Archive for Self Esteem
Emotional Abandonment, Rejection and Recovery
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Darlene
When I try to conform to what other people want, I realize that I am rejecting myself the same way that I have been rejected by others. I can decide (even subconsciously) that I don’t see the point of trying or that it is too hard to stand up for myself, but that leaves me feeling the same way that I have always felt; empty, unsupported unlovable, unworthy and not good enough.
Rejected and emotionally abandoned.
Loving myself has so much to do with being there for myself. It has so much to do with not leaving myself the way that I was emotionally abandoned by others.
Rejection is not just when someone says “get out of my life”. I was rejected by every single boyfriend that I ever had although I was always the one that left the relationship. I didn’t understand my deep feelings of turmoil in those relationships. I didn’t see the reality of not being accepted. I didn’t realize how hard I tried to conform and comply. I did not realize I had experienced emotional abandonment again. Sometimes I didn’t even understand why I gave up and left.
And I was left with this huge feeling of restlessness about my life and why things didn’t work out, always sure that it was my own fault always looking to change myself, my reactions, my way of doing life. But in reality, I was always rejecting myself the same way that I was being rejected. Every time I saw the need to change me, I was agreeing with them. I was agreeing that the real me was somehow “wrong,” every time I tried to conform in order to make someone else happy.
All of this was combined with the underlying questions about why I was not accepted and trying to understand why I always had to change, and why I was still being rejected and abandoned emotionally by others, even though at the same time I was willing to accept that it must be me who had the problem.
Today I realize that when people asked me to conform to their ideas of who I should be, that’s rejection. When people asked me to be who they want me to be, they are rejecting who I am. They are rejecting who I was born to be; my individuality.
When people who are supposed to love you do this, it cuts really deeply and it is very hard to understand. When we keep trying to meet someone else’s expectations that is the same as rejecting of our own desires. We don’t understand it this way because we have learned that we MUST conform and comply as a child in order to survive; which is a true fact. In order to find freedom and wholeness however, I had to realize I am not a child anymore. When I began to understand this concept I made big progress in overcoming depression and dissociative behaviour.
When I was a child I had to do whatever was necessary for me to survive. I had to try harder to be what they wanted, to please, to make everyone happy. What I am saying now though, is that I had to realize that I am not that child anymore. The truth is that I do not need to conform in order to survive. The truth is that I do not need other adults to take care of me; my survival is not dependant on anyone else anymore. I am not a pawn in someone else’s game.
I had to realize this truth; I can take care of myself now. Then I had to learn to honour myself, to value and appreciate myself for who I am, so that I could “be there” for me. I had to stop rejecting myself in order to accept myself. I had to realize that in all of this learned behaviour, I had become the one who was emotionally abandoning me.
Looking forward to your comments on this one!
From surviving to thriving on the journey to wholeness;
Darlene Ouimet
Related Posts : Click ~ Who am I ~ will I like me?
Click ~ Depression and Identity Crisis
Standing up to Dysfunctional Relationship Part 2
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My last post (click here) was about standing up to my husband regarding our dysfunctional relationship, that I was mistreated and disrespected and how he was willing to listen to me. Unlike him, not everyone was willing to meet me half way with my desire to change and become my own person instead of a robot that existed to restore everyone else’s value.
I cancelled hosting a family reunion because my mother and my brother were up to their trouble making tricks, and I was just sick of being the one in the family that was never heard, never valued, always expected to just “take it” and always the one who was wrong.
My mother and my brother we up to their trouble making antics again; apparently, there was this big “family horror” going on behind the scenes because I had told my sister in law about some of my childhood, and some of the things that my mother did, and she told my brother who told my mother… and well as you can imagine the you know what hit the fan. Before anyone talked to me or asked me about it, the whole family ~ aunts, cousins ~ everyone had all been contacted, questioned and informed about my “talking”. It wasn’t even what I talked about that was the real problem, it was what I MIGHT have talked about that he was trying to find out.
Did I keep the family secrets, or was I revealing them to everyone? Of course, these kinds of people make sure that they discredit you with each conversation. It is all about control and making sure that the family member who is “talking” is painted as a psycho with issues right from the beginning of the conversation, just in case that family member really has revealed the family secrets. These phone calls were about damage control as well as investigating the damage itself. It would have gone something like this: “Darlene has been saying things about her childhood, that are not true, she has made up this story about (whatever) and I am trying to find out what else she is going around saying. Did Darlene say anything to you about me? I just want to know if she has said anything to you about it don’t believe her because it isn’t true, she is a bit crazy and has been on anti depressants and seeing a therapist you know.”
