If there is ONE place that I recommend starting the emotional healing process, it is starting with the damage.  That might sound easy, but I had to actually find out what “the damage” to me was. 

I had to find out how I got broken.  What happened to my self esteem in the first place? How did my self esteem get so low? What happened to me? That was where the keys were and those were the keys that led to freedom. 

I remember when I realized that my depressions and dissociative issues came from somewhere; I sat stunned, repeating to myself over and over ~ What happened to ME?

I had to look at the roots. I thought that I was born depressed.  But the more I thought about it, how could that be?? There were actual events that caused damage and my depressions were in fact related to those events! I just had to see it. I had to finally SEE it. 

The biggest obstacles in my way were avoiding looking at how I used by others, how I was objectified and not considered to be equally human, and how I was failed by others. By avoiding looking at the truth about that, I was able to excuse the damage they caused.  I excused them because I had to. As a child, survival is of the utmost importance and if we start complaining about the people who are failing us, but are also in charge of our welfare, it is a pretty sure fact that we are not going to survive.

When I tell stories about teachers who were bullies or outsiders who devalued or abused me, I get a huge response. It is much easier to face the truth about someone outside of the family that hurt me and damaged me than it is to face the truth that my parents let me down, but the truth is that my parents knew about the bullying and the way it was effecting me, (I was sick in bed for months) and they avoided doing anything about it until I was so sick that the Dr whose care I was under, figured it out and MADE them do something about it.  As I have written before, my parents tried to resist the Doctor, but he threatened to get a court order on my behalf.

If the damage, (including the emotional damage) is excused and ignored… there is further damage. I am saying “so what” if my parents were “sick”. They did a lot of damage with their “sickness” and instead of looking at them and making excuses for them, it was time to look at the damage ~ to call it like it is ~ and heal from it. EVEN if it makes them angry; even if it hurts them; even if they rejected me and even though they deny it, lie about it and don’t agree with me or validate my truth. They started covering their butts when I was a baby, why would now be any different? It finally had to be about me or I would have ended up just like them; dysfunctional, sick, chronically depressed and unhappy.

It was one thing to face the damage that the teacher herself caused to me. That was the easy part. It was way harder to face how much emotional damage was caused to me because my parents were unwilling to act on the information that they got, (even from the doctor) in favor of saving face in the community.

My parents were still discounting me and devaluing me when I was a grown woman married and with 3 children. My father was still disinterested in me or in my life and didn’t seem to acknowledge that I was alive. His phone calls were still all about him. No matter what was going on in my life, he switched the subject in order to talk about himself and what was going on in his life. Every phone call or visit from him was a painful reminder that I was not valid or important to him.  

I was in my 40’s and my mother was still accusing me of enticing her boyfriends when I was a teenager and how it was because I had a crush on one of her boyfriends when I was just turning 14 was what caused him to come to my room in the night and molest me. My mother was still putting me down and accusing me of being the biggest problem that she ever had.  I was not allowed to have a voice, I was not allowed to look at the truth; the fog spin that she created was way too thick for me to see through it.

I was getting really tired of carrying the entire burden of the relationship with my parents. There was no pay off. They still invalidated me.

My biggest fear was that my parents would reject me if I faced the truth.

The truth is that my parents rejected me when they didn’t take care of me in the first place. They rejected me when they refused to hear me and silenced my voice and instead protected the people hurting me. They rejected me when they called me “dramatic, and a story teller”.  They rejected me when the way the rest of the world saw them, was more important than I was.  They were still rejecting me in the exact same ways. That is what I had to face. That was the damage.

I had to start by facing the damage.  The truth is that both my parents were broken. I had to finally say “SO WHAT?”  Whatever happened to them did not excuse or make up for what happened to me and knowing about how hard “they had it”, didn’t help me to heal. There was no solution in realizing that my parents were abused and devalued too. There was no solution in knowing that my mother suffered from chronic depression. It didn’t cancel the way that I was treated.

I had to stop running from the truth. I stopped accepting that depression was a “gene” that I was born with and instead, face the roots of my distress. In order to heal, I had to find out how I got broken.  What happened to my self esteem in the first place? How did my self esteem get so low? What happened to me? That was where the keys to emotional healing were hidden and those were the keys that led to freedom from depression, low self esteem, dissociative identity disorder, and many other issues that I had. 

Depressions, dissociative identity, illnesses and addictions all manifested in my life as a result of not being protected, emotional neglect, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse and spiritual abuse.  The roots of all of these were grounded in being unloved in the true definition of love.

Finding and facing the damage led me to learning the truth about my value. Self love and self esteem finally became possible when I faced where the broken began.

Please share your thoughts on facing the damage.

There is freedom on the other side of broken

Darlene Ouimet

Emerging from Broken on Facebook ~ (comments here are not linked to that page)

“Alive” photo credit ~ Theodora MacLeod

I was not heard for most of my life. My voice was silenced in many ways. I was sexually abused from a young age. I don’t remember if I “told” or not in those young years, but there were signs. There were physical and mental distress signs that went unaddressed. That is a form of not being heard.

My mother used violence to vent her anger and frustration. My father either didn’t notice or didn’t care; he never tried to stop it. Who could I tell? The way things were in my family was “my normal”.  In my survival mode, I only knew to keep trying harder to be “good”, to be what those manipulative people wanted and to be quiet because it seemed to me that I was causing a problem for them.

I don’t know how I kept going.

