued me, as I just stopped accepting that kind of behaviour in my life. This took some time; the fog didn’t lift over night, it was like one layer at a time. I had to stand up to my husband first, because I lived with him. The first time I said anything to him I simply told him that I was going to continue my therapy for as long as it took (he didn’t approve) and that I was no longer willing to live the way we were living as though only his goals and wishes were important and as if my purpose was to make things easier for him. I was terrified to say it. I had an anxiety attack just saying that much. He ended up having to get his own help with his own belief system and realize his own truth in order for him to change only then could we work together to heal our broken relationship. This took time and the fog began to clear with the rest of my relationships.
A couple of YEARS later I started to set bigger boundaries. I stood up to my older brother once. I never got a second chance. I didn’t get very far in talking to my mother about my abuse or my difficulties with our mother daughter relationship because she slammed the door on it. That is the chance that I took though and I never realized how much healing and freedom was on the other side of even that. The truth in what my mother did by not wanting to continue the talk was that I finally knew that she really didn’t really care enough. It was her, not me. In our last conversation, she told me that she would see a therapist with me, but she never called again. I was finally ready to face the fact that she didn’t really care. In a way this gave me permission to be so public about it.
The truth set me free to be who I am and to live in a way that impacts others for their own truth and freedom.
Darlene Ouimet
Dysfunctional Relationship; My Parents Treat Me Like a Child
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When someone says that they are sick of being treated like a child, what comes to your mind? One of the commenter’s on my blog post Mother Daughter Relationship Lies said that she was sick of being treated like a child, and caused me to think about the meaning behind that statement. Such a familiar expression. What is being treated like a child like? What do we adults mean when we say that? Is it how a parent wipes your chin when you are eating a soft ice cream cone? Is it holding your hand when you cross the street? Is it being told to brush your teeth and get ready for bed? It would be pretty weird if our parents did that stuff when we were adults. So when an adult says that he is sick of being treated like a child, I get a whole different idea about what this statement means.
I have teen agers. My youngest teen doesn’t like it when I suggest things off the menu to her. She likes to read it for herself and make her own choice. My older teen says that I am treating her like a child when she feels like I am not giving her enough choice or freedom. My oldest teenager (who is legally and adult in Canada) doesn’t use this expression.
In my experience, when adults use this expression it means that a parent is treating an adult in similar ways to the way that both my daughters express this dislike above. Using voice infliction and innuendo, parents can make adult children feel like we are not capable or too stupid to make our own decisions ~ still having the mind of a child.
Consider some of the following statements; these are meant to make you wonder about your thoughts and decisions. They are meant to make you question yourself.
~ You are not really going to do that, are you?
~ You don’t really believe that, do you?
~ You aren’t really thinking that are you?
~ You are not really going to wear that, are you?
~What were you thinking when you bought that?
~What were you thinking when you said that?
What were you thinking when you DID that?
The unspoken message is “are you nuts” or “you must be stupid”.
These questions are not designed to get you to think about what you did or said, they are meant to make you feel stupid. They are meant to make you question yourself. When we were children we depended on our parents to help us decide, to make good choices. This is what I think some of us mean when we say they are sick of being treated like a child.
My mother in law had a different way of trying to get me to do things her way. She would say “Well, you will most likely be ready to buy that next year. Well you will most likely breastfeed (my son) for six months. She seemed to have an issue with how long I was intending to nurse, and finally I told her that I would MOST LIKELY NURSE HIM until he or I was ready to stop. But I was really conflicted about it, and her words echoed in my head for years because I just didn’t understand her motive for trying to make me stop and I didn’t realize that she was constantly insinuating that I couldn’t decide, like I wasn’t capable of deciding what would be best.
Other questions are designed to control but even these still indicate a suggestion that you couldn’t possibly know what is best. Here are a few:
~ You aren’t going to eat that are you?” (I am talking about when someone thinks they are helping you with your diet, or insinuating that you need to lose weight.)
~You aren’t going to go there are you?
~ You aren’t really interested in HIM or HER are you?
~ Why would you want to do that?
~ Why would you want to go there?
If our adult / child relationships were conducted like this when we were children, we become accustomed to this kind of innuendo and control. It becomes part of how we do relationship. It is so familiar that we don’t really think about it. We don’t realize how devaluing it is. It has become part of our belief system, our false definition of relationship, respect and love.
