Texting with my Daughter Katie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darlene Ouimet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talk about an example of dysfunctional mother daughter relationship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet

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

Seeking understanding and validation from the WRONG people

Darlene and Rocket

When I was a kid my parents got us a puppy! Although I only have one memory of playing with the German Sheppard puppy that one memory is a happy one. 

I have very strong memories however of how much my mother hated having the puppy. Long after the puppy was taken away, I heard her complaints about it.

The reason that they puppy had to go was not because my mother hated it though.  The reason that the puppy had to go was because both my oldest brother and I were allergic to it. 

My mother had an uncle who was a dairy farmer in Quebec. I have a few memories of visiting the farm, of the cows, the milking barn, the orchards my great Aunt and Uncle and their two hired men.  I remember the smell of the big kitchen, the fresh baked pies and the fresh garden food that we ate every time we visited. 

My father LOVED the farm.  He has spent summers there as a teenager.  My mother hated the farm and didn’t make much of an effort to try to hide it. I think she went there out of family obligation and also because my father loved it there so much. 

After I got so sick in grade 5 and developed asthma as a result of being so badly emotionally abused by my teacher, the pediatrician told my mother that I was too weak to visit the farm anymore because of my asthma and allergies.  I was 10 or 11 when this news was delivered.  I remember feeling really badly because my father (and my brothers) would have to miss out on the visits to the farm all because of me.  I don’t think my parents would dare go against the Dr.s orders when the same doctor had threatened them with a court order if they didn’t get me out of the teachers class. 

We moved to another Province the following year and my parents split up, so going to the farm or not, never came up again.

When I was all grown up and moved away from home I ended up marrying a farmer myself, this time on the other side of the country from where I grew up. I married a beef cattle rancher; we had lots of cows, I brought my horse with me when I moved in and pretty soon we added a dog to the growing list of live animals.  My husband also puts up a lot of hay and grain, something else that I had always been allergic to on my Uncles farm. 

My mother didn’t try to hide her disappointment that I married a farmer. She even made a bet that my marriage wouldn’t last 5 years. (Another way she defined me, but that is another story) It started to come out how much my mom hated “the farm”; our farm, my home.  I started to remember how much she hated her Uncles’ farm… and one day she told me that her Uncle got in bed with her when she was a kid and tried to press his erect penis through her legs from behind. (So now I knew why she hated “the farm” so much.)

But here is what I am getting at; One day when I had been married a few years and at least 2 of my children were born, my controlling mother made a comment about how she had made all these “sacrifices” for her children and what a “slap in the face” it was that my older brother had 2 German Sheppard’s in his house, and I lived on a cattle and hay farm and had a horse and a dog. I gapped.  She added that she “had to give up HER dog because of us” and that “she had to stop going to her Uncles farm” because of me.   

I reacted like I always reacted ~ with a whole bunch of explanations about how I had to wear a mask when I groomed my horse, and how I had to wear gloves when I rode. I defended myself with the fact that our dog (a scotch collie) had a double down coat that was the least allergic for me, and how my allergies were MUCH better now than they were when I was a kid… and on and on.  I was so used to having to justify every decision that I ever made that went against anything my mother wanted or didn’t want. The truth is that it was NONE of my mother’s business where I lived or what I did anymore and I could have just told her that instead of defending myself out of guilt and shame every time she brought it up.  The truth is that she only mentioned it because she saw a way to get a dig in against me. And as always she hit her mark.

Today I realize that this is a great example of how manipulative people will use whatever information they have to point a finger and “prove” that the problem is you and always HAS been you; YOU caused the problem and of course YOU OWE them for all they have done for you. This is “the message” that causes so much damage.

My mother sacrificed for me?? I guess she didn’t think I would remember how much she hated that German Sheppard puppy dog and how much she hated going to her uncle’s farm.  The situation had worked in her favor, but she used it against me anyway; she used it to prove how hard life had been for her and that I was failing (as usual) to make it any easier. 

This was one of the things my self-centered somewhat narcissistic mother said that was so telling and so revealing about the lengths she would go to blame me.  This was not the only incident of its kind.  When I started to come out of “the fog” I realized just how pathetic it was that my toxic mother pulled this particular card; SHE hated that dog and she hated her Uncles farm! She should have been thrilled that I was allergic to both! I also realized how pathetic it is that abusers and controllers (owners) will always push to see just how far they can go to get you back in line with what they want you to “do” and how they want you to feel.

Among others things in the dysfunctional relationship with my mother, I learned that LOVE does keep a tally. I learned that (in spite of all the sayings about love) the love that I was taught has to do with a life time of gratitude and obligation.  I learned that according to her I always make the wrong choice and never do what is best for me and that only she knows what is best for me. She knew so much better than me that she insinuated I married the wrong guy (a slap in HER face?) because his profession involved things that I was allergic to! Those messages are not anything even remotely related to love. Those statements come from dysfunctional family belief systems. They show examples of dysfunctional mother daughter relationship. They reveal how my toxic and manipulative mother regarded and defined me as stupid, unable to take care of myself and disrespectful to her wishes and her “sacrifice”. They are related to manipulation and control over another person; me. And the highlight the sneaky ways that psychological abuse work.

