Archive for Therapy
Standing Up to Dysfunctional Relationship
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When I began to stand up for myself, the people around me were in shock and they didn’t like it. When I think back on it, why would they like it? In the past I tried to bend over backwards to do whatever they wanted. I agreed with whatever they wanted me to agree with, and if I didn’t agree I kept my mouth shut about it. I cooked what they wanted and I cooked when they wanted. I complied, just like I had learned to do as a child. I believed that my compliancy made me likeable. I believed that it kept me safe. I tried to be all things to all people, but I denied even to myself that I was doing it. I thought that I took care of me too. I assured myself that I liked living that way, that I was a servant of God, that I was selfless and generous with my time. That is my definition of dysfunctional relationship today.
Everyone was used to that Darlene. Everyone liked that Darlene just the way she was. Why would they want me to change? Most people, from the minute they met me they wanted me to be someone else. They wanted me to adapt to who they wanted me to be. And then it wasn’t good enough anyway. They wanted me to be what they wanted but they didn’t even know what they wanted. More definition of dysfunctional relationship.
For several years I thought about going to therapy, but I didn’t want to spend the money; I viewed it as “taking money away from my family”. I also had a belief that I couldn’t spend the time on myself, that I was raising three kids and that to invest time on working on me and my issues was selfish. But things got bad enough that I felt I had no choice. It was either do some work on myself, (and feel selfish) or lose everything I had anyway.
First person that I stood up for myself with was my husband. It was freaking scary! I told him that I wanted to stay in therapy and he didn’t want me to. He said that we couldn’t afford it but I think it was because he didn’t like that I was changing. He liked things the way they were ~ his way. I told him that I was going to finish the whole process. Period.
Another big thing in the beginning was when he made a reference to something I wanted to do and he said that it had nothing to do with “us”. When asked to clarify he said that it had nothing to do with our goals and dreams. I told him that he had never once asked me what any of my dreams and goals were. He was well into his dream/goal and plan for his business as a beef cattle and hay producer when he met me and he just assumed that I should be part of it with him, so I was, because that is what a good wife does I thought. I thought I should become his support, you know, stand behind him. This was fine for a while, but I gave up everything that I liked in favour for what he liked. I no longer thought about myself as an individual. But I felt like I was suffocating under his life. There was nothing of ME left unless it was what he wanted me to be. So raising the kids and being involved in church groups or teaching Sunday school or activities with our kids met with his approval, but spending time on the computer or visiting a friend out of town was not acceptable.
As I started to grow stronger in therapy I realized that I was really held back by everyone my whole life, including my husband. So in order to live in the change I was trying to achieve, I told him. I remember how the truth of this statement (that he never asked about my dreams) shocked him. I still remember his face when I said it while we were in a joint therapy session. He looked angry, he genuinely did not understand why I would want to do or even be anything separate from him. He expected marriage and a marriage partnership to be just like the one that was modeled for him, the one between his mother and father. That was his belief system. And because I was used to being what others wanted me to be for most of my whole life, it was easy to find myself in this situation in my marriage too. That was my belief system.
Because we were in a joint therapy session, and because we had the help of the therapist to guide the conversation, my husband was willing to listen to me about my feelings and he realized that it was true; he had not considered my dreams, just as his father had not considered his mothers dreams, goals or wishes. He just expected me to join his dream, to be part of his goal, to work towards it with him ~ for him ~ but not to have a separate dream for myself. He thought love was ownership. He treated me like he owned me and he even thought it was his right as a husband. I thought I was happy to live that way, because I thought it was the definition of love and relationship, but I was dying and our marriage was dysfunctional. There was no equality, there was no partnership.
The truth is that I had never even asked myself what my dreams and goals were, because as I described in my last post, I was trying so hard to guess what everyone else wanted me to say, who they wanted me to be, what they wanted me to do. But somehow I realized that I had to start to find out who I was if I was going to break free of the oppression of depression. It I was going to finally wake up and live. And I was going to have to learn to stand up for myself in the true definition of love and relationship.