When we fight this without really understanding what we are fighting, is it any wonder why we end up struggling with depression and other mental health issues?
Please feel free to contribute to this post with comments or share how this post impacted you.
Breaking out of familiar;
Darlene Ouimet
Why Should we Love where there is Fear and Abuse?
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“Everyone was upset at me for not going to my brothers funeral. I refused to be a hypocrite. I was glad he died. That may sound horrible but it was such a relief not to have to live in fear anymore.”
That comment was from a reader on the Emerging from Broken facebook page in the same thread as the comments from my last post “Controlling Parents and Questions Abusers Ask”. This comment really struck me so I asked her permission to use it. What struck me was not the she was glad that he died, but that everyone expected this person to attend a funeral for someone she had deeply feared. Her feelings didn’t matter. All that mattered is that she do as she was expected to do. Do what others wanted her to do. This is also about obligation, and how obligation is used to control and manipulate people into doing what someone else says is the right thing to do. Her family was upset about her choice. They did not seem to care WHY she made that choice. This is one of my “why questions” that I forgot to post in my article about “Psychological, Physical and Sexual abuse WHY questions”. Why are we supposed to love people that hurt us just because they are family?
This comment reminded me of a time that my mother was extremely upset with me when I announced that I would never agree to see my older brother again. I was in my forties! I got her usual lecture about family being all important and how blood is thicker than water. (What the heck does that mean?) I asked her what her response would be if I told her that I was working in an office where one of my co-workers put me down constantly in front of the other co-workers. That this co worker spread lies about me to the rest of the office, ridiculed me and humiliated me constantly and never showed me any respect, yet demanded that I comply with his wishes. I asked her if she thought I should hang out with him after work. She emphatically replied “NO”. So I asked her what makes family any different. She didn’t have an answer for that.
It wasn’t very long after that when my mother was the one who was no longer speaking to me. Apparently she didn’t believe her own definition of family being all important. She didn’t love me by her own definition of love. There was no equality. I was supposed to respect her and love her, not the other way around. I no longer accepted the lie that I SHOULD love people who treated me like nothing.
I do not have to love, I am not obligated and there is no should. I am just as valuable as anyone else and me and my feelings deserve respect. I am not cold hearted and I do not make these decisions because I am heartless, but because I am taking care of myself now. As I began to comprehend the real truth instead of the lies I had accepted for so long and the skewed definition of love, I began to recover from all my many mental health issues.
Darlene Ouimet
Special News Tomorrow ~ July 27th 2010, I will be a guest on Conversations Live Radio with Cyrus Webb. The interview will begin at 8:00pm EST ~ 5:00 pm Pacific ~ 6:00pm Mountain and 7:00pm central. I hope you can join us then! http://www.blogtalkradio.com/conversationslive/2010/07/28/life-coach-darlene-ouimet-and-entrepreneur-ray-faulkenberry-on-conversations-live
Controlling Parents and the Questions Abusers Ask
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The post “Psychological, Physical and Sexual Abuse Why Questions” generated a lot of interest, so I decided to do a follow up post asking the questions that controlling and abusive people ask us. The response on the Emerging from Broken facebook page was huge.
These types of statements that controllers and abusers use are designed to keep us in a fog of confusion. Remember that this type of grooming begins when we are very young and becomes part of our definition of love. We are taught “if you love me you would not fight, argue or even disagree with me”. We may also be taught that compliance is respect and respect is a demand not a choice. The problem is that so often we end up respecting abusive behaviour and we are not sure what abusive behaviour is because it starts when we are so young.
The following ‘why questions’ abusers ask can be used to control and to cover up any type of abuse. They are used to guilt and shame us into looking back at ourselves and to question ourselves, instead of them. They are used to keep the victim in a spin ~ trying to figure out the truth and never quite putting a finger on exactly what the truth is. These questions are used to control. These types of questions are abusive. They don’t make sense but we so often don’t realize that because we have been groomed to accept these false definitions of love and respect since we were very young.
Here are some of the comments that came in on EFB Facebook, about typical questions and statements that are used to control, guilt and shame, force compliance, or cause to shut down.
~ “why don’t you just get on with your life and get over that? Why do you insist on destroying our family? Why can’t you let me forget that happened?
~ “Why don’t you spend time with me anymore? Why do you look so serious all the time?”
~ “Why can’t you forgive and forget? And I am told I SHOULD love them.”