I am extremely grateful that I learned that the LOVE I was taught, is not love at all. The false definition of Love had to be replaced with the truth.

P.S. Interesting that although I do have that one happy memory of having the puppy, for some strange reason I am very afraid of German Sheppard dogs to this day.

Please share your thoughts on these kinds of controlling messages from controlling manipulative people.  

Exposing Truth, one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet

Related Posts: To heal from the damage, Know what the damage was

More on Mother Daughter Dysfunctional Relationship

the freedom and wholeness in loving me

A couple of weeks ago I was really sick with a terrible virus which lasted for 8 days.  Just before I came down with it, I had dental surgery and it took me 3 days to recover from that and it felt like I had been sick “forever”.  Have you seen the commercial for cough medicine when the guy is sick in bed and starts calling his wife?  He moans “Pam….. Pam….. can you call my mom?”  In response, she throws a bottle of NyQuil at him.  In the next shot he is shown sleeping like a 200 pound baby. It’s really quite comical and it got me thinking about that expression “I want my Mommy”… That expression (often used in jest) is a popular one for adults who are sick or in pain.  Mommy’s are “supposed to be” or typically believed to be a source of comfort.  That was not the case for me. Sometimes I don’t have the words to express my frustration with being sick.  I wonder if it because I can’t say “I want my Mommy” and even the thought of that sentence just bothers me.

For many years now that phrase “I want my mommy” has been on the tip of my tongue many times, but I never could say it because it was so false.  Even thinking “I want my mommy” just because of the popularity of the expression, feels like a lie to me. Wanting “my mommy” was not going to help me any; I already knew that!  I want “a mommy” or “I wish I HAD a mommy” may have been closer to the truth, but I didn’t know how to express those thoughts.

Sometimes I feel like I got totally ripped off in the “having a mommy” department.  

I remember being sick as a kid.  My mother did the “care part” pretty good. She just didn’t do the nurturing part.  I wasn’t going to die on her watch but today I realize that when people express “I want my Mommy”, they are craving the comfort and the love part of the mommy/child relationship which I didn’t have.  My mother was clinical.  She was efficient. But my mother was not warm and nurturing.

A huge part of my healing has been to face what was missing in my childhood and beyond and realize that it was (and still is) okay for me to acknowledge that that there were things missing in the relationship that I had with my parents. That is just the truth about my life.  The truth is that because some of those important things were missing in my growing up years there was damage done to me. There were consequences to my emotional growth and it is okay to acknowledge that too.

Validating that I got ripped off in my childhood and acknowledging to myself that I was not taken care of as a child in so many ways that really mattered, set me free to get on with the work ahead of me in recovery. Looking back, I realized that the way I fought NOT to accept the truth about my childhood that was a really big problem for me as an adult.  It was in the way of my emotional healing. Once I began to establish what had been missing as far as nurturing and comfort, I was able to start doing those things for myself.  I pictured myself as a child feeling scared or alone or being sick and I would comfort myself.  I told myself that it was okay for me to feel those feelings of loneliness and abandonment and that from now on I would take care of my needs.  By realizing that my pain had never been validated by my parents, I was able to stop wishing for that to happen. When I stopped wishing that “someone else” would validate me and my pain, I was finally free to validate myself and my own pain.

I also became aware of those voices that told me that if I was sick, I was useless. I acknowledged the thoughts that I had that told me I was faking or exaggerating and that I was just being lazy and I told those voices on my own behalf, that they were wrong. I did for me what I longed for my mommy to do for me. I filled in the missing gaps and I was able to move forward with my present day life.   

I became my own parent and I went back to those memories that I had stuffed so far down that I thought they were gone, and I did for me what should have been done for me back then.  I soothed and validated myself.  I call this re-parenting.

When I first started to do this type of self care it was uncomfortable and even emotionally painful.  I had to ask myself WHY this was so uncomfortable for me. I became aware that I didn’t actually like myself all that much and that if I was really honest, I didn’t WANT to nurture me.  I had to realize that those feelings came from the way that I had been regarded as “unworthy” when I was a kid and that I had just accepted someone else’s disregard and disrespect towards me as the truth about me.  I had to be conscious and intentional about self validation and self nurturing in the healing process.  It did not come easy. It was something new that I had to learn how to do.  Self validating and self nurturing felt conceited and uncomfortable to me; it felt foreign and even wrong.

 I learned how to validate, love and nurture myself by practice and persistence. For the first two years or three years of what I call “cementing my new belief system” I wrote 10 minutes every morning on gratitude and self worth. I practiced learning to love myself and taking care of myself by being aware of the self defeating voices and overcoming and correcting them. I was intentional about self talk and self nurturing. I pictured myself hugging and taking care of a little version of myself. I pictured myself loving me.

Today, being responsible for me is much easier. My family took care of me when I was sick a couple of weeks ago, but the validation, self love, permission to BE sick and healthy self talk, I can do for myself now.

Please feel free to share your feelings, thoughts and feedback. You are welcome to use a screen name if you wish not to be known by your real name.

