Archive for Freedom & Wholeness
Emotional Healing and the Causes of Low Self Esteem
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- Let the Sunshine In
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding” Khalil Gibran
I struggled and fought for some sort of “place” in the world for a very long time before I began to find my way out of that darkness that I talked about in my last post. I felt as though I didn’t belong; as though I was different then everyone else; as though I was somehow on the wrong planet. My healing began when I was able to face the causes.
That was where I found the answers to all my questions about why I had struggled so long with low self esteem, depressions, and dissociative disorders. It was scary to face the truth about my past, but looking back what was scary was that I thought “the truth” was going to confirm what everyone ELSE taught me about me. And what I had been taught about me was NOT the truth. I had been taught through actions, inaction, voice inflictions, direct statements and indirect statements, inference and intolerance, nurturing or lack of nurturing as well as rejection and that others WERE more important and therefore more valuable then me, all went into a big melting pot that became the collection of all the experiences that made up “my life” in order to form my belief systems.
The ways that I was treated and not treated, communicated to me that I was not really a valid person
And then on top of being defined as invalid, I had been taught, mostly in non verbal ways, that I was the only one that felt that way. That “my problem” was something that was Read More→
Coaching with Darlene on My Definition of Love
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I am really excited to welcome my friend and guest blogger Carla Dippel. Today Carla is writing about a coaching session we recently did. This post is an excellent example of how to dig down and discover your belief system about a specific concept; in this case “love”. As always please feel free to contribute to this wonderful post by leaving your feedback and comments. ~ Darlene Ouimet, founder of Emerging from Broken
Cocahing with Darlene on my Definition of Love by Carla Dippel
A few weeks ago, I was freaking out about love. I felt anxious, confused, and stuck. I had this sense that I was missing something, that I was scrambling in the surface of myself while there was much deeper stuff going on beneath that I couldn’t get at. I described this “freaking out”-ness to Darlene. In her masterful way, she asked me a couple simple questions that changed everything. I really cared about working through this struggle because I really cared about the part of my life that it was affecting. So I decided to be open and reveal the truth as honestly as possible. I had hope that in doing this I would find better answers than the ones I was working with at the time.
First Darlene asked me to reveal my definition of love. She added, “Don’t worry about sounding silly or trying to have the RIGHT answer. Just write what naturally comes out, what you believe off the top of your head.” I had this sense of taking my focus off the leaves of the tree that were sick and shifting it to the soil. What was really down there?… I felt afraid to be so honest. I don’t like feeling vulnerable or sounding stupid (especially). But I went to work. Here is what came out, un-edited and un-analzyed: Read More→
Emotionally Abusive Statements Designed to Control
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- with clarity comes freedom
Continuing from part one “Emotional Healing by Understanding Psychological Abuse” I talked about how Psychological Abusers misuse their power in order to control and abuse others. In this post I continue with some of the statements that emotionally abusive controlling people make to create fear, confusion and the inability to think, and to force compliance and obedience.
NOTE: These statements are used by ALL controllers, and although I often refer to parents, these statements are used by everyone who misuses their power in order to control others.
I believed statements like this: Read More→
Emotional Healing by Understanding Psychological Abuse
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- there is peace when the fog lifts
Every day I realize more and more that if the world is going to change at all, it is going to change through the emotional healing of the victims. I think that victims of emotional abuse and all the other forms of abuse that stem from emotional and psychological abuse including sexual abuse, domestic violence and spiritual abuse, make up the majority of the people in the world. We have a voice; it is time to take our voices back, to heal and to take our lives back. Abusers can only be truly stopped when victims heal. When the people that they have hurt, realize the truth and realize that we can overcome the pain, oppression and rejection we have lived with and finally take a stand against it in our own lives. When victims emotionally heal, we are strong enough to stand up to the abuse and we are no longer fooled by subtle manipulation. There will be a ripple effect and we will raise our own children differently then we ourselves were raised, and the abusers will lose some of their power because the psychological abuse, lies and manipulation highlighted in the points below, won’t work the same anymore. Read More→
Emotional Healing and Busting through Brainwashing
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Have you ever gone on a ride at the fair? I am talking about one of those scary ones like the roller coaster that flips upside down. I get this fear inside my belly, this wonderful horrible and yet irresistible fear. The fear is there because I am afraid the ride will crash, that when the roller coaster goes upside down the cart will just fly off and fall to the ground… but then I tell myself that this ride runs hundreds of times a day, thousands of times a week and it hasn’t crashed and I reassure myself that my fear is not real. So I take the risk…
Have you ever gone to a natural hot springs for a dip? I have been to several of them. In the winter, the steam rises into the chilly air; sometimes there is snow around the outside of the pool area. If there are people lounging and relaxing in the pool, I automatically trust that the steamy water is not going to burn me. If I dip my foot in the water, and it feels too hot, I know that it is just because my foot is cold. If the water WAS too hot, all those other people would not be in the water, so I just quickly get in, and suffer the few minutes that the water “feels” too hot.