 I know I told about a teacher who was emotionally and psychologically abusing me in grade 5. I told but I was ignored. I was shushed. I was silenced. I was lectured about “respecting my elders.” I was not heard.  When I finally got so sick that the pediatric specialist asked to speak to me alone (without my parents) he ordered my parents to take me out of the class I was in. My parents didn’t want to do it and the Dr. said he was going to get a court order if they didn’t remove me from the presence of that teacher.

That doctor heard me. But my parents did not hear me. I felt I was “wrong” for telling. I knew that I had caused my father embarrassment. I felt ashamed for bringing this to light with an “outsider” who confronted my parents. I knew that my parents had been “told.” They had been reprimanded for not listening to me. I knew that they had been “forced” to act on my behalf but perhaps more importantly, I also knew that they didn’t want to. They didn’t take action because it was right or because it was best or because they loved me. They did it because they were threatened with a court order. Today I know that that was the bigger damage to my self esteem; the fact that they didn’t “want” to listen to me or take action on my behalf.

And in order to save face, my manipulative parents told people the story in a much different way than what had actually happened. The doctor was never mentioned. And in doing so, the message that was communicated to me was that I was invalid. My illness was invalid and the abuse I had suffered was invalid. My father became the hero with his version of the story that he “marched into that principles office and demanded that I be removed from that “bully” teachers classroom”. I kept silent about that lie until I was in my 40’s because I knew that I would not be heard. I didn’t matter.

My new teacher was nice but the guilt I felt made me feel as though she was afraid of me and didn’t trust me. I felt like she was only nice because she was afraid I would complain about her. It felt like I was in the spotlight; the problem child that reported a teacher. I was full of shame and completely believed that I was the problem and that I had caused a huge problem.  I disconnected and dissociated further from myself.

Somehow I kept going.

So I learned not to talk. I learned that my voice was not important so I stopped using it. I learned that I was not going to have any impact so why bother trying? I learned that other people were more important than I was. I learned that my value was in how good I could make other people feel.

I learned that even if the truth were exposed, the people in power could change a few details and make it about them.

I learned to discount myself exactly the way that I was being discounted.

I kept going but I was a puppet. I was going through the motions. I was living in survivor mode, doing things according to what I thought those manipulative people wanted and not from living with a mind of my own.

And I got depressed. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know that I was worth anything. I didn’t know that I was lovable or that I was an individual. I didn’t know that perhaps there was a reason I was on this earth. I couldn’t figure it out.

I kept going.

And I accepted the blame for the things that happened to me. I accepted the blame for the abuse that was perpetrated against me by evil and manipulative people. I accepted the blame for the fact that I was not heard and unloved.

I was offered to men. I was told that my virginity was a small price to pay… I was taught that my value was only in the way I was viewed by others.  I lived in fear and sometimes in terror.

I kept going.

I tried to find love, acceptance, solace and escape. I tried to find it in drugs. I tried to find it in alcohol. None of that worked. There was no answer in those things.

I kept going.

I tried to find love, acceptance and self esteem in men.  I had been taught that romantic love was the answer. Again I was not heard. My voice did not matter. I was valued for what I could do for them, and how I could listen to them and how I could make them feel. I did not find my self esteem in them or in those relationships. 

I tried to find it in the bible. I tried to “give my life to Christ” but the false and dysfunctional system was there too. I was taught that I was “good and acceptable to Christ” when I was obedient and compliant to what the teachers, pastors, leaders and elders said. I was not encouraged to let the bible speak to me. I was taught to listen to men and women (manipulative people) who were wiser than I. I pointed out things that I was reading in the Bible, things that I thought spoke of a different kind of love, but I was not heard. I was shushed. I was lectured to “respect my elders”. I was shut down and silenced. Even there my voice was unacceptable; I was unworthy, and I was silenced.

I kept going.

And one day, I listened to myself. I heard ME. I realized that what I had been trying to say and trying not to say was valid. I realized that my value was not in those other manipulative people or how they defined me but that it was within me. I realized that I could validate myself. And a little seed of hope grew. I nurtured that little seed each day, I listened to myself and to my pain and I learned to stop discounting it. I learned to stop discounting ME.

I went back to some of those events that communicated the message to me that I was invalid, unworthy, and less important than the adults in my life and I realized how wrong those messages were. I looked at the truth and I told it to myself over and over again.

Perhaps the adults in my life didn’t fight for me, but I can fight for me now. I can overcome those false messages that I received in the past.  

I listened to me. I validated me. I kept going.

Out of self validation grew self love. Out of self love grew self esteem. Out of self esteem and self love grew self respect and an understanding of what real love and mutual respect in relationship is.

It doesn’t matter anymore if other people hear me or not since I started to learn to hear myself. I don’t need those dysfunctional manipulative people to hear me or agree with me anymore.  I can do this for me now. I can love me now. I can validate me now.

I know me now ~ not who they said I was and not by what they define as worthy and acceptable about me; they disregarded me, they didn’t protect me, they blamed me for attracting the abuse or accused me of lying about it. They refused to hear me. That discounts their credibility, NOT mine.  I know that it wasn’t “me” that was the problem. I have found “the truth”.   

I still keep going.

Please share your thoughts.