Exposing truth; one snapshot at a time,

Darlene Ouimet

Visit Emerging from Broken on Facebook (the EFB facebook page is NOT connected to this blog in anyway other then the updates that I post there; your comments here, will not show up there.)

Related posts ~ Victim Mentality in Relation to Keeping Family Secrets

Rebuilding my relationship with me ~ Recovering from Dysfunctional

I was 13 years old the first time I woke up hearing my mother having sex. My parents had been split up for a few months; I had never heard my parents having sex. By the sounds of it, I thought that the man my mother had in her bedroom with her was trying to kill her. And he could have been! How would anyone know? None of us knew him.

I felt frozen in my bed, terrified about what I was hearing and not knowing what to do about it.  Should I get a large object and go in there and club him over the head? Should I call the police? My frozen immobility and indecisiveness was making me feel guilty and then suddenly, those horrifying sounds stopped.  I heard normal murmuring sounds of conversation.  I must have gone back to sleep then.  Eventually, I figured out that what was going on in her bedroom was not murder or physical violence.

My toxic mother didn’t want to be a single mother. That was her answer to everything. It was even her justification for having very loud sex with men while three children slept in rooms very close by.

One of my brothers made comments about her night-time noise making sessions; she would respond “I never asked to be a single mother”.  I was left to assume the translation for that statement.  And I translated it according to my belief system.  My mother deserves to be happy. Men make her happy. I have no right to interfere with her happiness. I have no right to feel uncomfortable about hearing my mother doing this stuff.

I have no rights.

I translated her justifications into the belief that this situation was normal. I believed that I had no right to any judgements about my mother. I believed that I was wrong to feel scared, embarrassed and unsafe.  I believed that the uncomfortable feelings I felt when I came down to the kitchen in the morning to find those men sitting there at the table, were due to the fact that something was wrong with me. I thought I was different than other people because I thought I was having difficulty accepting a “normal divorced family” situation that I was unable to accept as “normal”. I thought it was just ME that couldn’t accept it as “normal.”  I thought I SHOULD be able to accept it. (As you can see, my definition of “normal” was dysfunctional and I was accustomed to accepting our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship.)

By the time I was seventeen I was calling myself prudish rather than accept that my narcissistic and self centered toxic mother was promiscuous. By the time I was 19 I suspected that I was “frigid” because I was not at all interested in sex the way that my mother was. I was always looking at the “what is wrong with me” part because my grid of understanding came from dysfunctional mother daughter relationship. My “normal” was not really normal at all. My toxic  mothers dysfunctional behaviour throughout my teen years messed me up a great deal and it took me a long time to realize that.

Understanding THIS truth has been one of the profound truths that set me free.

My promiscuous mother’s decision to have loud sexual relations with men was a decision made out of my mothers selfishness. Repeatedly stating that she “didn’t ask to be a single mother” was meant to justify her own bad behaviour while ensuring that her children didn’t blame her for anything. I didn’t know that and could not even suspect that back then.  I felt guilty and wrong that I was ashamed of my narcissistic mother so I turned it on myself.

When my toxic mother started taking me to the bars where she was picking up men, I didn’t know that was abnormal or dysfunctional mother behaviour either. Even though I knew that I was underage, and I had that adrenalin rush every time I ordered a drink for fear of being asked for I.D. I didn’t know that what my narcissistic mother was doing was wrong because she was my mother. She was the ultimate authority in my life. In my mind, my mother’s authority surpassed the authority of the law and I believed by then that my role in her life was to help her get through the terrible burden of being a single mother.  I felt the same way about her conduct in our home. It was my job, my responsibility to help her get through the terrible burden of having to be a single mother to me; I believed that I was the burden.

All of my mother’s promiscuous sexual behaviour and misbehaviour since I was about 6 years old had groomed me nicely to accept that my value was in sexuality, just like my mothers value was in sexuality. I was groomed to be ready to identify with sexuality as my value even though it scared me to death because of the abuse and trauma that I associated with it. This is one of the terrible conflicts these mixed messages cause that survivors of dysfunctional families face.

~And I wondered why I struggled with depressions continually.

~And I didn’t understand HOW I had become dissociated.

~And I constantly questioned why I had such low self esteem.

~And I beat myself up for my weaknesses with addictions and dysfunctional relationships with abusive men; when in reality I had been well groomed to accept dysfunction as “normal”. I had taught to reprimand myself when I had trouble accepting dysfunction as “normal”.

~I actually fought to accept that I was a failure in most areas of my life thinking the answer was in acceptance and surrender and never realizing that I was struggling to accept the wrong truth. 

These were examples of the type of damage that I had to face the truth about in order to overcome the ways that the results of that damage manifested in my life.

I HAD to understand that I was not the one that let me down.

The ideas presented in this article are not limited to the examples that I have given. This same “grooming process” producing other mixed messages can be applied to any dysfunctional behaviour displayed by a parent in order to see where you own belief system formed in a false normal way. I welcome you to share your thoughts on this subject.  