I didn’t know this was going on of course. My mother called one day and said that she had decided to tell me that she was worried about something I was doing and she told me about this conversation that I had had with my sister in law 6 or 8 months earlier and what a problem that I had caused. (I am assuming that they had been talking about this with each other for 6 or 8 months.)
There were a couple of things that struck me odd;
a) That she totally believed everything that she had been told, without even asking me.
b) And because several things she heard and was upset about were actually the truth.
To the things that I said to my sister in law that were true, I responded, yes, I did tell her that, so what? My mother seemed stunned and didn’t know what to say about my admission or my honest reaction. So the truth was ignored. The fight became about the false.
There were some things that had been exaggerated, and a few things that I had never said but when I told her that I had never said them, my mom said “Darlene, she wrote it down” and I said “that makes it true?” (that was ignored too)
The real fear behind the call was about the stuff I hadn’t told yet. I realized that later. She was actually calling to warn me to keep my mouth shut and to re-establish her control and power over me. She wanted to reprimand me but good, and I didn’t think so. I was finally sick of it.
So a few weeks later my brother called like nothing was going on, telling me all the dates they booked and their schedule for this family reunion that I had agreed to host. (Everyone in my family lives in a different Province or State from each other so arranging this was kind of a big deal.) I told him that I had heard that he was saying all kinds of things about me. He admitted it and told me about how he called everyone in the whole family. (It surprised me when he just told me he had done all that, but that is the degree to which he thought HE was right and that it was right for him to call everyone and he was right to discredit me ~again without ever talking to me first) and we got in the first real fight we had ever had. (I had never dared to stand up to him before) He was ranting and raving and yelling and bullying me so much I started to shake.
I stuck to my decision to cancel hosting or attending the family reunion ~ which stunned everyone! They thought it should be just family as usual, how dare I make a fuss. (How dare I stand up to him or my mother.) I caught him so off guard that he expressed his disappointment but at the same time insisted that the whole thing was my fault. No matter how many times I repeated that nothing I said to his wife was a lie and that I had a right to talk about MY childhood; those statements were NEVER addressed. Again, it was really all about what I MIGHT say. Don’t tell the family secrets. Be who we say you can be. Do what we say you can do.
If I was the problem, like I had been told for so long, then what the heck did they want to be around me for?
(Because I was the biggest servant of the whole family? Because I would do all the cooking? Because there is no real love lost between us? Because they wanted me to believe that they “loved me” enough to “accept me even with my problems”? Because I always complied in the past and never stood up to myself, and suddenly I realized that I had equal value?)
I thought they should be happy and celebrate that they didn’t have to spend a whole week with me! I thought they should have a party to celebrate getting RID of me!
But you know what? They didn’t really want to lose their victim now did they?
Please contribute to this post in any way that you would like to. I look forward to the conversations we have here at Emerging from Broken.
Exposing truth; one snapshot at a time,
Darlene Ouimet
Why Me? Wrong Answers to Abuse Recovery Questions
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Why Me?
I read the following quote on twitter and it really bugged me: If a person who went through domestic violence asks you “Why me?” then answer; “you’ve been put on this Earth to help others who went through the same thing.”
I think not.
This ticks me off because I used to believe this kind of thing; I accepted it as the truth, but today I see it for the skewed way of thinking that it is. If I believe this saying, then I have to believe that there was some grand plan for my life that included me being mistreated, abused, invalidated and devalued. If I believed this then I would believe that abuse is and mistreatment is for character building and actually has a place in our world.
I was not abused because the universe, fate, God or some other higher power had some amazing plan for my life. A plan that included me being beaten down and squished, devalued, mistreated, abused and invalidated for the first 40 or so years of my life, so that I could emerge from the rubble, bleeding and broken and become this fantastic encouragement to the world and make a huge difference. I think not.