But what would happen if the water was too hot? What if I got all the way in and I started to burn and scream… because it really was scalding hot. Continued….. Read More→
Rebuilding my Relationship with Me ~ Recovering from Dysfunctional
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- emotional healing from dysfunctional family
Sometimes I feel as though I can never go back far enough in order to tell you how I got myself out of the emotional mess that I was in. Today I have been thinking about some of the questions that I began to ask myself in the process of emotional healing and some of the ways that I began to wake up to the way that I was devalued in relationships. This relationship dysfunction was present in almost all of my adult relationships.
Here are the “fog busting” questions that I asked myself; continued… Read More→
The Deadly Side of Accountability
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- Contemplating Freedom
There are several really HOT topics when it comes to recovery. One of them is “accountability” I’m talking about the destructive practice of “self blame” that is disguised as the virtue of accountability. This week I posted the following update on the Emerging from Broken facebook page:
“Recovery started with me. That alone was a hard truth to swallow. I had to face the pain. I had to do the work. It didn’t seem fair ~ none of this was my fault in the first place which was ALSO a hard truth to swallow because for some reason I thought it WAS my fault. These were the stick points; the road blocks. The bottom line is that I am the only one that can “take my life back”.
When I posted this in EFB facebook, I was thinking the discussion would be about my statement “I am the only one that can take my life back”.
An awesome discussion started which quickly turned into a discussion about accountability. This happens frequently. I am talking about when people say “although I didn’t know better as a child I certainly knew better as an adult”. Accountability can be a nice way of saying “it was my own fault”. This is a topic I seem to be running into a lot this week and it is one that is very close to my heart because that kind of accountability almost killed me. Continued… Read More→
The Problem with Living One Day at a Time
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- living one day at a time
“One day at a time – this is enough. Do not look back and grieve over the past, for it is gone: and do not be troubled about the future, for it has not yet come. Live in the present, and make it so beautiful that it will be worth remembering.” Ida Scott Taylor
Isn’t this a lovely quote! I tried to base my life on this quote for many years and I spun my wheels. I beat myself up with it because I could not seem to achieve this “one day at a time” attitude and approach to life but I KNEW in my heart that there was some deep truth and wisdom within it.
But this wasn’t “enough” for me. I could not start there. I am convinced that the reason I struggled for so long was because I didn’t start my healing close enough to the beginning of where I got broken. I didn’t go far enough into the past.
I needed to grieve over the past. It was the self validation that I had never experienced before that began an important part of the healing process for me. I wonder if I had actually known any truth in my life, if I had actually had a healthy foundation, if I would have been able to actually apply or implement this quote.
I could not live in the present when so much darkness was still hanging around me, clinging to my heart and weighing me down. I was beneath the light. I was struggling even to breathe I was so smothered by the unresolved past.
I kept drifting back to the past, and feeling guilty about it. The past was like an unsolved murder mystery. We can’t just decide not to pursue the murderer. That would be dangerous. Some things just need to be resolved. I had things in the past that I needed to look at and deal with.
The future was therefore terrifying! I had no reason to believe that my future would be any better than my past, especially when I didn’t understand what the heck was wrong with me, why I wasn’t loveable, why I was so depressed and feeling like a failure while sometimes fooling the world with my bubbly personality and when I got older, fooling them with my lovely looking family and respectful children. WHY was I feeling so lost inside?
So that brings me to the present ~ (not to “today” but to the present the way I thought about it when I was trying to live by the One Day at A Time quote back when I was broken and struggling with depression, failure, and dissociative identity disorder.) How could I possibly live in the present and make it beautiful when deep down I was lost and sick? And I was consumed about not being able to create a beautiful present and worried that I would have NOTHING worth remembering. Round and round it went.
Trying to live by this quote was like being deeper in the denial that I was trying so hard not to live in. It was like being trapped in a tornado in slow motion. It was like being held under murky water unable to see who or what was holding me under.