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time;                                          

Darlene Ouimet

For related posts click the coloured links in bold print

the wrong gift

The Ghost of Dysfunctional Christmas Past ~ Part 2

How come I could NEVER find the right gift for my Mother? I never seemed to be able to make her happy. My Christmas gifts  as well as any other gifts I found for her never had the desired effect one wants when giving a gift to someone.

There was always this disappointment she showed when she opened a gift from me. Her face would fall. She would look uncomfortable. She wouldn’t say much about whatever I had chosen for her. I agonized over what I would get her, and then I worried about it until the day I gave it to her. I dreaded her reaction. I guess I was hoping that her face would light up. I was hoping for approval.

I got so that I HATED thinking about what she might like for a gift and what I should get her. There was so much anxiety around gift giving that I couldn’t actually concentrate on the celebration itself. There was so much “obligation” around all these events that I didn’t understand back then.

My mother never made it easy for me by pointing out or mentioning a specific gift she wanted. It was as if my “guessing what the right gift would be to get for her” was part of what would make her happy. It was a though if she “told” me what she wanted, that would ruin it. In order for the gift to be “special”, I had to come up with the idea on my own, or be a mind reader.

My mother collects Royal Doulton Figurines. Not the cheap kind either. The ones she likes cost upwards of $250.00 each. One year I decided to get her one. It was a lot of money but I really wanted to make her happy.

It worked. She loved it. FINALLY I had done something right after YEARS of giving her a disappointing gift and feeling like I had let my mom down. Her face lit up! She approved! It was an exhilarating feeling of success for me!

There was only one other time I recall where my mother was pleased with me choice of gift for her. It was when I sent her a huge amount of roses to correspond with the number of years she had reached on her birthday. (I can’t remember which birthday, but I know it was over 60)  

When I began my journey out of the foggy darkness, I realized that my Mother sees gifts as a reflection of “love” or a measurement of love.  Gifts “prove” her value. If the giver spends a lot then the giver recognizes her value. Gifts define her. It isn’t the thought that counts in her mind. In addition to that, it’s not only about money and the monetary value of the gift but how well the giver has “guessed” what would please her.  When the relationship is dysfunctional however, it is really hard to guess the right gift.

It seems as though according to her belief system, the gift actually “proves” her worth. The gift proves the givers love and understanding of her.

There is another side of this picture. My mother didn’t give gifts to me in the same way she wanted to receive them for herself. Once again this is an example of how controlling and manipulative people live by two different sets of rules.  The rules that apply to her, and the rules that apply to others.  I always say that narcissistic, controlling and manipulative people don’t ‘love’ by the same rules that they demand love. If my gifts to her defined my love for her and her worth in my eyes then I thought it would stand to reason that the same was true for her when she gave a gift to me. 

When it came to me and the gifts that my mother would choose for me, the gifts always seemed practical or convenient.  She hated those kinds of gifts for herself, but she bought them for me. It seems odd to me that she would buy me gifts that would have disappointed her; gifts that would have “defined her” as less than worthy of a major splurge gift.

In the fog of dysfunctional mother daughter relationship, I could not sort this out.

If my gifts to my mother defined or proved my love for her and made a statement TO her about HER worth in my eyes then it would stand to reason that the same was true for her when she gave a gift to me.

Today I realize that her gifts to me were in fact another way of keeping me defined as less valuable than she was.  Upon closer examination, if my gifts defined my love for her and her worth in my eyes, than judging by the gifts she chose for me, it would stand to reason the same belief actually WAS true for her.  In truth, she was giving me gifts according to her own belief system. She believed that I was not worthy of thought and consideration in the way that I had to prove she was worthy of thought and consideration.

Her double standard (in her view) wasn’t odd at all. It was actually a truth leak about the way she regarded me as “less” than herself.

And in some dysfunctional families, this devaluing belief system is reflected differently for each child! In other words, one child gets the best and most expensive gift imaginable while the other child gets socks.

I don’t miss any of that stuff anymore. I don’t miss the anxiety of choosing a gift for her; I don’t miss bracing myself for the reaction from her; I don’t miss her disappointment or her false definition of love that wrapped around the whole Mothers day, birthday, and Christmas gift giving thing.

It took me years to get over my fear of giving the wrong gift. It took me years to get over my fear of opening gifts too.  I was so afraid that I would react the way that my mother did, I was more focused on my reaction to a gift than I was ON the gift itself! Once I found the truth at the roots of those fears, each passing year has become easier. I don’t buy gifts OR give gifts out of obligation anymore. I don’t believe gifts are a measurement of love. And since my definition of love has been redefined and I know what LOVE is and what LOVE is not, I don’t live under those two different sets of rules anymore either.

I welcome your comments. Please feel free to share.

Happy Holidays everyone; Bright blessings, hugs and squishes to all;

Darlene Ouimet

 Emergingfrom Broken has a facebook page but this website and the comments here are NOT connected to that page. Your comments will not show up on facebook. Your identity is safe as long as you don’t use your full name in the comment form.

Related Posts ~Part one to this post ~ Dysfunctional Family Christmas and Being Alone

I dreamt that my mother threw an elegant cocktail party. It was attended by her well to do friends and it was very formal. The house was decorated beautifully; all dressed in sparkly Christmas decoration, Christmas flower arrangements and the type of decorating perfection that my mother has always been known for.  There were handsome waiters in beautiful black tuxedos quietly bringing around trays of fancy treats and beautifully presented drinks. 