Eventually my husband and I realized that we had become part of a cycle of psychological abuse and dysfunctional relationship passed down through the generations and that we had to stop it in order to prevent it from being passed on to our own three children. We realized that we had modeled our belief systems to our kids, just as our parents did for us and it was time for us to grow up and learn the real definition of love and model that for them before it was too late.
Real love does that.
Not everyone is willing to change like my husband was though; stay tuned for more reactions.
As always, please share your comments and stories of your own.
Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time.
Darlene Ouimet
My Coping Method Failed and Depression Increased
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- RUN
It was a big decision to tell my therapist what was going on in my mind. I could tell him what was going on in my life but what was going on inside my head was a different matter.
I lived inside my head for years. I constantly wondered what to say. I constantly wondered what you (or they) wanted me to say, what would make them mad, what would make them like me and accept me. What would keep me safe? Those are a lot of questions going around in my mind that I needed to think about BEFORE I answered anyone. I got quick at it though. This was one of my coping methods.
This was my survival mode. This coping method went so deep that I realized even as an adult, I was always wondering what everyone else was thinking. Always trying to guess what they wanted me to say, who they wanted me to be, what they wanted me to do. I wondered this so long and so deep that I didn’t know what I thought anymore. And worse than that, I didn’t care what I thought most of the time. I don’t think I even thought about what I personally thought; I was too focused on everyone else, believing that understanding and complying with others, would keep me safe. It was one of the ways that I coped, one of the ways that I survived.
I was always afraid that everyone was disapproving of me. I didn’t want to meet with any disapproval. Oh I used to say all the time “I don’t care if “they” like me or not”. But it wasn’t true. I was just saying one more thing that I had heard from someone else. I was lost in a world that was not mine. It was exhausting.
Eventually I fell apart and just could not seem to climb out of the serious depression I kept going back into every time I tried to stop taking the anti-depressant medications. I felt like I was being pulled under water; deep, murky, heavy, mucky, dirty cold and yet comfortable water. Looking back antidepressants really only represented a band-aid and I had come to the point that I needed the cure or I was going to just stay under that water and drown; once and for all.
I went to a therapist again because I was afraid for my life. Not because of others this time, but because I was really aware that I was losing the fight. I was losing my lifelong fight to just be okay and belong somewhere.
So taking into consideration everything that I said above, why would talking to a therapist be any different then talking to someone else? All my approval issues and fear of being hurt came with me to therapy. My “what do you need me to be” mode didn’t go away just because I was paying someone to talk to me. I still worried about what he would think, what he would want me to do and how would I stay safe? I didn’t trust because long ago I had learned to keep my guard up. I’d had a few inappropriate therapists cross my path too. All of this came into the therapy room with me although I didn’t know that. I was operating the exact same way that I always did. Survival and safety, coping and extreme self control came first. I had been groomed that way my whole life.
I was afraid of what he would think of me. I was afraid that I would be in danger if I told him what I had been through and what I was really like, because I was convinced for most of my entire life, that I was the problem. I even told him in that first session that the problem was me. I told him that I had a fantastic life but I just wasn’t happy and I was ungrateful. Something, I told him, is really wrong with me.
I had to break through this wall that stood between me and my recovery before I began to change and the first step was realizing that I although I believed that I all thought about was me, the truth was that I never thought about me.
Stay tuned this post will be continued…… HERE
Exposing Truth ~ One snapshot at a time;
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
Mother Daughter Relationship Lies
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- Aware of the Danger
It is devastating to realize how little regard parents can have for their own child when that child is you. It is deeply wounding; I was filled with self doubt about why they felt this way. They planted that doubt; they made me question my value all along. This is a difficult cycle to understand and even more difficult to escape because the roots go so deep.
One of the things that I realized in the process of recovery was that the fear of losing my parents love was still very real. Even as an adult, the thought of standing up to my mother about our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship filled me with dread and could cause my heartbeat to spike with an anxiety that I never understood. No one wants to be rejected by their own parents. What I didn’t realize is that I still had the fears from the view point of a child.
When I was a child I was pretty sure that if my parents rejected me that I would be left to die. I could not survive in the world without them. That’s not just a fear; that is a reality. I didn’t think about someone else taking care of me. I think this is why it was easy for me as a child to take the blame for things that went wrong. If it was my fault, I could try harder. If I blamed my parents, and they rejected me, then I had no hope. So I tried harder.