I can use my adversities and the struggles that I had to overcome to encourage others, yes, but that isn’t why they happened. We all want the answer to the question “why did this happen to me?” The answer that this was so that we can use our adversity to help others ~ is just the best answer many of us can come up with, but I often think that the reason we come up with that answer is because we don’t want to look at the real answer. People, sick people, abused us psychologically, mentally and emotionally, physically, or sexually ~ the point isn’t how it happened; the point is that it did happen. Sometimes these people were our parents, OR we are afraid to look at the possibility that our parents knew something was wrong and didn’t do anything about it or didn’t look farther into it. The truth will set you free, but we are deathly afraid of it. Some of us were beaten and lived in horrific situations of domestic violence, often daily. Even witnessing abuse is terribly traumatic. I can’t believe that this was “meant to be”.
Some of us were sexually abused and physically abused and completely invalidated in our own homes by people we trusted, people that were supposed to take care of us and we lived in fear, guilt, shame and confusion. Others of us suffered sexual abuse by a neighbor, an uncle, aunt or grandparent, and we were coerced into not telling. I can’t accept that this is because God had a plan to use that situation to better the rest of the world in the future. That would be almost as bad as the abuse itself.
Some of us were called stupid, selfish, useless, ugly and all other manner of abusive and devaluing statements against our personhood. Some of us were told called liars, trouble makers, and told that our feelings were “wrong”. ~ do you really want to accept that this was “all God’s plan” for your life? What kind of God would organize the world that way? No wonder there is so much controversy about God. No wonder people hate the very concept of a God. But it isn’t God that decided this would be the way, it is Man who blames God for the outcome of the world.
All of these types of abuse ~ physical abuse and domestic violence, sexual abuse and psychological abuse, and even witnessing any of these kinds of abuse attack us at the core of who we are. They rip away at our individuality and our personhood; they force us to try and deal with things we have no way to comprehend how to deal with; they tear down our chances of productivity and cause damage that we so often don’t realize was the cause as we grow up in years, resulting in depressions, physical illness, mental breakdowns and mental health problems, low self esteem, failure to thrive in life, oh the list goes on.
Every so often I go on a rant. This was one of those times. Thank you for reading; I would love to hear your comments!
Exposing Truth, one snapshot at a time;
Darlene Ouimet
Importance of Recognizing Progress in Recovery
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“It is important to give yourself credit for all your successes, no matter how small. If you wait to get to the end of the healing process, until you’re ‘finished,’ before you recognize your progress, you’ll wait forever. Each small step is a building block, and accomplishment in and of itself, and by acknowledging each step along the way you make room for further growth”. Courage to heal workbook by Laura Davis.
I thought it would be fun to pool my thoughts with Christina Enevoldsen and Patty Hite from Overcoming Sexual Abuse on this post about rewarding ourselves and recognizing our progress along the way on the journey to the other side of broken.
Christian Enevoldsen writes:
“I learned as a child to think in terms of my inadequacies, so I discounted any progress if it fell short of where I wanted or expected to be. I couldn’t see how far I’d come; only how far I still had to go. I’d verbally flog myself after I finished anything. I secretly hoped that if I put myself down, others would disagree with me and come to my defense. I thought if I focused on my flaws, I’d keep improving and wouldn’t get complacent with my achievements. Trying to be good enough felt like it was a life or death battle.
A big part of my healing from sexual abuse has been to accept my weaknesses and love myself in the midst of them. I know I’m just as valuable right now as I will be when I’m all bright and shiny at the end of this process. That helps me to accept not only myself right now, but my work right now. I approve of my progress. Even if it’s a little thing, it came from me and that makes it good. It’s the baby steps that are the foundation of healing and any other successes in life. Those things that look like gigantic leaps to others are really just a lot of baby step strung together. Others may not be very impressed with me or with what I do, but I know where I came from. I know what it’s taken me to get to this place. And I’m DAMN impressed.”
Patty Meyer Hite writes:
h step along the way you make room for further growth.” Courage to Heal WB by Laura Davis
“I too had a hard time acknowledging my achievements in the beginning. Especially when all we focus on are the bad things that has happened to us and the whys and the why not’s. It’s hard to focus on “how far we have come.”
But it is soooooo important to. I compared myself to my kids. Every little thing they do, as children, is exciting. They learn how to tie a shoe, how to write their names, how to read a book. They learn a new cheer or they caught a fly ball. With every triumph, we as parents should encourage them. I would clap my hands, tell them how proud I was of them and always give them a hug. Sometimes, I would pat them on the back, tell them, “Way to go”, and take them out for pizza. Compliments were big in my house toward my kids. They still are even though the kids are now adults.