My mother looked stunning in her black full length evening gown; She was happier than I had seen her for years.   

I felt as though I was not actually “at” the party but that I was observing it. I felt awkward in my professional style dress and wished I had thought to buy a new evening gown myself. I felt more like I was part of the “staff” instead of a guest. (In real life I always felt like part of her staff too ~ just a servant, her cook, her whipping post) I noticed that what had started off to be a slight tension headache was quickly becoming a migraine headache and I decided that I better take some Advil and get somewhere quiet to let the pain killer work before it was too late.

I quietly slipped upstairs to the guest room to lay down while the Advil took effect.  A few moments later my mother quietly slipped into the room.  She whisper/yelled “what do you think you are doing?”  I felt that same shock and bewilderment that I always felt when she asked me something in that accusatory tone of voice as though I was purposely doing something “wrong” and that I should not PRETEND that I didn’t know what she was talking about.  I was already backing away from her as I explained that I was getting a migraine headache, that I had taken something for it, and that I was going to stay quiet for a half hour while it took effect. I didn’t think anyone downstairs at the party would even notice. I could see in the dream that she was becoming outraged.  Her eyes were beginning to grow brighter and she got this “look” that I had come to know as “the warning look”.

I felt myself brace. I knew what was coming next.

She started to reprimand me. Her whisper/yell became louder and then she dropped the whisper. She was very angry with me. She said that I always found a way to ruin her plans, that I had to make everything “about me”, that I was selfish and self centered.  How dare I take the focus off her and her party! She said that she had gone to so much trouble for this party and that she had been planning it for months and that I had ruined it.

She started to hit me and while she was hitting me she continued to express her disappointment in me and her devastation over how I had wrecked her party. 

In my mind, although I was dreaming, I was shocked but at the same time I had this surreal feeling that “this verbal rant” explained a few things.  My mother had gone on these rants in real life accusing me of all sorts of things and bringing up every time in the past that I ever messed up in her mind. BUT she had not verbally spewed any of this detailed stuff while she was hitting me and she had never make it so clear that in her mind I had destroyed something that was so important to her in the way she did in the dream.  In real life when she went off on me as an adult, it was always more about the things that I did that made her so ashamed of me. I never connected those rants to the current event in event in her own life that she thought that I had actually destroyed or that whatever I had done had gotten in the way of her success or happiness.  

It was as though I suddenly realized that her rants and rages had their foundation in her belief that I had hurt her perhaps on purpose; that I had actually “set out” to wreck things “for her” and that I had control over those things.  I felt as though her disgust with me had to do with her false belief that I could make her world perfect if only I “wanted to”.  

I realized also that somehow I had believed that too, all my life; that I “could have been” the perfect daughter if “I wanted to.”  But I believed that I was a failure as a daughter, just like she said. And because of that “failure” that I took responsibility for, I believed it was my job to restore her order by taking abuse from her. Verbal abuse, emotional abuse and even physical abuse.

In the post I wrote about when my daughter was born and how my mother made this big deal about wanting to “be there for me” and how hopeful that I was that she was “finally going to be “My Mother” and then how it turned out to be such a disaster to have her there, I give an example of how my mother raged at me for some unknown reason.  I used it as an example of our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship and her symptoms of narcissism.

Through this dream, I suddenly realized that in my mother’s mind, when things went off the track when I went into labour with my daughter, and all the anxiety that it “caused HER” I had destroyed the way she had envisioned the whole thing going.  She had this “plan” that SHE was going to be different this time. This time it was going to be about her, my mother, being there for me. This time (my mother believed) she would make up for all the other times that she had NOT been there for me.  She was going to be mother of the year and for once she was going to “be a great mom” and because of how it actually went, she was royally stripped of her grand plan to “make it all up to me” and it was all my fault, so she did what she always did and lashed out at me. She blamed me because things didn’t go HER way when I was having MY baby. This was actually how she justified her verbal and emotional abuse.

Putting dysfunctional events with my mother through this grid of understanding made many of the mental madness moments in my relationship with my mother more understandable. It is still pretty sick and dysfunctional. In the dream I thought to myself; “my poor pathetic mother. She really is a little bit psychotic.  Her thinking process is completely dysfunctional and abusive at the least.  She is freaking out at me because my headache interfered with the way she envisioned her perfect Christmas party”.  

When I woke up I didn’t feel so sorry for my mother; I was relieved that it was a dream!

(I actually threatened my mother when I was 15 years old that if she ever hit me again I would hit her back and it scared her enough to stop that part of the dysfunctional toxic parent child relationship we shared, so although this dream was about my mother physically abusing me as an adult, that never happened in real life.)

NOTE: Realizing this and having this insight into my mother’s thoughts, doesn’t change the damage that my mother caused to me, it just helps me comprehend how messed up her thinking is. Realizing her crazy thinking does not excuse her behaviour nor should it be used as an excuse for her behaviour. Using these insights as excuses for mistreatment and abuse got me stuck in the dysfunction for YEARS.