Many other problems can grow out of this mindset though. When we have been kept down this way, it is easy for other people to treat us the same way; like we are less important than they are because we accept that we are less important and this sort of opens the door to other maltreatment. This was something that I fought accepting for a very long time but when I began to understand this concept I began to realize how my life was like a big sticky mess that kept snowballing into a bigger sticky mess. Everyone seemed to disregard me and there were times I was shocked at how I was treated by people.
So it was time for the untangling and rebuilding process. The tricky part was that I had to learn to refuse to be treated like I was less than anyone else. The first step was believing that I was equally valuable by exposing all the lies I believed, and replacing them with truth and then I had to learn how to draw boundaries. Now that was scary but I came to realize that if I didn’t do it, I would stay right where I was and my new growth and my hope for excellent mental health would be stalled.
Although I became aware of the way that I had been devalued by my mother and the damage it caused, for several years afterwards I continued talking to her and just ignored her jabs. I think I believed the new me would finally be good enough. I still wasn’t ready to deal with our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship but my life had already begun to change. I was speaking in mental health seminars about my recovery from Dissociative Identity Disorder and Chronic Depression and I was good at it. I was impacting people and inspiring hope that they too could overcome their mental health problems. I was impacting mental health professionals too.
I was invited to do the content edit on a book being written by a therapist about the destructive nature of power and control. I was SO excited to tell my Mom. She wasn’t impressed at all. She wanted to know why he asked me. She wondered (out loud) if I was having an affair with him. Something snapped in me. Ever since I was 6 she had communicated to me in various ways that the only thing that I was good for was sex or something to do with sex. That realization had been a big part of my therapy. Now, I was building a professional career and I had gone back to school. I was speaking regularly in seminars about recovery and my Mother, my own Mother, decided that if someone was noticing me, it couldn’t possibly be because I was smart or that I had a talent in that area; it had to be because I was having an affair and that any man who saw value in me really just wanted to have sex with me. I was so stunned that I didn’t say anything. I was silent and didn’t stand up to her. I knew that I didn’t deserve that kind of treatment and I thought long and hard about what to do about it. In my therapy process, I had taken a close look at my trust issues with others, but what about the trust issues that I had with myself? I knew that it was time for me to take action; to honour myself and step into my new belief; that I was worthy.
I was already aware of my fear of being rejected by her if I told her that she couldn’t treat me that way anymore but I also knew that if I didn’t tell her what my boundaries were, and stick to them, that nothing would change. The time had come.
Exposing truth one snapshot at a time,
Darlene Ouimet
My Dual Thought Process in Therapy Sessions
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Everything felt NEW in the process. Everything WAS new! I had been so protected by my coping methods for so many years. When I started what I call “the process that worked” In my intake session with a new therapist, we talked about some of my coping methods, and my therapist mentioned that we would work on letting go some of my self control. I thought “I don’t think so, no freaking way” but I smiled and nodded. The truth is that I had no idea what he was talking about but it didn’t sound like something I wanted to try. I realize today he was talking about my coping methods. When I began to consider letting some of them go I quickly became very aware of my trust issues. For me, the therapy room became the tiny world where I would try out my new tools, new thoughts, new hopes and dreams. It would also be where I would face my fears, my false beliefs and the truth about my life and what had really happened to me.
As soon as I made the decision to really engage in the process of recovery, the fears came up in a big way and those trust issues were more evident than ever before. My first fears about learning to live in a new world were about my tiny new world ~ the therapy and the therapist. First of all I had to know that I could escape the therapy room, it I needed to. Each session I checked around for the escape routes. There were two doors one leading outside and into a beautiful garden and one leading out of the office itself. I made sure that I could reach the garden door if I had to run. Sometimes I had to sit on my hands; I thought I would get violent. I was afraid to get angry, I was afraid to “do the wrong thing” and I was afraid that if I did the wrong thing that my therapist wouldn’t like me. I could not relax; I was so sure that I would make a wrong move, and if I did, then he would make a wrong move. I was afraid of the therapist, but yet saw him as my last hope. Looking back my adventures in therapy were a tiny mirror of how I lived my life. Everything looked fine on the outside but inside it was chaos.