We need this. We need a pat on the back, a “job well done” and a special treat. Even if our parents (especially if our parents) didn’t do it for us, it is time to do it for ourselves. If no one is there to encourage our efforts, we need to do it ourselves. We are valuable and we deserve it!”
Darlene Ouimet writes:
Self acknowledgement was a huge problem for me. I never gave myself credit for anything because nothing was ever good enough. Nothing was ever good enough for me because when I was a kid nothing was ever good enough for them. (teachers, parents, elders) I was conditioned to try harder no matter what I was trying for. It was the slow process of not being acknowledged for achievements that wore me down. It isn’t that I was always told I my efforts were not good enough; sometimes it was just that nothing was said. Sometimes it was a frown, sometimes it was a scowl, or an impatient huff. So I tried harder to get what I considered to be approval. A smile or any kind of approval or acknowledgement that I was even there would have gone miles towards my self esteem. This was not the case, so I learned to try harder and never rest or be satisfied with my effort. I learned to believe that I was never enough in almost every area of my life.
One time my therapist asked me to write a list of my accomplishments ~ to write down anything and everything I had ever done that I felt good about starting at about the age of 18. I thought I was going to throw up at the very idea of doing that exercise. I was sure that I was going to have to come back the next week and tell him there was nothing. What I realized is that there was nothing I could write down that I believed was good enough. When I looked at the origins of that belief, and saw where it came from and how it developed, I was able to write down some of the things that I felt good about, and then what happened that caused me to feel not good enough afterwards. I saw that I let others continue to suck my joy and ask me for more even after I left my childhood family. By then, if my efforts were good enough, I told myself it wasn’t good enough; I looked for ways that I could have done more, done better and I no longer trusted anyone who was pleased with my efforts.
Shortly after this project that I did for my self growth and recovery, with the help of my therapist I set a few goals. When I accomplished the first really big one, my therapist suggested that I reward myself. I didn’t know how. I realized that I didn’t know how to give myself a pat on the back OR any other type of credit. I was so stuck and once again scared about “not doing it right or good enough”. For several weeks he asked me if I had chosen my reward, and I resisted. We ended up having to spend some time talking about HOW to reward myself.
That first reward is in my living room and each day I see it, I remember “I can”. I can take care of myself, I am worthy, I can do anything that I put my mind to. I can overcome the past. I can fly. I can emerge from broken and have a new life. And I DID and I DO.
What are your thoughts about acknowledging yourself? Does it make you uncomfortable? Does it make you feel weird? Does it come easy? Please feel free to share your experience with us and our readers.
Darlene Ouimet
Depression and Recovery from Mental Health Struggles
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I have talked a lot about taking a look at the truth in order to realize how I arrived with repeated depression, broken, exhausted and ready to throw my life away in my early forties. I had to look at what happened to me through new lenses. I had to realize that I was innocent of blame for the mess in my childhood that resulted in my adult life still being a mess. There is a gap between childhood and adulthood that I discovered is a very common place where many of us get stuck. We reach a certain age in our early twenties and we are told that we are adults and we are responsible for our lives. Stop blaming others, get over it and get on with it. But no one helped me sort it out when I was a kid. I had been treated like I was less important than the adults in my life. SO how was I supposed to suddenly know my value, get over “it” and get on with it? As a child I had this sense of having been abandoned ~ my feelings didn’t matter, I was not taken care of and I did not grow up “properly” as a result. No one helped me with this mess, a mess that I was innocent of creating, BUT nevertheless, it was still my mess. It was finally clear that no one was going to rescue me. It was clear that my family was not going to suddenly wake up and love me. No one was going to suddenly realize my value. It was up to me.
I did not realize that I was a victim. I didn’t like that word and didn’t really understand it. I thought it meant that I was a whiner. I thought a victim was someone who complained all the time about the world and it’s people and about what a tough hand of cards they had been dealt. I wasn’t a whiner. I grew up in a world where depression has a stigma. Deep down no matter how much I heard that depression was common, that many struggled, yada yada yada, there was a stigma surrounding it and I believed it was a weakness. I didn’t want to admit that I was on anti depressants; I would have been seen as weak, lacking in faith, and like everything else in my life, I must be doing something wrong. I tried positive thinking, affirmation, bible study, self help books and seminars. They all worked for a while, but nothing had a lasting effect. I was exhausted. The depressions that I had dealt with since I was ten years old were getting worse and more frequent. I was losing the fight. I felt like I was being held under water, struggling to breathe, fighting to have a voice and a place in this world. And I was losing.