This little insight through the dream helped me to realize HOW she thinks (based on her reactions in the past) however it doesn’t change the fact that she is and was wrong and that the way she parented me and our mother daughter relationship was toxic and dysfunctional. She has always acted as though she believes that it really is my job to make things go well for her. Her actions inferred that life doesn’t happen, but that I “caused” good things to go bad. She acted like I had trouble with the birthing process just to wreck her plans of being the perfect mom for once. I could never get my head wrapped around her way of thinking. (and I no longer want to)

Please share your thoughts,                 

Exposing truth one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet

Related Posts~ My Mother Finally wanted to Be my Mother (this is the story I refer to when my daughter was born)

Seeing through New Eyes

This article is based on a page from the unauthorized biography “Oprah a biography by Kitty Kelley”

When I grabbed this book of the shelf at Costco, I didn’t realize that it was an unauthorized biography about Oprah Winfrey. I thought that it was the real story. I thought that Oprah had agreed to the publication. I quickly realized that I had picked up something that might be full of lies and conclusions that had no right to be drawn; but since I bought it, I decided to read it anyway. 

One of the most popular subjects here on Emerging from Broken is the subject of dysfunctional and toxic relationships between mothers and daughters.  I think that as humans we are born craving love, community and acceptance from our mothers and when it appears that our mothers hate us, disapprove of us, judge us or generally never seem to love and accept us… it is a mystery that we are attracted to solving.  I want my mother to LOVE me.  I want a relationship with my mother. But I got tired of how the entire burden of that desire was left up to me with zero accountability on the part of my mother.

I came across a part in Kitty Kelley’s book about Oprah Winfrey that bugged me a great deal. I realize that this is an unauthorized biography, but the example that I found about dysfunctional and toxic mother daughter relationship was so good, that I just could not resist writing about it for Emerging from Broken. It shows the way that society views how we SHOULD respect parents no matter what.  It shows that the definition of love is often communicated in a very dysfunctional way.   In my opinion, this part in the book explains the just how toxic mother daughter relationships can be and that society actually views this toxic false definition of love and respect as the right way to view it.

The following is a quote from page 175 of the book Oprah; a biography by Kitty Kelley. This quote is in the context of a conversation that a very close family friend (whom Oprah calls her Aunt Katherine) Mrs. Esters has with the author of the book.

Mrs. Esters says

“Oprah takes very good care of her mother, who now buys five-hundred-dollar hats and has drivers who have drivers and helpers and cooks and all, but the story of Oprah and Vernita is sad and complicated”. said Mrs.Esters. “Oprah does not love her mother at all…She gives her a great deal financially but she does not give her the respect and affection a daughter should, and that bothers me. Vernita did the best she could with Oprah, who was a wilful, runaway child….Her mother has had to bury two of her three children over the years and I can tell you that when a parent loses a child it can you to your knees. I know. I had to bury my son. So Oprah should be more forgiving of her mother…”

This paragraph bothered me. It reminded me of my own life, and the way that I have been blamed for the problems in my relationship with my mother. It irritated me. Notice the word “should”. (…“but she does not give her mother the respect that a daughter should” and “Oprah should be more forgiving…)

Notice that Mrs. Esters brings up two children who have passed away as though that has something to do with the whole thing.  That is what I call a “rabbit trail” The fact that two of Opera’s mothers children died has NOTHING to do with why Oprah should love her mother or with Oprah’s relationship with her mother. See how the lies are told? Does this mean that the definition of love is “feeling sorry” for your mother?

And you “should” respect your mother, because she is your mother? Because she did the best she could? The best according to who? And why does she use the word “forgiving” because that implies that there is indeed something to forgive and it bothers me that the word “should” is in the same sentence as forgiving. There is just something wrong about all this.

These quotes are a reflection of how society is brainwashed to regard parents as Gods.

Mrs Esters also comments that Oprah was “a wilful and runaway child” which puts the all the blame for the behaviour of her mother squarely back on Oprah’s shoulders. And that is the whole problem in the first place. Children are always blamed for whatever the parents do or “have to do”.  Like I said this paragraph is a great example of the way society views “toxic mother daughter relationships” blaming the daughter or blaming the child no matter what age they are, for all the problems.

There is so much “truth leaking” about what really went on in this paragraph but in our society, nobody catches it.  Everyone hears it the way that it is intended to be heard; that Oprah, the child, failed her mother and continues to fail her to this day.

This part of the quote in the statement “Oprah does not love her mother at all…She gives her a great deal financially but she does not give her the respect and affection a daughter should, and that bothers me.” … well that Really bothers ME. Respect and affection? That phrase made me cringe. We are supposed to give our mothers affection? Why? Even if they beat us? Even if they sexually abuse us? Even if they disregard us as human beings and neglect our emotional health? This whole thing implies that being a daughter is a duty; that this “duty” has guidelines that need to be abided by or else you are NOT a good daughter.  And there is no accountability on the part of the mother.   And what about the concept of “RESPECT”? If the childhood history that Oprah endured is actually true, then her mother was not a very loving mother, and her mother didn’t respect Oprah at all, so why “SHOULD” Oprah give her mother respect and affection?