There is freedom on the other side of broken;

Darlene Ouimet

Related Posts ~ Please click on the sentences in coloured bold print within the blog post itself

~Psychological abuse ~ How self doubt grows ~ this is the actual story of the emotionally abusive teacher

~ My power tool for Rebuilding after Abuse by Christina Enevoldsen from Overcomeing Sexual Abuse

Pondering Freedom

I was dying my whole life; I just didn’t know it until I started living.

The fog that I grew up with was almost completely transparent. I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I lived in a false normal and growing up like that was the way it was. It was my truth and my “real”. I didn’t know that there was any other way. I didn’t know that I didn’t know there was indeed another way; most of my life, my reality and my truth were dysfunctional.  The adults, the reality all malfunctioned.

And therefore so did I.

That is what living in a dysfunctional family was like for me. Those were the effects of psychological abuse emotional abuse and trauma. That is the effect of being groomed and being trained in silence, compliance, obedience and obligation. That is what happens when a child is taught that their value as an individual is not the same as the value of others. There are consequences and negative results when we are raised in a false normal.

Psychological abuse is at the root of all forms of abuse. It is part of the grooming process. Emotional abuse and neglect makes a statement to a child. Abuse in any form makes a statement about human value. It teaches things that to the child that no child should be taught.  It teaches the WRONG thing.

Sexual and physical abuse leave a child living in fear every day of their lives. It doesn’t make “sense”; abuse is incomprehensible and as a child I had to try to understand. Trying to understand something that is incomprehensible as a child is impossible.  So, I “tried” to understand “them” for the rest of my life and as I was slowly dying I didn’t realize that my life was being extinguished by the very people who did all the harm in the first place.  Perhaps the people who didn’t take care of me properly didn’t realize that there was harm being done. Perhaps those who covered it all up didn’t know that they were contributing to murder and to the death of a child. “Understanding them” didn’t change the damage. Perhaps the perpetrators of the abuse itself were sick people who also came from dysfunctional families, but that didn’t change or excuse the damage they perpetrated on me either.  

I was taught to protect them when they didn’t protect me. I was taught to value them above myself although they didn’t value me.  The proof of this was in their actions and inactions. I was taught to consider what “they needed” when no one considered what I needed.

And as I was growing up and even into adulthood, every time I felt like life was going to be okay, I was squished. Like a happy puppy being slapped away with a newspaper, I was shushed, I was reprimanded and I was told in words, looks, actions and inaction that I was not worthy. And not by just ONE person. Many people contributed to the devaluing of me and my personhood. I felt like I had a sign on me somewhere that I could not see, and the sign read “if it makes you feel better about you, kick me down, I can take it” And instead of realizing that I was not the one at fault, I tried harder. I tried to understand them so that I could excuse them.

I WANTED to make them feel better because I believed that if they felt better about themselves, they would love me.  This is psychological abuse and I had to finally accept that love doesn’t work that way.

Not worthy of love. Not worthy of protection. Not worthy. I didn’t know that they had no right to declare me unworthy. I didn’t know that they were WRONG. I believed that they knew if I had value or not. What child would question that?  Children don’t process problems through the grid of truth, but rather through the grid of understanding based on what they have been taught.

Protecting and valuing the very people who disregarded my human value made sense to me because as a child that was survival. I HAD to find a way to survive the dysfunctional world that I lived in. That world was “my normal”. That false normal world was all I knew. I had to find a way to cope with my increasing sense of failure and lack of human worth. Compliance and hope was my daily diet. I pinned my hopes on the fact that one day I would find the KEY that would enable them to love me and that was all I understood.

As an adult, I needed to find a new way to cope because as long as I didn’t see the truth, I was stuck in that childhood survival mode.

My process of emotional healing was about finding out what those wrong messages were and how they got stuck in my mind so that I could overcome them and replace them with healthy truth so that I could LIVE again. That is what I am doing on this site. I am sharing all that. I am sharing the truth that set me free.

As an adult, I had to face the damage. I had to find the truth about the way it should have been. I had to get a glimpse of what real love was and what a functional loving family would have looked like. In this was I was able to heal myself and then stop the cycle within my own family, take my life back and now make a difference within the world with my message.

Psychological, emotional abuse and neglect makes a statement to a child. Emotional Abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, domestic violence and abuse in general, makes a statement about human value. It teaches things that no child should be taught.  It teaches the WRONG thing.

Emerging from Broken is about how I found a new way. It is about how I moved from coping to conquering. Emerging from Broken is about how I moved from surviving to thriving and about how I moved from dysfunctional to functional.

There is freedom on the other side of broken;

Darlene Ouimet

Related posts ~ “Stop that Crying or I will give you something to Cry about”

“Over coming Self Blame”

Have you ever walked away from telling your exciting news feeling somehow defeated or dejected or feeling disappointed and rejected; as though your good news somehow wasn’t that good anymore?

I have had major issues with this in my lifetime.

People who were “supposed to love me”; family, boyfriends and people who were “supposed to be my friends” said things like;

 “Well it can’t be that great”. What’s the catch?” Or “how did YOU get that award or offer?”  What about; “Why you?  Why would they pick you?”  

These types of statements have a clear message attached to them. The message is “WHY would anyone see value in YOU?” Those statements communicated to me what the speaker THOUGHT about me and how they defined my value and worth.

There were often really devaluing questions about the motives of whoever was acknowledging me; Questions like “are you sleeping with him?” “is that man in love with you?” “are you having an affair Darlene?”  Those types of questions make the statement that my ONLY value to anyone would be about SEX.  And those statements “defined me” too.  