My therapist pointed out the escape routes in his office. I smiled nervously. Part of me was wondering if he knew that I had already planned my escape which meant that he would know that I didn’t trust him and that might hurt his feelings or make him angry; the other part of me immediately wondered why he was pointing the escape routes out to me. Was he going to do something to make me want to run? Was he going to try to trick me into trusting him? He told me that trust was something that came with time and that I didn’t have to trust him with anything until I felt more comfortable. Looking back, he explained this really well, but in my mind I heard that I should not trust him because he was human and that I might need to run. I had had problems with therapists in the past. A few of them made passes at me or made it clear that they were attracted to me. Part of me was pretty sure that I had caused the attraction and had sabotaged any help that they could have given me. I was afraid that I was going to do it again. I wanted help but I didn’t believe that anyone could help me; furthermore, I didn’t believe that I deserved it.
Even though I planned my escape should the need arise, I was absolutely sure that I would not use it even if I had to. I had frozen so many times before that I didn’t even trust myself to protect myself.
I wanted recovery but I was afraid of it. I wanted to trust someone to be able to help me, but I had learned my whole life that people rarely could be trusted. This is a difficult spot to be in when in counselling therapy because these trust issues and this mixed up thinking get in the way. A therapist can’t help you if you don’t or can’t tell him what is going on but the problem in most cases and certainly in my case was compounded by the fact that I didn’t really know what was wrong and I was pretty sure that the problem was me. I was afraid to tell the stories in case he validated that the problem was indeed me, and once again, I was afraid that he wouldn’t like me, therefore reject me and then my last chance would be gone. I was also afraid he would like me (inappropriately). There were two distinct sides to everything that I thought, although I was not really that aware of it then. Round and round I went, all my thoughts spinning and swirling in my head; most of them opposing each other. I had a lot to sort out and there were days when I wanted to give up ~ “Stop the world, I want to get off.”
Everything was hard. My therapist somehow picked out one thing for me to start with. The process was really truly difficult but the combination of wanting recovery so bad and some of the things that this therapist was saying enabled a little seed of hope for recovery and even a seed of hope for wholeness to take root and that is what kept me going. I fought for my life just a bit more then I fought the process at first. Eventually I fought the process less and less. Little by little the therapy helped, I got stronger, I learned how to feel and deal. I learned how to listen to my dual thought process and figure out the truth and false of each side of it. I learned how to stop spinning and sort my thinking out. It wasn’t super quick but it happened!
My therapist told me that we would find the jewel that was unique to me, the gem inside me. (I thought he was the one who needed therapy but I smiled and nodded.) But once again, he was right. I found the jewel inside of me. And guess what? We all have one.
Life is more colourful without the spin,
Darlene Ouimet
Dysfunctional Family ~ First a Child Then a Parent
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- Freedom just Beyond
Jimmy’s post “valued for my ability to work hard” was a big hit and so many could relate to being valued by the work they produced and by the results of their performance. This post is about the siblings who are often NOT recognized or valued for accomplishments.
As a child growing up I had a brother who was valued for his accomplishments. I always thought that he was the most important child in our home. He excelled at the sports he played and with the teams he was on and he got really high marks in school. My brother got all my fathers attention which left me feeling unimportant. My father seemed to love my brother for reasons that I could not seem to compete with. I was jealous of the attention that my brother got and my father never seemed interested in the things that I was good at other then when I cooked or made him a snack.
All my life I have heard all sorts of comments about how every child feels that they are the one who has life the hardest. My suspicion is that how our value is defined for us, is what makes us all feel that way.
There is another layer of confusion with this whole concept for those of us who were NOT valued for achievements or lived in the shadow of another child’s accomplishments.
I was trying to measure up to my parents expectations AND I was also trying to be more like my brother to win the approval that I thought he got. (In reality my brother was likely feeling under similar pressure to what Jimmy described in his guest post for us.) I realized more about this child value belief system by watching and listening to my own children as our family emerged from living in an abusive and dysfunctional family system within our own home.