It was time to step back and take a look at my life. I put all the puzzle pieces on the table. The mess was overwhelming. I didn’t think I could face it, I didn’t think that I could sort it out. There was so much confusion, so many mixed messages, so much that I had accepted the blame for and I was so tired. I had to go back to beginning and realize where my emotional growth was stunted. I had to face one thing at a time and break that one thing down. There was abuse that resulted in destructive coping methods. I had been focusing on the destructive coping methods, even questioning WHY I had depression as though that too was my fault and beating myself up for the way that I dealt with everything. I saw myself as a failure because I looked at my life through the expectations of the very people who held me under that water. I had to make my beginning and at first it was only a decision to try. I started with one thing and was willing to look at one abusive situation in my childhood. My therapist chose my first memory of an abusive trauma to take a look at first. I laid it out on the table piece by piece and looked at it the way it happened, bit by bit. I revealed every thought I had that I remembered including the baggage of self blame. I had not even been conscious that I had self blame. I dumped all the thoughts about how I could have prevented it, how I must have done something to cause it onto the table as I focused on this one event. I talked about the adults’ expressions, the eye movement, the secrecy, all of which helped me understand that I was innocent. I recognized the beginning of my dissociative identity disorder. I felt the horror of what had happened to me and for the first time I realized that it happened “TO ME”. I faced the pain of child abuse, and came to understand that I had been wronged.
One event at a time, one small snapshot of truth, one little breakthrough, one new way of looking at it, one little realization and then another.
This was the beginning of Emerging from Broken ~ I invite you to contribute to this post in any way that you wish.
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
Victim Mentality (What Happened to Prince Charming?)
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Okay I admit it! Deep down I had dreams that prince charming would arrive and whisk me away on his beautiful horse and save me from the sad life that was mine. I was sure that being loved and treasured by the right guy was the answer that would solve all the problems and sooth all the hurt. As soon as that guy showed up, everything would be okay and I could start my real life. (Man oh man I waited a dang long time before I gave that dream up.)
But I had been victimized; I had a victim mindset and I was attracted to broken men. I was attracted to guys that needed me to rescue them, and for some reason I believed that if I did rescue them, then they would love me enough to make my life worth living.
I had this idea that if I did all the right things and soothed their pain, I could prove how much I loved them and they would love me back. I never noticed that I had this same belief about my parents. I didn’t realize that I believed that love is something that comes from doing something “good enough” for someone else. I didn’t know that deep down I thought that I was missing some key thing which is why no one would rescue me from my pathetic life.
Have you ever made excuses for someone because you knew that they had been hurt by life? Have you ever stayed with a boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife, because you wanted to somehow communicate that you would not hurt him/her like the rest of the world had. Have you ever had a deep desire to prove to someone that not all life is bad, that not all people will hurt each other and that you could be the one person who understands; that one person that could make the big difference?
I had a few relationships like that.
I made these kinds of excuses for others. I seemed to have a soft spot when I knew that someone had had a tough break in life, and I felt sweeter towards them. At the very heart of my heart, I wanted to be understanding and I wanted to think only the best about others; I didn’t want to believe that they might actually intentionally hurt me, so I let it go when they did. I believed these people when they said “You know I would never hurt you on purpose, I love you, you know me” So I was cheated on, hit, forced to do things I didn’t want to do, degraded, devalued, stood up and so many other things and when I complained I was told there was something wrong with me and that I just didn’t understand. They assured me that they loved me so much. I adjusted and I believed, just like I believed my other abusers; just like I believed my parents.
Something that comes to mind when I think about all the boyfriends that I “understood” and believed I could love into wholeness and ease their pain with my amazing love powers, is that I never cut myself any of that same slack. I was always willing to be the one who tried harder. I was always willing to say “oh that’s okay honey, I know you didn’t mean to hurt me”. But I was also always willing to chastise myself and tell myself that I was a bad person. I never thought that I deserved that healing love power myself.
I didn’t consider that I deserved to be loved and saved by ME. I didn’t even think that if I loved and cherished myself, that my dreams of feeling and being “good enough” would come true. I didn’t consider that if someone cheated on me, degraded and forced me, that I didn’t have to take it. I didn’t have to TRY HARDER; I just needed to get out.