~”After all I’ve done for you why are you treating me this way? Why can’t YOU just move on?”
~ Why don’t you like me? Don’t you remember all the fun we had when you were a kid? (along with an answer ~ “no, I don’t remember all the fun and even if there was some fun does that make up for all the other abuse?.. NO”)
~”Why don’t you respect him? He was a good provider. (Is that what a father is?) You are going to have to live with the way YOU are treating your Dad.”
~ “If you loved me you would… or If you loved me you would not….”
~”You SHOULD be grateful”
~” Why can’t you think of somebody other than yourself for a change?”
~ “Why can’t you grow up and start acting like your Mothers daughter?”
~ “You MAKE me do this to you. If you would do things right the first time I wouldn’t have to….”
~ “Why can’t you see this from my point of view?”
~ “Stop acting like a spoilt brat”
~ “What is WRONG with you?”
~ “Why do you keep talking about this? Why do you blame me; your father did it. What the hell are you thinking, writing a book about it? Why are you so selfish? Do you think you are the only one that matters? What about ME?”
These questions are full of the twisted communications and insinuations hurled at people for the purpose of control. Love is not disempowering and it does not support lies. This system is very backwards and extremely devaluing. Most of these questions are what controlling PARENTS said to their own adult children. We are called selfish, because we want to expose the abuse? Because we want our lives back? We are reprimanded for wanting to have a voice, for wanting to have a chance, for telling the truth? It is more important for them to keep up appearances and to protect the abuser or the secret than it is to validate a child or adult child? Therefore we are the ones with the problem because we want to be heard? In this system there is no hope. When we do as they ask everyone stays sick. And the most difficult part to comprehend is that they would rather us comply, cover up and obey, then become the flourishing healthy adults that we were born to be. We are told we SHOULD love them but we are not taught love by them. Love has not been modeled for us. They do not love by their own definition of love; the same definition of love that we are expected to love them by.
When I went back into my past to examine the events that originally caused my depressions and dissociative identity disorder, it became apparent that there were a lot of lies involved. There was justification by the abusers, there was blame towards me, when I was an innocent victim, there was covering up, ignoring, and “that didn’t happen” and “shush let’s just forget all about it”. This is where the mental illness accelerated for me ~ with the twisting of the truth; the not being protected and the misplaced blame. The illness accelerated because one lie breeds another lie. And when this type of control works, the controllers keep upping the ante. They want more control, more compliance.
We grow up and we are often attracted to controllers and abusers… it’s familiar; it’s what we know. By the time I was in my late thirties the confusion and the fog was so thick that I couldn’t see the truth at all anymore; I easily bought the lies, I conformed to the requests, I complied and I tried harder. My mental health grew increasingly worse. I had no idea what love was. This is how my belief system got so messed up. And it was in sorting it out; realizing the false from the truth that I recovered.
Please feel free to contribute any of your own stories or the questions used on you.
Busting through the fog,
Darlene Ouimet
My Teenage Son’s Point of View ~ Unintentional Teachings from his Father
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Carla’s last post “Unintentional but Destructive ~Belief System Inheritance” caused a bit of a stir on Carla’s personal profile page on facebook last week. Someone on her friends list took offence to her post and accused Carla of devaluing her father and being hurtful. My son is good friends with Carla and he stood up for her and for the right to state the truth by writing the following comment on Carla’s wall. He has given me permission to post it in our blog to give our readers another perspective from someone who has been through what Carla is posting about. He shares about what it was like for him to have absorbed his own father’s belief system, and then what happened when his father got help. My son is 18 and is usually quiet when it comes to how he was raised before our family Emerged from Broken. ~ Here is the comment:
TJB wrote: “I agree with the person who wrote ‘If you don’t like it, don’t read it’. We live in a free country, we aren’t Communists; we can post and say whatever we want (as long as it doesn’t break the law, hate crimes and such). Carla is only stating her opinion, much the same as you are stating your opinion saying that she shouldn’t be writing such things. I don’t understand what is so horrible in stating the faults that one grew up with?
Off the top of my head I can list multiple things that my dad fell short in: he worked too hard and expected me to do the same, he put pressure on me to be better than him the first time I did something, he told me to do things without communicating where or how he wanted them done and then gave me heck for doing it different than the way he wanted it done, and he unintentionally made me feel like I wasn’t good enough for him or as good as him.