Everyone had great expectations for our first born child who happened to be a boy. When he showed signs of being a great athlete, everyone pushed him. Much to the delight of Daddy, Grandma and Grandpa, he showed interest in farm work before he could even walk. We pushed him in both those areas, but we called it encouragement. My husband also pressured my son to do farm work in a similar way to how he himself was raised but he only had one example of parenting, and it wasn’t a good one.
As our children got older, my mental health was getting worse and worse. When I finally fell apart and I felt that I couldn’t go on anymore, I decided that I was either going to leave my family or I was going to die so I sought help one last time. In the beginning I wanted help only for my mental health issues. I was sure that everything was my fault and that I just could not BE good enough or do it right and I didn’t recognize any of the dysfunction in our family. I believed that I had done much better than my own parents had done but still it wasn’t enough and I was extremely unhappy. In learning what my belief system was and how it had formed full of lies and pressure and other people’s expectations, many other issues were brought to light. It was apparent that my husband and I needed to make some changes in our relationship too. I had been in a position of “background” and not “partner” and was beginning to realize that I wanted to have equal value as a person, as a co owner of our farm and as a partner in marriage. As my husband and I both began to learn how to have a functioning relationship in the true definition of love, eventually the truth about how our children felt about the expectations that we had of them, their own perceived value, what each of them felt about us and each other and what was “fair and not fair” started to come out.
My son felt that the system was extremely unfair to him, that the girls got off easy and didn’t have to perform a certain way in sports; they were not expected to do the farm chores (exactly right) either. He felt that all the pressure was on him and that he took all the heat especially from his father. Our eldest daughter, then a young teenager, confessed that she felt she never measured up to her brother, and that he was the only one that was cared about by her father. She said that everything was about her brother and he got all the attention and only his activities and accomplishments mattered. Everything that he felt pressured by, she felt he was praised, loved and valued for. And what she felt was neglect and disinterest towards her, our son felt that she was more loved and valued then he was because she didn’t have to perform and didn’t have the responsibility or pressure that he had. What he saw as being picked on, she saw as being loved and what she felt was neglect he saw as more accepted.
So at the risk of sounding repetitive; both of our daughters believed that their brother had more value than they did because in their view he was getting all the interest. Even though they heard all the pressure that he was under, they viewed it as attention, and they recognized his value (the value placed on him verbally) for his sports ability and farm work ability. Society sometimes calls this “sibling rivalry” but you can see there is a valid basis to it. None of our children felt valued or acknowledged for who they were. All 3 of them felt pressured to live up to what we wanted them to be.
My son was resentful because under the guise of encouragement, he was being praised as a form of pressure to perform, achieve and produce. It was so bad that our son had serious performance anxiety to the point that he got sick before tests in school. We didn’t realize this was our fault and we thought that it was just his personality.
In truth, each of our children was right. Our daughters were not being recognized in the same way that our son was recognized and even depended on especially with the farm. They felt neglected, unloved and that they were not as valued because of it. Our son was right too, he was being pushed and getting a lot of negative attention and he was over burdened with chores and the pressure to perform at hockey.
This family dysfunction was exactly how my husband and I were raised, and it had become our definition of love and value. Therefore according to the definition of love and value that my husband and I had been taught we had taught our own children the same definitions of love and value. We were passing this false information on to them and in doing so, forming in them a belief system not based on the truth about love, value or equality. You can see how the cycle continues if we don’t stop it. As we all learn about truth, love, value and equal value, our family continues to recover.
I look forward to your comments,
Darlene Ouimet
Mental Health Recovery ~ Ten Necessary Changes
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I had to get it sorted out. I had to separate the real from the imagined; the true from the false; the facts from the fiction and it all had to be looked at from a new perspective; the true perspective. The way things really had been. These are a few of the necessary things that I did in order to give myself some space to come out of the fog enough to see clearly and begin to heal. This is part two; continued from “The Recovery Journey ~ Common Bonds“
~ I decided that my version of the truth was not really mine and that I didn’t know the truth at all. I gave myself permission to examine the truth and to realize that my survivor mode was a leftover from childhood. I was strong enough to know the REAL TRUTH now.