I don’t believe that children learn by being told HOW to be loving daughters.  I believe that we learn by example and the example that my mother set for me is exactly what I learned. My mother was not nurturing or respectful. Her example of “love” was dysfunctional. She taught me things from a very one sided point of view. What applied to me, didn’t apply to her because she is the mother, and society accepts that view. 

I don’t think my mother is very happy with our relationship because we don’t have one, but honestly, whose fault is that? Why does society view it as MY fault? Based on the small parts of the toxic mother daughter relationship I had with my mother and have shared here in Emerging from Broken, it is clear that my mother did a lot of damage to me. I am not going to take the blame for that because my mother and society are more comfortable blaming all relationship difficulties on the kids, no matter what age they are. I think that it’s time that everyone looked at the difficult subject of toxic mother daughter relationships through the eyes of truth. 

The problems don’t start with the child. Even if that child was never abused by the parent, the adult child is often angry that said parent didn’t protect them from the abuse that did happen and that is understandable.  Think about that in relation to yourself as a child. I believed most of my life that the problem was me, because I was always told it was me. But does that mean it was the truth? No.

I had a very strong reaction to the way this story about Oprah Winfrey was presented and to the way that her relationship with her mother was viewed by a family friend. It triggered all the memories of how no matter what my parents did, no matter how dysfunctional and toxic they were, no matter how I was regarded and devalued, I was the problem and any lack of acceptance or complaint was regarded as disrespectful and therefore viewed as my failure as a daughter.

Please share your thoughts on this example of toxic mother daughter relationship. I look forward to the discussion in the comments.

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time,

Darlene Ouimet

Please visit Emerging from Broken on FaceBook

For more about dysfunctional and toxic family relationship please see the category buttons above for Mother Daughter, and Family.

When I finally drew my boundaries and make it clear to my mother that I was no longer going to accept her devaluing treatment of me, she walked away. She never called again. Oh she played her usual manipulative tricks including telling me that I could contact her “when I have thought about it” but I quickly told her that I it wasn’t up to me anymore. It was now up to her to decide if she was going to have a real relationship with me based on love, mutual respect and equal value, OR if she was going to continue to abuse me. (An option  I would no longer tolerate)

She wanted to just put the whole thing behind us and “start over” I said no and that this time I wanted to deal with it. This time I wanted my say.

She said “Oh Darlene, we have always had our differences but we have always worked them out in the past” and I responded “No Mom, in the past I have always backed down and let you have your way”. 

Always her way. Always a one sided relationship. Always her side.

That was the last time I spoke to her. I left it with her and she refused to bend. She refused to meet me half way.  She turned me down. My mother abandoned our relationship.

When I realized that she wasn’t going to contact me again, it cut me to the core.  I was rejected all over again.  By walking away from me she was saying “you are not worth it Darlene. I can’t be bothered working on having a relationship with you”

And that hurts very deeply. That is a horrible thing to realize and accept.

Not being worth it, had always been my deepest fear; I felt as though she proved I was unworthy of her love by not trying to work on our relationship.  But in reality, her actions do not make a statement about me; they make a statement about her. 

I questioned myself a million times about whether or not I had made a mistake drawing that boundary. But the alternative was just too devaluing. It was at the root of all my depressions and low self-esteem. I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself to her anymore.

The truth is that what my mother actually proved is that she either does not actually love me, or that she is incapable of healthy loving and mutually respectful relationship. (I suspect that both are true.)

I stopped using my suspicion that she was incapable of loving me or herself as the excuse to let her hurt me. There are all these “teachings” out there that when we are an example of “love” we teach love. And the truth is that I was not “being an example of love” by letting her walk all over me.  In truth I was sending her the message that she WAS more important than me and that I would accept her nasty behaviour no matter what because she was the more deserving one in our relationship. Like a dog that always comes home to the master no matter how the master regards the dog.

I had lots of grieving to do. In some of the most painful times, I had an image in my minds eye of the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz screaming “I’m melting, I’m melting” because sometimes it felt as though the pain of my mother’s rejection would kill me. It felt like I was dying.  

Eventually I began to accept that this was the way it really was.  I had to reaffirm my decision that I didn’t want to live by her rules anymore. I spent months reminding myself what the alternative would be if I lifted my boundary, and reaffirming that I didn’t want to lift it because the alternative was too devaluing to me.

Although I longed for a loving relationship with my mother, I had never had one in the first place; I had no frame of reference for what I actually longed for.

Standing up for myself was empowering. It was like saying “HEY, I deserve better than what you offer” and my actions proved that I believed it.  I made giant strides in the following months towards self-esteem recovery and personal growth.

There is no good answer for the question of why my mother doesn’t love me. She just doesn’t. The truth hurts but it has also set me free. I don’t wait around anymore for approval and love from places where I will not get it. Her actions state that she will love me only if I do things the way she wants.  She will love me if I do our mother daughter relationship the way she wants.