Today I don’t have that same definition of love and I certainly don’t think it is up to me to rescue, sooth, restore value or carry all the burden of the relationship. I have learned to value and respect myself and to look at myself with the empathy that I have always had for the ones who treated me like crap. I declared my own value and I embraced it and believed it. When I finally figured out how my value had been defined by others, and where they were wrong and why I believed it, I was able to re-wire that belief system and eventually I knew who I was and what my value really was. It is others who treat us like we are not good enough to be loved; it is not that we are not good enough to be loved.
Darlene Ouimet
Church Lies and Religious Abuse
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- Layers of Lies on Something Beautiful
I received this letter from one of our readers in response to Carla’s amazing post “Groomed to Doubt through Spiritual Abuse” which generated 60 comments and many emails and I found this one so compelling that I asked her permission to post it. In this email, Jeanette touches on some of the key sore spots that so many of us are dealing with in our frustration with Church and religious abuse.
This problem isn’t just within the Christian Church and Christianity, but in many fellowships and even non religious organizations. At the heart of this problem is the misuse of power and control. Certain people get to dictate what is right and wrong, what is acceptable or not acceptable and in the Church many have decided what the bible really says and feel justified in judging others with it. It took me a while to get out of my own struggle with this aspect of abuse because I was afraid that if I went against them it was the equivalent to going against God himself. My mind questioned “What if they are right and I am wrong?” and deep down this was a constant fear that I had. But when I took a look deeper into that fear, what I was really afraid of is that if they were right, then I was really not even good enough for God and even though I believed that God would forgive, love and accept the rest of the world, He would never love me. When I started to share this dread with others, whispering in fear of who knows what… I found out that I am not the only one who feels this way. We have a whole society of people who feel these fears and are afraid to talk about it; afraid to disappoint God. I was afraid of God because that is what controllers wanted me to be. It kept me pliable. It kept me doing the things that they wanted me to do. It kept me quiet. It kept me in my victim mentality, and there is no freedom, love or grace in that mentality. At the heart of this message, we are discussing our frustration with the way that we have been conditioned; we are exposing the lies that we have been fed by people, not the bible, God, or Christ as a whole.
Jeanette highlights a few other points in her letter:
Jeanette says
“Darlene, I’ve been stewing over the spiritual abuse issue and it’s had me going in all kinds of directions because of how it permeated every area of my being, and I know you can relate to this.
One of the fallacies or lies of the current Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christianity is that there are short cuts to everything, that God has provided them and if we have the faith, they are ours. There is a short cut to transformation, that ‘born again’ experience; there is a short cut to getting through physical infirmity, faith healing; there is a short cut to emotional healing, the spoken word of forgiveness. It’s is all bullshit. There are no short cuts, and as Christians we have been caught up in this false teaching and have been spinning around and around, knowing in our deepest parts that it doesn’t work, but too afraid to confront the entire foundation that we have built our world view upon.
The road to healing, whether spiritual, emotional, relational, whatever, is never short and easy and a matter of just speaking a word and then moving on. It is a long process that is filled with twists and turns and pain and triumph and every other thing that we encounter in life, there’s no getting around it. And it pisses me off that people try to bully those of us who have figured this out into thinking we just lack spiritual insight and faith. There is so much arrogance going on with this and it really pisses me off. Many of us wouldn’t have had to endure half the pain we had, if hadn’t this added burden, this added layer of deception to work through. More than just an added layer, it is a plethora of threads that are woven into every layer of our abuse and pain.
I don’t know if I will ever be able to rejoin the Christian community frankly, I don’t believe I will ever have the stomach for it. But one thing I am thankful for, and that is that I have at least gotten to this place, where I see the wrongness of that belief system and am able to walk away from it, shake the dust off my feet, and move on to a better life. I’m NOT saying I am not going to remain a Christian, I just don’t know if I can rejoin the community, there are too many people who believe all this crap that seem to infiltrate every Christian community out there. I’ve had enough of it for a thousand lifetimes.
Love, Jeanette”
As always, we welcome your comments. Again I ask that you please understand that the point of this blog is not to trash the bible, God, Jesus or any religion, we are simply exposing the truth in order to heal from the lies and abuse that have us trapped in a cycle of being controlled by people (not God or Christ) to the extent that we could never feel good enough to deserve the love and acceptance of a higher power. When I recovered from spiritual abuse, I was able to have a relationship with God and to know that He is on my side. I am good enough, I am loveable, and I have purpose and I believe this to be the truth for all.
Blessings and Love,
Darlene Ouimet