~ I decided to spend some time with myself, to invest in myself and my health and to pay attention to me and give myself some of the value that I had shown to others.
~ I decided that I was not going to be responsible or accountable for other people’s feelings during this process.
~ I put aside my constant obsession with guilt and shame over not having enough faith (because if I had enough faith, I would be healed) and over not being grateful for my wonderful life (because I thought that I didn’t even deserve the good things I had) and put aside my obsession with doing things “the right way” (the right way according to who??)
~ I stopped trying to look at things as a mature adult who was responsible for the results of my own life and just looked at what my own life had somehow become.
~ I stopped feeling sorry for my parents and making excuses for their behavior and decided that I was going to just open my eyes and LOOK at the truth.
~ I gave myself permission to feel however I really felt. If that meant feeling angry; fine. If resentment came up, then that was fine too. I had to allow those feelings long enough to really feel them, so that I could let them go and become able to get over them.
~ I decided to put aside the whole forgiveness issue. I did not think about forgiveness, I made a decision NOT to think about it until I had time to sort a bunch of things out because by then it had gotten really complicated. I was beating myself up for not forgiving and hiding the fact that I had not forgiven.
~I decided to put the time and effort into the process no matter what, because life the way that it was ~ was not worth living. I decided that I was going to at least find out what my “worth” was even if that meant that I was going to be disappointed. (I was so afraid that “they” were right about me, that really I wasn’t worth it. There is NO SUCH TRUTH!
~ Somehow I knew that doing all these things~ including putting my faith aside~ to examine the truth about faith itself and my faith, would not get me thrown into hell. I decided that I had to clear all that clutter, so that I could start fresh, with a clean slate, without all the garbage that was on my old slate.
Most of these decisions were not conscious. I made many of them along the way. My therapist had to tell me many times that I didn’t deserve to be so disregarded. He had to tell me many times that I had a right to have been protected and that the abuse was not my fault. It was in believing him that I was able to start to look at the truth. It was in seeing how my belief system formed, that I was motivated to change it. It was in taking everything apart that I was able to be put back together. When I was able to make a beginning on even the first few of these decisions I began to see the road ahead. Eventually, I walked into a world of freedom that I never thought possible. I was able to own my value; I not only felt my worth, but I knew it, and I found my purpose.
How does this post make you feel?
To Your Freedom on the Journey to Wholeness,
Darlene Ouimet
The Recovery Journey ~ Common Bonds
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These past few years I have realized a commonality between almost all of us who struggle with any or all issues, whether those issues have to do with the causes ~ such as physical, sexual, or emotional abuse or if they have to do with conditions ~ meaning symptoms or diagnosis such as depression of any kind, dissociative identity disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, bi polar, borderline personality disorder or mild or serious low self esteem. I am not discounting or stressing the importance of any one type of struggle here because I’ve realized this common bond we all seem to share. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I am talking about the belief system that develops in our lives when we have been abused, neglected or devalued. That belief system seems to have something to do with the resulting problems that interfere with the individual having a life filled with joy and freedom.
I started this blog to write about the healing journey and the difficulties with it; a place to talk about our common bond and to stay away from emphasizing the differences or highlighting the diagnosis. I had been diagnosed with a few different things, and the diagnosis was not what helped me to recover. I found a way out of the brokenness that I lived in for so long and want to share my journey because I realized that the road so many of us travel on the journey to freedom is similar. It is noteworthy to mention that we also have a lot of commonality in the places that we get stuck.
I talk a lot about how I got broken in the first place; Other people got to decide what I was worth or not worth, what I could be used for or what I was good for and even what I was good at. With sexual and physical abuse, someone took control of my body and did things to me that I did not want done to me and I had no choice, although I was told and even convinced that I did have a choice. With neglect or with a parent who never noticed or took interest, I learned that I was not valuable, not important enough to be cared for. I was groomed and trained in guilt and shame, convinced that all of this was my fault; I was influenced and I convinced myself that I could do better or try harder and then it would stop. As I grew older, those childhood beliefs became even more skewed because now I am told that I have a choice about how I view it, and that I should just accept it and get over it or not talk about it because it was a long time ago, and because I still have the deep rooted belief that I was not really loveable due to something I might have done or something that was missing in me and I became even more distressed. I was so sure for so long that it was my fault that I struggled. On top of all that, as an adult there were a lot more voices and influences telling me what was wrong with me, what I was doing wrong and what was in my way. These are the well meaning people, books and leaders that told me I didn’t have enough faith; that I needed to be more grateful, that the past belongs in the past, that I needed to forgive and forget….. Well I’m sure you get the picture.