Those statements hurt. They were invalidating. They made me feel dirty. Those specific statements about the  motives of men who acknowledged me tagged on to my already horrible feelings about having been sexually abused and the fear I had that perhaps that abuse was my fault. Because I was not heard, believed or protected, I already believed that I must have done “something” wrong to have been used that way.

If my only value was in sex or sexuality…which is what was being communicated to me by those statements, then what was I supposed to feel about those statements.  I was hurt but I didn’t say anything.  I couldn’t say anything because I had always been taught that I was wrong anyway.  AND because deep down I was not sure if those statements were true or false.

Put down statements like “why you?” infer other things too, like; what is so special about you? What makes you qualified to do that? And they always carry with them, a demeaning voice inflection.

Put down statements like this are insinuating that “there must be some mistake”. You must have lied about your qualifications. Or there must be some ulterior motive for them to have chosen you! It implies that if the person giving you the opportunity or acknowledgement really knew you ~ they would never have offered you the opportunity or recognition.

AND because of the grooming process that I went through from a very young age, it was not hard for me to believe that “if that person really knew me”, they would not have offered me the opportunity or acknowledgement in the first place.  When a child grows up being defined by abuse and malfunction, that child believes that only people that don’t know them will “value them”. I lived with huge imposter issues, and a huge fear of people abandoning me “if they really knew me.” So when it came to statements like “why you?” What could I say? I believed enough of the statement that I accepted it. I hung my head and felt “told” I questioned myself the same way; in agreement with the put down, and in submission to the abuser I agreed; “yes… why me?”

My mother was good at this type of thing.  She always had a way of squishing my joy over some accomplishment or any recognition that I got.  It was like if I was recognized, that it was insulting to her, or demeaning to her and lessened HER value. I suspect that she was afraid that if I ever found out my true value, that I would not worship HER anymore because if I knew my own value, I might somehow see her value the way that she saw it. (And although it looked to me like she was in total control of her life, the reality of that was quite different.)  

Here is what I found out;

The truth is that most people in my life did not pay enough attention to me to even know what my gifts were. They disregarded me as being insignificant compared to them because they wanted me to see myself that way. It was part of the way them maintained control over me.  Seeing my gifts was threatening to them, so they didn’t see them. With controlling and manipulative people, they are only interested in looking at me through the eyes of what I could DO for them or how I could contribute to whatever they were working on.  And the best way to keep someone doing what you want it to make them think that they will only achieve equal status to you if you do what they want. And that is where the put down statements come in. They are an abuse tactic.

This understanding became much more clear to me when I starting flying in my life; those same people were no longer interested in me at all. 

In the case of my mother, and her put downs aside from the fact that she wanted total control over me, she couldn’t stand to see me recognized. My mother’s jealously of me was evident from the time I turned 13 when she suddenly turned me into her competition.

My father was never interested enough in me to even engage in a conversation about anything I was doing in any part of my life.

I had a few bosses who kept me nervous and kept me scrambling to try harder in order to make sure that I never caught on to my gifts; if I realized my gifts, I would leave them and move forward to accomplish things without them.  Some of them took credit for my ideas and in the depth of my low self esteem, I didn’t fight that either.

These reactions to good news are pathetic. I never realized in the past that when people reacted like that it was a huge proof of how little regard that they had for me. They were more intent on putting and keeping me down, then they were on congratulating me or celebrating my win with me but the motive is about KEEPING me CAPTIVE and keeping me serving them. The motive is about making sure that I am always trying to see where I am in the wrong, so that I don’t notice that they are wrong.  That is not love. That is dysfunction.

And you know what I KNOW for sure today? I know that the put down statements were not about ME but about them. It was no reflection on ME, it was always a reflection on them. It reveals their character, not mine. In the past I put so much energy on proving my worth and believing that the proof of that worth being was in the way that I was received and regarded that I missed the truth that put downs designed to burst my bubble are not a statement about me; they are a statement about the person putting me down!

Today the conversation would be very different. I have a reply to this disrespect and disregard.  Now that I am out of the fog on this whole issue and realize that these put down statements have nothing to do with my value, but everything to do with putting me down and beneath them, here is what I say;

“Why not me!? What exactly do you mean when you say ‘why would someone pick ME?’ What a nasty hurtful thing to say to me. I am shocked at your lack of support and encouragement.  Your opinion and reaction to my good news shows me how little regard that you have for me.” (see note)

And they are speechless because finally, they got BUSTED; they got “told” and the truth (ABOUT THEM) emerged.

NOTE: If you cringe reading that statement I understand; I had been told for so long that I was “too sensitive” that when I first thought about speaking the truth in any of these situations, that “too sensitive” label jumped up and squished my conviction that they were wrong. Those days are gone.

Please share your thoughts.

There is freedom on the other side of broken…

Darlene Ouimet

This blog has a Facebook page however these comments are not published anywhere but here. Please use only your first name or a screen name if you wish to keep your identity private from other readers.

For related posts click the highlighted coloured words in bold print

additional posts ~ Emotional Healing by Understanding Psychological Abuse

Beautiful Self Esteem

I was raised to believe that I had less importance than the adults in my life. At first glance that may sit okay with most people. Perhaps it feels “right” and “logical”. Perhaps I had no reason to believe otherwise in the first place.  As children we are not born with truth filters. We learn what we are taught is the truth. We accept what is modeled to us AS truth.  But the truth we are taught is often false truth. 