Before I could stop struggling with the past, I had to acknowledge it for what it was.
Before I could stop dreading the future I had to understand the past ~ find the lies about me ~ the lies that formed the foundation of my belief system and then realize the truth about me.
Before I could live for today I had to have a clean foundation to build on. I couldn’t start with these neat little solution based quotes until I had actually caught up to the present day.
And that was the process.
Once I got my past sorted out I found it much easier to comprehend and even implement quotes like this one.
Please share your feelings about this subject.
Wishing you truth ~ for love will follow;
Darlene Ouimet
other myth busting posts:
Forgive the Abusers? ~ a bit of a rant
Before I Faced the Pain I had to Face the Lies
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- The Road Ahead
Something is happening here on Emerging from Broken. There is a depth of sharing and honesty that I didn’t expect. There is a community growing that I only hoped for. There is a profound expression of struggle and healing, all working towards the overall good and towards emotional recovery.
This post is the follow up to my last post ~ “Tomorrow I will Start to Face the Pain” . If you have not read it, I really recommend that you take the time to read it and the 50 some amazing comments that it has generated so far. There is something special there.
Some of those comments made my heart ache with pain and I wanted to touch each heart and convince each one that there is hope for emotional healing. It is possible. It is doable. This is curable! I feel your pain because I remember that pain myself.
~The pain of realizing that any kind of abuse including emotional abuse is rejection. I worked so hard all of my life to be this great person full of acceptance and rejection was my biggest fear, only to wake up one day and realize how rejected that I was all along. But that was not MY failure.
~The pain of realizing that my life was built on lies. But they were not MY lies.
~The pain of realizing that all of my efforts to avoid being alone, left me alone anyway, but then realizing that the journey is lonely because we have to go through it as individuals. All my life I tried to do life how someone else taught me to do it, but in reality, I had to find my way because there is only one of me. They took that from me for way too long.
~Realizing that I had been defined by someone else and then suddenly realizing that if I was not who I thought I was, then who was I? And being scared to death to find out who I might be. Which comes from the same fear of rejection and round and round it goes.
~I was so stuck in realizing that after the abuse I felt like no one ever loved me again ~ thinking the answer would be in finding someone to love me again, but in truth, I didn’t love me either. I didn’t know how. The abuse defined me. I wanted someone else to fix it just like someone else broke it. But I had to do it for me. I had to decide that I would love me. I had to find out how. I had to redefine me and in that new beginning, I was able to take my life back.
~Realizing that I never believed that MY abuse was really valid and therefore I was invalidated; first by them and then by me. But that was not my choice. That was what I learned to do. I wasn’t given a choice. But I have one now. I have one today.
~Realizing and finally acknowledging that I was filled with guilt and shame and not knowing exactly what the heck to DO with it. But it wasn’t MY guilt and shame and realizing that was what got me to the next step in the process of letting it go.
~And the frozenness that goes along with all of it and seems to return with each new stage. That feeling of being immobilized; the fear of forward motion; all of that with its own history, each one of us with a slightly different story that the frozen is grounded in and has its roots in and everything even remotely related to any of the following things.
~ I told but was ignored
~ I didn’t tell because I was too scared of the consequences
~ I told and I suffered the consequences
~ I didn’t know there was anything to tell
AND the threads of steel wrapped around each one of these things, each memory, each event, each invalidation and ALL the conclusions that we came to ~ all of which need to be looked at, examined, cut and then healed such as:
~The belief that I am the one that wasted my life. That somehow I should have been able to get over all of this by myself; that somehow I am a failure because of what happened TO me. That somehow the abuse done to me has suddenly become my fault, and I lived my life as though it was my failure ~ that my whole life was my screw up. But HOW was I supposed to move forward with no guidance? HOW was I supposed to “get over it”?
~No one validated me so that I knew how to validate myself
~No one ever helped me move forward.
~No one encouraged me to be who I am but everyone “told me” who I was and that was a lie too. No one knew me. No one SAW ME.
~And I carried the failure that was not mine to carry. I lived the identity that they assigned me.
Running from me but not realizing that it is in the running back to me that I find my true self. Running from the truth because I believed the lies.
Running until I finally realized that the running was killing me. Realizing just one truth was enough to set me on the right path. And then running again because the fear of the unknown was just too scary to actually stop running to face it.