I spent years practicing positive thinking, telling myself that I loved myself, telling myself that “God don’t make junk”; never speaking of the past, never acknowledging depression, resentment or anger. I practiced gratitude, prayed for people that were my enemies, went to extremes with my physical health and joined self help programs. For 8 years I studied Greek and Hebrew word origins so I could study the original meaning of the bible, I confessed all my sins, and practiced accountability. I submitted to my husband, which in my case meant that I gave up my identity and individuality and became a servant to my family. If I had any dreams I gave them up in favor of his dreams. My struggle only increased.
I learned to cover my real feelings up. I smiled to the world and dissociated much of the time and I beat myself up whenever I was discouraged or ungrateful. I was unhappy and I felt guilty about it because I could not see past all the things I was told and believed that I brought on myself. Consequently I never got over it until I really took a good look at all of it. I took a look at the whole picture. There was no way that I could just get over it or put it behind me, especially with all the mixed up beliefs in there.
There was something missing between the events of my childhood and the “getting over it” and “letting it go” part. The bridge was broken and the keys were on the bridge. There was no real acceptance, no real freedom, no real forgiveness and no real life, until I got the bridge repaired and found those keys. I am grateful every day that I did.
Stay Tuned for part 2 ~ “Mental Health Recovery ~ Ten Necessary Changes“
As always I love to have your comments!
Darlene Ouimet
My Therapist Winced when I Told Him…….
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- the road is mysterious
Unless you are new to this blog, you have realized by now that my life has not always been happy joyous and free. I prayed to die for many years. I tried hard to change my life, to change my heart and to just “get over it”. I didn’t know what the heck was wrong with me, but I knew something was. I did everything that I was told might work, and I can honestly say that I was sincere in my desire to live without the baggage of my past dragging me down forever. I just never felt happy or good for very long.
I did make some progress over the years through some of the people that I met and the places that I went for help. Some books gave me hope; some seminars lifted my spirits for a while. I am not discounting any of the methods that I tried; it is just that none of them were the total answer. The improvement never felt finished. I still had this emptiness, this hole in me that would not fill. I had this restlessness and desire for something better, to find and know myself, to find my purpose in life. I longed to be free of the depression that came unexpectedly and yet regularly into my life. I just wanted to be okay instead of lost, broken, exhausted and disconnected.
I found fresh hope one day when sitting across from a new therapist talking about the hopelessness that was me; In my intake session I told him that I had the best life, the most wonderful husband, 3 great kids and was living my dream on a big farm/ranch riding my horse, but for some reason I had no reason to live. I thought that my family would be better off without me. I was tired, frustrated and heading for my third serious depression in 5 years. The last two depressions had lasted for almost 2 years each. I was terrified of antidepressants since I’d had a terrible withdrawal experience the last time I had taken them. The only stone left unturned that I knew of was that I had not followed through on the therapy for the dissociated identity disorder that I had been diagnosed with when I was in my mid twenties. I had decided to make one last attempt at dealing with that.
I caught just a glimmer of something different in the methods this therapist was using. He didn’t just listen to me, he reacted to me. He winced when I asked if it “was normal for a mother to put her tongue in her 9 year old daughter’s mouth?” He assured me that this was not “normal” and it was in that moment that I knew this therapy would be different. Not because of what he said though, because he winced. Other therapists had never reacted to that question. It was what I later realized was my “test question” and I was not going to tell absolutely everything if I wasn’t going to get an idea if this stuff was just run of the mill no big deal stuff or if something really wrong had happened to me. I had been raised to believe after all, that my life and my upbringing was better than most.