Emerging from Broken is largely about how I uncovered that false truth and re wired my brain to understand and accept the true truth.

It felt right and even logical to accept that adults were more important than I was when I thought about it the way that I believed “importance was measured.” I was a child; a dependent child. I believed that the adults were important because they provided. They brought home the food and until I was a young teen, they cooked it. Adults provided me with clothing and shelter. They sent me to school where other important adults taught me what I needed to learn in order for me to become an adult myself.  Adults met my physical needs and in many ways they had all the power; both good and bad. Looking at it that way, I could easily agree that I did not have as much importance as the adults in my life. I was just a needy child. I had nothing to contribute yet.

I think that the way the child views their importance in the family dynamic depends on HOW the whole importance thing gets communicated to the children. In some families, the children are the centre; they are the joy in the family. They are the jewels and the treasure. In some families, everything a child does is amazing. Children are indeed the future in some families.  But that was not my family.

If I change the word “importance” to the word “value” we get a whole other understanding of this subject matter. 

If a child has been raised to feel as though they have less value then the adults who are providing for them, or if it communicated in any way to the child that they are somehow a burden to those adults and if that child learns he or she must fight to PROVE they deserve to live or deserve to be taken care of in any way, that child will grow up with negative and false beliefs about their own value. Children learn their value by the way it is communicated to them.

Eventually the child is expected to have self esteem and if they don’t there are a whole new set of labels assigned to them. BUT where do they get the self esteem and self value from in the first place? And if the adults in their lives fail to instill that sense of value in a childs life HOW does a grown up child change that misunderstanding? I tried affirmations and positive self talk for YEARS, without success until I discovered the foundation of my self esteem, and changed the lies that lived there.

How was your importance communicated to you? That will be a clue about your belief system about yourself and your self esteem formation.

Reverence, respect, obligation to the adults; that was what I thought love was.  I lived in the spin of having to try harder. Obligation, obedience, compliance, respect for disrespectful people; this is not real love, but it is the definition of love that I was taught. It was the definition of love that I grew up with and it was all I knew. I was controlled by trying harder to be good enough; never the right gift, something wrong with the food, not saying the right thing. I didn’t dress “right” I was too fat, too thin, and my hair was too long, too short or looked better up or down.  I was called (labeled as) stupid, insensitive, selfish, cold hearted, a drama queen, too quiet and sullen, and yet also told that I talked to hear myself talk. I spun round and round in the spin of trying harder to be acceptable to people who behaved in an unacceptable way, never realizing that some of these accusations were contradictive.  I questioned myself for years about what was wrong with me. The only time I questioned what was wrong with these adults was in order for me to understand and forgive their transgressions against me. Always about them, never about me because I always viewed them through the belief that they were more important than I was.

I never noticed that the spin of “not good enough” was about the ones who labeled me that way and not really the truth about ME or my value in the first place.  

I was discounting myself in order to prove that I acknowledged their importance, which (to them) was always ABOVE mine.  

The spin of having to try harder was about restoring THEM and making them feel good enough by repeatedly forcing me to change; forcing me to change myself and my actions all the time as though if I jumped through their hoops, complying with what they wanted from me, it would prove THEIR power and therefore their value. As you can see looking at it this way, this system has nothing to do with real love however again… this is what I was taught about love.

I “heard” all my life that everyone ~ all human beings and all God’s people are created equally ~ however this was not anything close to the truth about what was “taught” to me. It was not the example of truth that was modeled to me. Therefore I didn’t live in the truth about equal value and healthy self esteem that I live in today. I had to understand what I did learn, realize that what I learned was wrong and then relearn the real truth.  This was where I was able to overcome my low self esteem. This is the foundation of my freedom and wholeness. This is my wish for all other people. This is my purpose in writing Emerging from Broken.

This is my final post for 2011~ what a fantastic year it has been for me and for Emerging from Broken.  I appreciate each of you and wish you all a fantastic 2012!

Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Darlene Ouimet      

For related posts please visit the highlighted words in bold throughout this article.     

Some people act as though they believe that there is not enough love in the world to go around. They act as though they need to make sure that they are getting all your love and no one else is getting any of it as though if you love anyone else these controlling people will “miss out” on some of your love.  In the past I put a lot of effort into trying to make these people feel like my love for them would never run out because I mistakenly believed that my love for them, could save them and if I could save them, they would love me back and that would save me.

And at the same time it seems as though these controlling and manipulative people also believe and go to great length to communicate, that if you love yourself, you will be spending your love allowance on yourself instead of on them. Heaven forbid that happens! This “don’t love yourself” concept is taught in tons of ways always with the threat of becoming a horrible selfish person if you do anything to nurture or acknowledge your own value.

They picked on the way that I dressed. They picked at the way I did my hair. They picked at me all the time to make sure that I was feeling bad about myself. To make sure that I was trying harder. To make sure that my self esteem was kept low. To make sure that I was always questioning myself and not questioning them. And all of it was presented as thought their judgement was “for my own good”. That this “picking at me” and criticizing me was going to make me a better person. This grooming started young. I was ready to listen to all new controllers and manipulators that came into my life when I entered my adult years.

We all know these people; they told me what to believe about other people. This is known as the “divide and conquer tactic” They warned me about certain people as though I was too stupid to make up my own mind. They turned me against my own siblings and picked at the character of my best friends. They discredited my co-workers. They insinuated that I was crazy and naive if I like someone they don’t like. They told me that I was “different” when I was around these other people making me believe that they were only concerned for my welfare, or my reputation.