Unconditional love towards my mother on my part no longer looks like me accepting her devaluing and abusive actions and regard towards me. Unconditionally loving my mother is only possible when I respect and love myself in the true definition of love. Relationship with my mother is not possible when the price that I pay includes sacrificing my human rights, individuality and self-esteem.

Today I am free of that false system and false definition of love! I love in truth and equality. I see myself as equally valuable to all others. My self esteem is strong and healing more all the time!

For years I missed the idea of having a loving mother. I don’t miss that idea anymore. I don’t miss what I never had either. Standing up to the dysfunctional and toxic mother daughter relationship stuff went a long way towards my process of emerging from broken.

Please share your thoughts about toxic dysfunctional mother daughter relationship stuff or any other toxic relationship stuff that this post brings up for you.

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time.

Darlene Ouimet

A very hot topic post this week was  ~ Adult Children and the Skewed definition of Respect 

For Related posts see the words in bold highlighted blue

stormy mother daughter relationship

I used to live waiting to be good enough. I thought ~ “as soon as YOU say that I am important, then I will be important.  When you say that I am lovable, then I will be lovable. When YOU say that I am worthy then I will BE worthy”.  Deep down I believed that someone else would determine my value. I had to learn to stop operating under those beliefs. I had to stop seeing myself through the unloving eyes of others.

When I was 14 years old, I vowed that I would never be like my selfish, unloving, self centered mother. That was a serious vow and that memory is one of the clearest memories that I have. I don’t remember what happened the day that I made that vow but I remember it was one of the only promises that I ever made to myself.  I knew somehow that our mother daughter relationship was dysfunctional and that my mother was on the toxic side, I just didn’t know what I could do about it, or how long lasting and deep the effects of her way of relating to me would be.

When I went through my process of recovery from dysfunctional relationships, I took a closer look at the vow I made to never be like my toxic mother.  I asked myself what that meant to me and what specifically I had been referring to back then. I saw my mother as someone who didn’t care about others and cared about herself too much. She didn’t care about me. She discounted my feelings and she discounted my needs. She was disloyal and dismissive.  She was cutting and mean. She humiliated and embarrassed me in public and her actions and statements made me feel unworthy of respect or love. My mother (who demonstrates many signs of narcissism) was very selfish and self centered. My mother and I had a very dysfunctional and toxic mother daughter relationship.

More recently I took a look at this whole dysfunctional mother daughter relationship and the ongoing damage that it caused to me, in an even deeper way.  My narcissistic mother put herself first. So I vowed that I would never put myself first. My mother didn’t go without so I wanted to be the opposite;   I would go without many things to prove that I was not like my mother.

Somewhere along the line I decided that my needs would never come before others because that would mean that I was “like my mother” and in putting myself or my needs before anyone else would be showing those same signs of narcissism and since I had learned as a child that my needs didn’t matter, it was easy for me to stop listening to myself and discount my own needs.  I was proud of myself for doing it! That decision represented the vow that I made not to be like my mother. And I didn’t realize that I was taking over from all the other abusers in my life by agreeing that my needs would come last. My motive was understandable, but the practice was funky and dysfunctional.

When I decided that I would never be like my mean and toxic mother, I went to the other extreme and ended up being just as dysfunctional and I ended up treating and regarding myself exactly the same way that she treated and regarded me; as unworthy and unimportant. I discounted my feelings and I discounted my own needs. I put myself last. I humiliated and embarrassed myself by not ever standing up for myself and my own actions reinforced the belief that I was unworthy of love.

It’s a long uphill climb, learning to overcome this self discounting treatment. I still catch myself putting myself last under the guise of being a wonderful person and contributing to the greater good of mankind.  I have done it with my family and I have done it right here with my website and my readers.  Spreading myself so thin that I get sick, all because I vowed that I would never be like my narcissistic, dysfunctional and toxic mother.

I have been rethinking that vow lately.

The way that my mother did relationship with me was dysfunctional and toxic. The way that I learned to do relationship with myself as a result of how I was raised, was also dysfunctional and toxic.  By realizing where I got the ideas and teachings about HOW to treat myself, and how to NOT be like my selfish, toxic and dysfunctional Mother, I discounted and devalued ME, in just the same way that she did.

I still vow that I will never be like my unloving mother but today I am learning that what I regarded as the opposite of my mother is still toxic and dysfunctional. I had to take a look at the whole picture in order to see that I was not actually setting things right by being the total opposite of her because I was still disregarding me. (As I had been taught to do by her example)

Putting myself first is not narcissistic at all. The difference between the way that my mother regards herself vs. others and the way that I regard myself vs. others is that I believe all people are equally valuable. The way that my mother operated was that SHE was the most important and that HER needs were the most valuable.

The truth is that we ALL have equal value and that self care and self love when done in a healthy way, will actually benefit all those in contact with the person who practices it.

Everyone is welcome to share. Please feel free to use any name you wish if you feel unsafe about posting with your real name. I look forward to reading your responses to this article.

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time

Darlene Ouimet  

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.                                                  

For more on Toxic and Dysfunctional Mother Daughter Relationships please see the category tab for “Mother Daughter”

Please visit Emerging from Broken on Facebook