I started working on the farm from a very very young age and because of this I picked up many of the bad qualities / feeling / opinions that my father possessed. He unintentionally transferred his opinions about himself on to me, he unintentionally transferred his opinions about certain types of people on to me, and he unintentionally gave me a false belief system about myself. Since he thought he wasn’t good enough I automatically thought I wasn’t good enough because I wasn’t as good as him at anything, which is obviously understandable considering it’s hard for a 4-8 year old to do things better than or even as good as his father. The only thing I was good at that he wasn’t was crawling inside machinery to take apart and fix parts that he was too big to get at but that was only because of my size not because I was actually better than him.
Many of these beliefs and habits carried on into my teenage life until my father got help and realized that the things he was doing to me were so very wrong and he started to correct the shortfalls and teach me that what he had unintentionally taught me as a child was wrong. Now you may be sitting there thinking I just tore a strip off my Father, threw him out to dry, insulted him beyond belief, and that I devalued him. That couldn’t be farther from the truth- all I did was state the short falls that my father had, just like I could state the shortfalls of my favorite band, or my favorite movie. Everything has shortfalls and nothings perfect. Just because you state shortfalls doesn’t mean that you’re devaluing something.
Despite my father’s shortfalls I love him very much and I look up to him as he has the most respect from me than any other man in my life. Since this comment is public and my father is friends with Carla he could possibly read this (I guarantee he will not take anything I have written as insulting or devaluing) just the same as Carla’s father can read her public blog. I in no way insulted or devalued my dad, just like Carla didn’t insult her father. We both simply stated the things our fathers lacked in and how they were transferred to us. I don’t believe it’s hurtful to state things like these, it’s just stating the truth. It happened and we learned from it. No matter what, parents transfer things to their children; good, bad, funny, it doesn’t matter- it gets passed on.” TJB
My husband (Jimmy B) did read TJB’s comment and wrote one of his own on Carla’s facebook page in response, affirming all that TJ has said. Jimmy also commented on my last post “Anger at Parents~ A pathway on the journey to freedom” here in the blog where you can read a bit more from the father’s perspective.
As always, your comments are welcome,
Darlene Ouimet
How a “Leeching” Belief System Creates Havoc
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Sun breaks through over a Canmore mountain
A belief system that says, “I am a nobody, I can’t do anything right, I’m just stupid” wreaks havoc in a few different ways. I believe we were born with an unconscious sense of our own value; deep down, in each of us, there “dwells a beauty”, a person who is loved and can love. But trying to function with a totally opposite belief system creates a swirling, anxious situation inside, as if two rivers are colliding head on into one another and the water is all confused. In my last three posts (1, 2, 3), I’ve been describing my Dad’s belief system and how it was passively handed down to me as a child. His belief system also created havoc in my family, just not the really obvious easy-to-see kind.
Someone with a “I’m a nobody” belief system still wants to be valued, because they are human. Because my Dad didn’t value himself he sought to find his value in other ways. One of these ways was to put a lot of responsibility on his family to do the work of his own failing self-esteem. He believed that he was loved if his wife cooked and cleaned and took good care of him. He believed he was loved if we didn’t say a mean word towards him or be upset with him in any way whatsoever. If he put himself down, we would disagree with him and try to tell him that the opposite was true. Because he didn’t communicate his thoughts and feelings, my Mom, brother and I were forced to try and read his mind. If he was in a bad mood we ALL could tell- we became so skilled at reading his subtle signs and passive communications at the expense of learning to communicate for ourselves. If we sensed he was upset, we would do the work to try and make things better. Though my Mom would try and encourage better communication, he was so extremely uncomfortable and uptight about trying that things would end up more anxious than before. He was the passive King in our home and we learned to treat him with kid gloves. In living this way, my brother and I learned that love was all these things. Love meant compensating for someone else’s poor self esteem. Love meant not making the other person upset. As children who did not know this was so backwards, it also meant sacrificing our own needs to be built up and paid attention to in order to build up our parent. So the cycle continued. My brother and I grew up with this huge sense of lacking and low self-esteem of our own. We naturally lived to please other people. And all the while, the pain was brewing deep inside.
The last five years have been a process of seeing these things as the truth of my story. In learning the truth that all these subtle “leeching” dynamics between a parent and his children can have just as much damage as more physical or obvious kinds of abuse, I was exposed to a whole new world. I learned that these things were not my fault. I learned that my depression and anxiety has definite reasons and weren’t just symptoms of a messed up person.