But perhaps they have a different motive.

As long as I was questioning everyone else and hero worshiping and depending upon only “them” they had me where they wanted me.  As long as I was looking at myself and what was wrong with me, I would never look at the ones who were constantly picking at me! I would not listen to anyone who warned me about them, because I would not give any credit to all the people that they already discredited. I was so worried about all these “dangerous people” they were warning me about, that I never noticed that my oppressors, my CAPTORS were the ones that I needed to be afraid of in the first place.

It is easier for controllers to control if the object of their desire (ME) is discounting and suspicious; questioning all others including myself.

I think about this concept often. When I was coming out of the fog around the way that I had always been regarded as “nothing” and “no one important” I had this profound realization that the fear these people had was that if I realized my own value, I would simultaneously realize how PATHETIC they ~ the controllers and manipulators in my life were. If I realized that they were wrong about me, then I would see them for who they really are; controlling, manipulative evil and pathetic people. 

That was pretty much how it worked too. When the fog lifted and my eyes were opened ~ when I began to see things through the eyes of truth ~ that was pretty much the conclusion that I came to. Those people were pathetic. I was shocked and disgusted when I realize the tactics they used to accomplish their own control and manipulation over me. They were evil and manipulative ~ pathetic because their own self esteem was so low that they had to control me by insuring that my focus was always ON ME, believing that the problem WAS ME and making sure that I believed I was not smart enough on my own to realize who was good or bad aside from them. They were making sure that I never noticed the truth about “them”.

Today I have plenty of love to share and I don’t throw it away on people who only desire to own me for their own manipulative and controlling reasons.

Please share your thoughts. Emerging from 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.

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time,

Darlene Ouimet

Related Posts ~ I vowed I would never be like my Mother 

Dealing with People who talk down to me

Controllers and Manipulative people don’t question themselves

Evil Manipulative People and Emotional Damage

The timing could not have been more perfect for me.  It was the lift I needed. I speak about “the ripple effect” and I long to make a big difference in the world and although I get tons of fan mail and excellent validating comments on my blog every day, this comment is about a difference that I made when someone stumbled across my work.  She understood my message and she changed her message.  That is really validating.

You can read the post here: “You Reap what you Sow ~ what about Child Abuse?” Here is the comment from Connie. 

“Hello – I wanted to tell you how I came to this blog and what it did in my life. I volunteer at a Christian after school program and teach kids 4-6th grade. I was planning to teach LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR from Galatians 5:14. In reading further, I found “A man reaps what he sows.” in Gal 6:7 and thought it would be a good way to illustrate, if you want love, sow love…right?…. How NAIVE of me! (Thanks to finding this blog.) As I read your descriptions of how this scripture gets twisted and used to harm gentle spirits, I just lay on the floor and wept for the hurt and became outraged at the lies!!! I realized, God was allowing me to feel just an ounce of what He feels on the subject! Thank you so much for sharing your stories, and know that they diverted a well meaning teacher from planting an idea that could be used against other kids! I basically looked into each of their eyes and told them, “YOU ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR HOW OTHER PEOPLE BEHAVE, EVER!” We are only responsible for how we behave. Anger and meanness are a choice, just like love and gentleness are choices!

I thank God for Emerging from Broken and I pray for wholeness that can only come from knowing the healer.

Doing my best to serve Jesus,
Connie”

I write a lot about self validation, self care and self love. This is the goal. Sometimes I make it sound like being validated by others serves no purpose but what I mean to say is that being validated by others is not the whole answer and that being validated by the abuser is what so many of us seek due to the false belief that the person who devalued us can restore our value if they finally value us.  That is a terribly damaging false message. It keeps us working for the abuser and the only one who gets validated IS the abuser.

Before I was able to validate myself love myself or accept myself; before I was able to even KNOW myself, my pain was validated by someone who heard me.  There is nothing wrong with being validated. My interaction with my readers is based on my belief that we all need validation. It is manipulative validation that you have to watch out for!

I wanted to share this with my readers because all of us are in this together.  When we learn the truth we share the truth if not through our voices then through our actions. Sometimes we don’t even realize how much we are changing or growing just by realizing the actual truth. 

Thank you to Connie. Thank you for sharing this story with me and with the other readers here. I too am doing my best to serve.

While I am on the subject of being validated for the right reasons; I got another great comment this week challenging all my readers to send me a donation.  I support emerging from broken out of my own pocket. There have been monthly expenses since the beginning as well as the thousands that I spent on my education before I started this site. I gave up my paid work to build this website because I wanted to reach a larger audience with my message. The traffic and comment numbers exploded and I needed to hire technical help to keep the website safe. My plan was to give myself an 18 month window to build EFB and then take clients again so that I could pay the bills and contribute to my family income. That was over 2 years ago now. Between writing the posts and keeping up with the readers/commenter’s and all the private emails I get, I have been having trouble finding the time to get back to generating an income. Every month I receive 700 to 1000 plus comments and I spend a lot of time reading and answering them because being heard and believed was the first step in my own recovery.

And now I really need to have an income again and I am asking for help. I work full time on this website to deliver this message. I have a passion for my readers and for sharing this truth about how I overcame depressions and all the issues that manifested in my life by finding the roots of the problem and where I got broken in the first place.