Round and Round it goes… like a whirlwind that I was trapped in. I had to somehow find a way to step out of it for mere moments at a time. Picture being inside of a small tornado that is spinning you around so fast that everything is a blur. Now picture stepping back just enough that you can SEE the spin in front of you, but you are not in it, just for one minute. That is how it began for me. And I began by just looking at one thing at a time for those moments when I could step back from the spin. As time went on, I learned to love myself and fill the void in me for myself. This was not quick OR easy but it was possible and it is possible.
And we do have a choice.
And we can overcome.
And we can take our lives back.
And we can leave the pain behind.
And we can live fully in real happiness and freedom.
………..And I know because I didn’t think I could do it either, but here I am.
Please share.
More little snapshots of truth;
Darlene Ouimet
Related posts: “Tomorrow I will Start to Face the Pain”
“But HOW do I recover? Emotional and other abuse”
and most of the other posts on this blog.. 
That ~ Makes Me Angry by Darlene Ouimet
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- Darlene Ouimet ~ on vacation!
Greetings from Beautiful Puerto Vallarta Mexico!
I have trouble with this topic. I didn’t feel anger the way that I understood anger to be. I saw others express their anger, and I couldn’t relate to that kind of feeling. I was afraid of anger. The few times that I got angry before my process of recovery, I remember quickly going from feeling anger to feeling powerless. I did not give myself the right to be angry. In my mind’s eye I see a spineless, droopy shell of a person, rather like a rag doll, void of any real emotion. Tossed about by the world and its people; everyone had more rights than I did, everyone was more important than I was, everyone had a right to their feelings except me.
That makes me angry.
I don’t remember ever being angry as a child. I did not have a temper. I was quiet. I was often labeled sullen. I was withdrawn. I had no confidence, no spark; I was afraid to be noticed.
I was afraid to be….
That makes me angry.
I remember as a young adult being told that there are only two emotions and all other emotions fall under the heading of one or the other. I was taught that there is only love and fear. Anger comes under the emotion of fear and I was taught that if I was angry to ask myself what I was afraid of. Because of this teaching, just when I might have gotten in touch with my anger for the first time in my life, I shut it down. The truth is that I was afraid of everything including life itself. Asking myself what I was afraid of was WAY too big a question.
That makes me angry.
Looking at things that way also puts the focus on what is wrong with me. For someone who knew her whole life that the reason I was how I was, was because something was wrong with me, was just heaping more guilt, blame and shame on myself. I needed to get to the root of the WHY I was so shut down, why I was so afraid, before I cut straight to the “get rid of it”. No one ever helped me with actually doing that. Everyone wants to skip the WHY steps.
That makes me angry.
I was not heard. I had no voice. I stopped trying; I gave up. I put myself behind everyone else. I got more and more depressed and had more and more emotional struggles. And I got blamed for them. I got more labels attached to me. Crazy, reactive and over reactive, incompetent, emotional, stupid, unwilling to forgive, holding grudges……
That makes me angry.
When I had to go on anti depressants because I couldn’t get out of bed anymore, some people acted like they finally had the PROOF that it was ME who had the problem all along. “See, she is crazy”…. I was embarrassed and ashamed at what I thought was my inability to cope with life. And actually with a medically treated depression, things got worse. My family looked down on me, as though now they had a right to treat me like I was “nothing”.
That makes me angry.
I was so compliant, I was so easily manipulated, so willing to do what they wanted, and yet I was so unimportant and so disposable. I was a good victim, a great victim actually; the PERFECT victim. And that wasn’t enough. Nothing I did was ever enough or good enough. And when I said enough, they said goodbye.
That makes me angry.
My anger (when I finally did get in touch with it) for the most part was for the life that I lost. It was about the fog that I lived in and was kept in and about the lies that we swallow and because we are groomed for the lies as children, it is easy for us to continue to be easily fooled. It is anger for you, for me, for the children and for the broken world.
But today I have my life back. I don’t live in that fog; in fact I am a “fog buster” now. I know the truth. I know that my anger is justified, I am not afraid of it anymore. I am not easily fooled anymore; I don’t believe those lies anymore!
I have hope for you for me and for the children and I rest in the knowledge that there is indeed hope.
Please share whatever is important to you to share and thank you for being part of this blog.
Exposing truth, one snapshot at a time;
Darlene Ouimet
As always, please feel welcome to share with us. I am on my way home in a couple of hours from now, and will answer the comments sometime tomorrow!
Related Posts: What is my Anger telling me?