That glimmer of hope is what kept me going week after week, dumping some of the most difficult stories, and being validated by my therapist who was sometimes moved to tears. He showed his disgust for the things that happened to me. He assured me that it was not my fault, but more importantly than that, he showed me why I thought it was my fault, and then he helped me to see why it was not my fault. This was the beginning of my emerging from broken and into to a life of wholeness and splendid mental health beyond anything I had ever hoped for.
Living life to the fullest,
Darlene Ouimet
Anger at Parents~A Pathway on the Journey to Freedom
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This post has been inspired by Sarah who left a compelling comment on my last post. I have copied and italicized her comments and answer them point by point.
~Sarah~ “What if you are an adult child of someone who was abused as a child who never sought professional help? My parent was depressed and put us through so much as a children yet I don’t feel I can call it abuse as we weren’t sexually abused or physically.”
~ Darlene~ Abuse is not just physical or sexual. Having said that, the word we use to describe our situation past or present is not nearly as important as it is to get help and shine some light on the situation. I try to use terms such as emotionally unavailable, or emotional abandonment but it all comes down to not having had a sense of value instilled in us. I was well fed, and well clothed. On the outside I imagine that we looked like the perfect family, yet my first major depression was at the age of 10. It may have been easier for me to blame sexual abuse for all my problems, but I have met so many others who share my story of struggle and depression who had never had either sexual OR physical abuse, that I began to realize that my problems went deeper then the type of abuse. I think emotional abuse is extremely hard to cope with no matter what you call it. How does a child understand the things that you are describing here Sarah?
~Sarah~ “this parent uses their abuse as an excuse for why they weren’t emotionally present and as a reason for all the irresponsible choices they made for us as children. As an adult I’m dealing with anger towards them for the way they treated us and the poor decisions they made. This parent is still focusing so much on their childhood and is seeking sympathy from their children for what they missed out on. This parent fails to see how much we missed out on when they didn’t seek help.”
~Darlene~ my mother constantly told me that I had it so much better then she’d had it. And that was true. My mother was a better mother then her mother was to her. The quality of my life was at least 10 times better then the way that she grew up. It never occurred to me to say “SO???” Does the fact that her life was worse than mine justify that she didn’t take proper care of me?
I was taught my whole life that I was responsible for my own feelings, and I found this a difficult concept to grasp. I didn’t think I had the right to be angry with my parents. I sought help via support groups in my early twenties and it was drilled into my head that my feelings were my choice, that I was responsible for who I was as an adult, that I could not blame my past for my present. I believed all those things and I tried positive thinking, affirmation, self help books etc. Many of these things helped for a little while, but they were more like a Band-Aid for a critical wound. I was shocked when my last therapist told me that there was such a thing as “justifiable anger” I had never once thought of that in relation to my parents OR to my past.
~Sarah~ “The (adult) children are afraid of confronting the parent about their behavior out of fear they will be really upset.”
~Darlene~ The most important thing for me to say on this point is that the fear I had about standing up to my mother, was a fear left over from childhood and I didn’t realize that fact. I was so afraid that my mother would abandon me, or reject me if I told her how much she had hurt me. In my therapy process I realized that as a child, rejection and abandonment means death. As an adult it just hurts. As a child, my mother’s love, attention, acceptance was the most important thing in the world and I tried very hard to get it. As an adult I was still trying very hard to get it.
~Sarah~ I’m contemplating seeking therapy as I’m at a point in my life where I have no idea how to deal with this situation.
~Darlene~ It was in therapy that I learned my value. It was in therapy that untangled the mess at the center of my soul and realized the truth. In the end, I had to learn how to re-parent myself. In the end, I was able to find the real me, the individual that I was born to be and move forward with my life. I left depression and dissociation behind me for what I believe to be forever.
It isn’t that I blame my parents for the struggle that I have had. Realizing where they had failed me was only a pathway on the journey to wholeness and freedom. What I’m trying to get at in this blog is that in order to get to the bottom of my depressions, and mental health issues, I had to see where I was squished, where I was invalidated and unsupported and where my emotional growth was stunted. I had to acknowledge those things before I could get to the “me” that was hiding underneath the confusion and emerge into wholeness and freedom.
~Darlene Ouimet