If you find value from reading what I write and if you can help in anyway, please consider using the donate button on the right sidebar to make a contribution. Thank you AnnaLyzza for initiating this challenge. I don’t think many saw it since it was in a comment thread, but you inspired me to make a public appeal about it.

With love and gratitude to this whole community;

Darlene Ouimet 

where I will be this week

We live in a society that teaches “don’t get raped” instead of “don’t rape”.  And we wonder why we are so filled with guilt and shame when we get raped. We mistakenly believe that we somehow didn’t prevent ourselves from getting raped.

And some of us even question what others “did” to get raped because we are so conditioned to think in terms of “don’t get raped, instead of “don’t rape” ~  as though the weight of the crime should be shared between the victim and the perpetrator or even worse that the weight of the crime rests mostly on the victim.  

And the weight of the crime should not be shared. There is no excuse for rape.

When we are treated unfairly or unjustly we try our hardest to understand why someone would treat us that way and when we have been told that we get what we deserve or that everything that happens to us is our own fault, we look for what we did to cause it. If this brainwashing is done well, then when we are beaten black and blue, we believe that we did do something to deserve it. We will even look for what we did to deserve it. And when we have been conditioned to try SO HARD to be perfect, the things that we think we do so wrong make little sense to the rest of the world; Left the toothpaste cap off the toothpaste? Left the toilet seat up? Forgot to put a coffee cup in the dishwasher? Phoned 5 minutes late? Didn’t realize he was in a bad mood?

Growing up this way becomes our normal. But it is a false normal. We become desensitized to the truth. We become accepting of mal treatment and disrespect. We have no idea that we deserve better. How would we have learned that?

We live in a society that teaches “it’s your own fault” and we wonder why we take the blame for everything and believe it is our responsibility to fix it.

We live in a society that teaches “don’t retaliate”. And when “don’t retaliate” is taught, “don’t fight back” is what is learned. When we teach “don’t fight back, we also teach “don’t stand up for yourself”.

What is taught is what is learned.  

We live in a society that teaches “trust” someone until it is proven that you can’t trust them. But then we are also taught the conflicting lesson that it is our own fault if we get taken advantage of.  We are told that we should have known better or that we placed ourselves in danger, therefore either we deserved what happened or we brought it on ourselves.

We are taught that relationships work in a way that they don’t work. We learn things that we never should have learned; in ways we never should have learned them.  False things that we think are true.

Emerging from Broken is about unlearning those things.  It is about separating the real truths from the false truths. It is about sorting out those mixed messages and conflicting teachings and embracing the real truth so that we can live in freedom and wholeness; thriving instead of just surviving. It is about flourishing with our faces held up to the sun. 

Please share your thoughts and feelings and feel free to use any name you wish to use in the comment form. Your privacy is important to me.

A mini snapshot of truth on the journey to wholeness

Darlene Ouimet

If you would like to have a peek at where I am going to be this next 10 days, check out the webcam at the resort I am visiting.

Visit Emerging from Broken on Facebook

one step closer

I had a hard time with self love as long as I saw myself through the eyes of the people who defined me as “unworthy”.  I saw myself through their actions and through the way that they treated me. They treated me as though I was “not good enough” and not important.

For instance when I was in a crowd of family and trying to be part of the conversation but no one heard me. I would say something and sometimes I would be ignored. Sometimes I would get a cold blank look as if to say “you have nothing to contribute here”.  At least that is the message that I got.

Imagine a young child. The child is trying to get the attention of his mother. He is trying to tell his mother that there is a kite in the sky. But the mother won’t look.  She won’t acknowledge the child’s pleas for her to share the moment with him. He keeps trying; he keeps tugging her sleeve or patting her arm… “Mommy, look! There is a kite in the sky! Mommy LOOK!” The mother brushes him off. She is reading a book and doesn’t care about the kite. She shrugs him off at first, but as he becomes more persistent, she pushes him away. Eventually, she tells him to leave her alone, to go play, to let her be…. Never once acknowledging his pleas until finally he hangs his head dejectedly and gives up. 

There are messages attached to these actions. Communication is not always direct. He gets the message that books are always more important than he is. So is the phone. So is the television, so are her friends.  And over time, what message do you think that this child gets about himself?

Day after day, adults are too busy, too tired, too stressed about their own lives to listen to the child. What message does the child get from all that?

A little girl is being picked on by the teacher at school.  She is being humiliated, made fun of and criticized in front of the entire class. She tells her parents but they don’t listen. They ignore her. They tell her to respect her elders. They don’t believe that this teacher bullying is serious or harmful. Over time she begins to get sick.  If her parents finally notice her, then illness becomes the way to get the “love she desires”. Illness becomes the way that she will be heard.  Illness “works” for her so she manifests illness.

If both or one parent communicates that illness is a weakness, the child will try to hide the illness.  

But what is the message that this child gets? The actions communicated to the child are

“I am only valued if I am sick” or “I am even LESS valuable if I am sick”. 

And don’t forget that there is an original message;

~I am not worth being heard.

~The teacher is picking on me; she has a right to do whatever she wants because she is my “elder”. 

~Something is wrong with me because the teacher is picking on me and she doesn’t like me.

~No one cares about me.

~It must be me. I will try harder to be liked so that I don’t get picked on and then when I am liked, people will care. 

This is how a belief system develops. These are the beginnings of low self esteem. Children get messages from the actions of others about their worth. They are either loved, or they are not loved.  They get love mixed up with approval. They get love mixed up with whether or not they get attention or have impact.  Impact can be positive or negative.