Of my two parents, my Dad’s belief system had the most impact on me. Deep down I believed I was a “nobody” as well and I relied on other people to tell me that this wasn’t true. This wreaked havoc in its own kind of way, testing relationships and causing me to miss out on great opportunities that I felt I just wasn’t worthy of. As an adult, the responsibility to live differently is now in my own hands. Now that I know that this belief system is not my real inheritance, not the one I was meant to have, I can choose to embrace a new one. I can choose which river to follow. Today I am working to change my belief system. Today I take on the primary responsibility of nourishing my own self-esteem. Today I am taking another step into freedom and living in the truth.
~Carla~
Anger at Parents~A Pathway on the Journey to Freedom
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This post has been inspired by Sarah who left a compelling comment on my last post. I have copied and italicized her comments and answer them point by point.
~Sarah~ “What if you are an adult child of someone who was abused as a child who never sought professional help? My parent was depressed and put us through so much as a children yet I don’t feel I can call it abuse as we weren’t sexually abused or physically.”
~ Darlene~ Abuse is not just physical or sexual. Having said that, the word we use to describe our situation past or present is not nearly as important as it is to get help and shine some light on the situation. I try to use terms such as emotionally unavailable, or emotional abandonment but it all comes down to not having had a sense of value instilled in us. I was well fed, and well clothed. On the outside I imagine that we looked like the perfect family, yet my first major depression was at the age of 10. It may have been easier for me to blame sexual abuse for all my problems, but I have met so many others who share my story of struggle and depression who had never had either sexual OR physical abuse, that I began to realize that my problems went deeper then the type of abuse. I think emotional abuse is extremely hard to cope with no matter what you call it. How does a child understand the things that you are describing here Sarah?
~Sarah~ “this parent uses their abuse as an excuse for why they weren’t emotionally present and as a reason for all the irresponsible choices they made for us as children. As an adult I’m dealing with anger towards them for the way they treated us and the poor decisions they made. This parent is still focusing so much on their childhood and is seeking sympathy from their children for what they missed out on. This parent fails to see how much we missed out on when they didn’t seek help.”
~Darlene~ my mother constantly told me that I had it so much better then she’d had it. And that was true. My mother was a better mother then her mother was to her. The quality of my life was at least 10 times better then the way that she grew up. It never occurred to me to say “SO???” Does the fact that her life was worse than mine justify that she didn’t take proper care of me?
I was taught my whole life that I was responsible for my own feelings, and I found this a difficult concept to grasp. I didn’t think I had the right to be angry with my parents. I sought help via support groups in my early twenties and it was drilled into my head that my feelings were my choice, that I was responsible for who I was as an adult, that I could not blame my past for my present. I believed all those things and I tried positive thinking, affirmation, self help books etc. Many of these things helped for a little while, but they were more like a Band-Aid for a critical wound. I was shocked when my last therapist told me that there was such a thing as “justifiable anger” I had never once thought of that in relation to my parents OR to my past.
~Sarah~ “The (adult) children are afraid of confronting the parent about their behavior out of fear they will be really upset.”
~Darlene~ The most important thing for me to say on this point is that the fear I had about standing up to my mother, was a fear left over from childhood and I didn’t realize that fact. I was so afraid that my mother would abandon me, or reject me if I told her how much she had hurt me. In my therapy process I realized that as a child, rejection and abandonment means death. As an adult it just hurts. As a child, my mother’s love, attention, acceptance was the most important thing in the world and I tried very hard to get it. As an adult I was still trying very hard to get it.
~Sarah~ I’m contemplating seeking therapy as I’m at a point in my life where I have no idea how to deal with this situation.
~Darlene~ It was in therapy that I learned my value. It was in therapy that untangled the mess at the center of my soul and realized the truth. In the end, I had to learn how to re-parent myself. In the end, I was able to find the real me, the individual that I was born to be and move forward with my life. I left depression and dissociation behind me for what I believe to be forever.
It isn’t that I blame my parents for the struggle that I have had. Realizing where they had failed me was only a pathway on the journey to wholeness and freedom. What I’m trying to get at in this blog is that in order to get to the bottom of my depressions, and mental health issues, I had to see where I was squished, where I was invalidated and unsupported and where my emotional growth was stunted. I had to acknowledge those things before I could get to the “me” that was hiding underneath the confusion and emerge into wholeness and freedom.
~Darlene Ouimet