Some children lash out. If they push their sibling down the stairs they have impact. They may even get some attention from doing it. 

All of this goes into what makes up the self esteem of the child. All other abuse or devaluing treatment is added to the grid that the child will see himself or herself though. All of this information forms the belief system that individual has about themselves.  The only way that I was able to change this belief system was to dig down inside and take a look at where it came from in the first place.

Emerging from Broken is about learning the truth about how I viewed myself so that I could see where I was stuck in a false belief system.  I looked at the events and then at the messages that I received through so many situations from my childhood. Were those messages the truth?

Whether I misunderstood them or not, the problem was that I believed them. I had to realize just what exactly I believed.

What were the messages that you got about yourself?

What did you believe about yourself over time?

Is this the truth about you?

Please share your thoughts and remember that you may use any name you wish in the comment form. No one will see your email except me.

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time,

Darlene Ouimet

For related posts, please click on the bold words highlighted in blue. Also see the Self Esteem Category

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I had to learn to value myself ~ enough to call them on it. I had to realize that they were wrong to treat me that way and if I let it go, they were likely to keep doing it. I had to care enough about me to reject that kind of treatment. I had to realize that when people talk down to me, it doesn’t define me as beneath them.  On the other hand I also had to learn that when people fall all over themselves to be with me, that doesn’t define me as worthy either. That was the false definition of love and acceptance that I had to come to understand in this process of emotional healing.

This was a huge part of my recovery process.

First I had to own my anger at this injustice towards me as a person.  I had to own my equality and believe in myself. Instead of constantly asking myself what was wrong with me and searching my heart for how I could be worthy of love and respect, I started to ask myself why people felt they had permission to treat me as less valuable or less important than they were.

The truth those thoughts led to enabled me to start asking those people who were discounting me questions about why they behaved the way they did towards me.

Years ago I would fantasize about talking to them the way that they talked to me. I imagined myself rising up and using all my sarcastic voice infliction, sneering down at them or rolling my eyes at them and disregarding them the same way that they disregarded me. I would “show them” how it felt. But that is not me. I hated that I didn’t know HOW to make them treat me as an equally valuable person.

I had to learn to stop seeing myself through their eyes.

Instead of scheming up ways of showing them how it feels when someone talks like that or ways to get revenge, I started to ask questions that seemed to shock them.  I say things like “why are you talking to me that way as though I am “nothing”?  I ask “why are you talking to me as though I have no feelings?” or I say “why are you speaking to me as though I am beneath you?”or one of my favourites;  “why are you talking to me like I am stupid?” No one ever has an answer. But they stop. They don’t know what to say. They are usually in shock because I point out their behaviour. Sometimes it is just a matter of letting them know that I know what they are doing. They are not fooling me anymore and they are not manipulating me anymore. I am not going to be regarded as beneath anyone. 

In the past I was afraid to make those kinds of statements (in the form of questions) because I was afraid that my feelings were wrong. I thought that maybe I was misunderstanding the intention of the person doing the mistreating. I thought I was “exaggerating”; I thought they must be right ~ that in truth maybe I really was nothing. I believed that I was less than other people. I had no understanding of equal value or equality for all people. I thought everyone else was deserving, but that something was wrong with me. I thought that it was my own fault (not that I could figure out WHY it was my fault) that people looked down on me.

When I married my husband his sister constantly talked down to me. For years she went out of her way to put me down whenever he wasn’t in the same room as us. When the kids were born she included my mothering ideas in her constant putdowns and sneering judgements of me. I found it SO frustrating but what could I do? I had no idea that I could point it out to her. It never occurred to me. And it didn’t occur to me because I was pretty sure that I must be wrong. I was sure that it was ME and it didn’t dawn on me that it might be HER or that she was proving herself to be a mean spirited woman. I didn’t realize that I was not the problem, and as I have written so often in the past, I had been convinced all my life that I was the problem… so I didn’t have the guts, OR the conviction  about where the truth lay, to say anything.  I took it. I tried harder to get her to like me!

When I first considered asking these kinds of questions, I thought that I was being a b-word. I really thought that sticking up for myself was mean and nasty and that I was presenting myself as mean and nasty if I confronted anyone with a statement like that. I was afraid that if I were to say any form of  “I don’t have to take your nasty attitude” that they would say “what a b-word you are”.  I had it really mixed up. 

But I got stronger. I grew in my understanding of the misuse of power and control. My self esteem began to recover.  I did not deserve that treatment from anyone. I am not stupid and I don’t have to allow people to treat me or to speak to me like I am stupid. The way they regarded me was about them and that isn’t my problem.  One of my fears was that they wouldn’t like me if I stood up to them. But by their actions and regard for me, they already didn’t like me enough to respect me. Another of my fears was that they would leave me, but they had never been with me. Relationship of any kind with them was conditional. My fears were misplaced and when I saw the truth, those overwhelming fears began to diminish. If they walked out of my life, and many of them have, what was I going to miss? 

Now that I know the truth, I can speak it. Now that I know the truth I don’t have to take that crap.  Now that I know the truth, few people ever say anything nasty to me anymore anyway.

My boundary is drawn in my heart.  It comes from the knowledge of my own worth.

And my life is so much healthier! 

Please share your thoughts and feelings.

A snapshot of truth on the journey to emotional healing

Darlene Ouimet