“Putting up with abuse or abusive treatment is not love for the abuser. It is not love for the self. It has nothing to do with love at all. Finding out what LOVE really is went miles towards my recovery” ~ Darlene Ouimet

Long before I ever ‘emerged from broken’ I had this burning question about the obligation involved in loving my parents. I had been told/warned that it was a sin if I didn’t honor them, and I had honor and love all mixed up. I didn’t really understand what either word actually meant since I had never been taught the true meaning of those words. My real question was more about my right to ‘stand up to them’ and since I believed that standing up to them was not a loving action, that standing up to them was going against them which meant “noncompliance” I believed that love was putting up with unacceptable treatment.

Each year around Mother’s Day, I re-visit my belief system and the longings that I had in the past, the judgments that I made on myself and the roots of where they came from; In order to find out what love really is, I had to realize what it was not. I had to realize how I had been taught what love was and realize that that teaching was false and not based on truth or the true definition of love at all.

I had been told that love was the answer but I had not been taught what LOVE actually was. So I took my false belief about love and what I ‘thought’ it was, and I applied that false definition of ‘love’ to everyone in my life.

I believed that loving abusive people like my mother, until they could love themselves was equal to having a higher purpose. I believed that I was ‘the better person’ because I could take the abuse, mistreatment or disrespect and that would communicate that I could love unconditionally. I believed that accepting devaluing treatment in some way ‘proved’ my value; even if it only proved it to God. 

The truth is that putting up with the abuse, disrespect and devaluing treatment only served to validate the way they treated me. It communicated my permission for them to treat me like dirt. How can that be love?  Sometimes I wonder if deep down they were laughing at me. I wonder if they ever thought “What an idiot this girl is! No matter how nasty I am to her she keeps coming back for more; no matter how I treat her she ‘LOVES’ me!”

I don’t think my acceptance of abuse did anything to serve any kind of higher purpose once I entered into adulthood; I think it served to communicate that these people (like my mother) had rights that I didn’t have which is really what abuse is; compliance to abusive treatment communicates to the abuser that they have more right and more value than the victim they are mistreating. So the compliance that I liked to think of as unconditional love, validated them. My compliance said to my mother and to eveyone else that I complied with “sure you can keep on spitting on me and I am going to love you. I can accept anything you serve up to me because I know what real love is and by MY example of love, I can teach you to love”.

But that wasn’t real love at all. The way my mother and others treated me didn’t communicate love or acceptance of me.  And my acceptance of them didn’t communicate love of them either.

Doesn’t it make sense that love, real love for self AND for the other person, would be to stand up to the nasty treatment? Doesn’t it make sense that if you want to express love for someone, that you DON’T validate that it is okay for them to treat you or other people in a devaluing way? How is love modeled through accepting abusive behavior? Isn’t abusive behavior wrong in the first place? And if it is wrong in the first place, isn’t it wrong for everyone no matter what position the abusive person has in your life?

Doesn’t it make sense that we can only model love by acting in a loving way? I had to look at what modeling love really looked like. I realized that accepting myself with having less value than them wasn’t love at all. (And it wasn’t the truth either!) Accepting abusive treatment in no way communicates love or unconditional love. It communicates that you will accept abusive treatment.

When I was a child there was no alternative but to accept whatever was dished out to me. I had no power and I had no choice. It had to live in survival mode. I was taught by action and inaction, words and other forms of communication that showing ‘love’ was about compliance and acceptance. But that definition of love and acceptance only applied to me and that was not how THEY showed love. They didn’t love me in the way that they insisted that I love them. They taught me that love was about obedience and about never questioning the authorities in my life which of course only served them and their desires. My compliance and acceptance served to restore their low self-esteem and fulfilled their own ideas about what love was and what it could do. And this is why abuse is a cycle. These false teachings are passed on from generation to generation, each broken child waiting for the time when they too will be loved either by the false definition of love that they have been taught (submission and compliance to everyone; in other words to keep trying to comply or submit believing that this acceptance of abusive treatment will eventually enable to communicate love to the abusive person who will then return your love) or by someone else’s compliance and acceptance of their unacceptable treatment which is falsely believed to communicate that the victim of their mistreatment ‘loves’ them.  

I am no longer a child. I have learned what right and wrong is. I have learned that love is not a one way street. I have learned that it is wrong to go along with the teaching that the one who gets loved is the one with the most power in the relationship.  I have learned that the proper use of power is to empower and the last thing that I ever was by my mother and father and these people who taught me this false definition of love was empowerment. They taught me slavery. They taught me obedience, submission, compliance and with those teachings they slayed my choice, my power and my individuality. I was not empowered and I was not taught anything about true love.

The most important thing I have learned is the truth about my own value and worth. I have learned that I have equal value to everyone. I have learned that I deserve the same respect that everyone else deserves and that I do not deserve to be treated as ‘less worthy than anyone else’. I have learned that real love treats everyone the same and that the rules of love are not different for children or adult children. I have learned that love is always about what is best. When people do not treat me with equal value, it is best not to accept that treatment. Refusing to comply with unacceptable treatment IS loving ~ both towards myself and towards the abuser. How can it be loving to allow them to continue their abusive behavior by accepting it as acceptable?

I have learned that victim mentality (believing that reacting in acceptance will eventually pay off and cause the abuser to change) will never be part of the solution but in truth will only serve to allow abuse to continue. And this is why learning to love myself first has enabled me to love others and be that example of love to others. This is why I see having no communication with my own mother is a loving action (to her, to myself and to my children) on my part.

This Mothers Day I do not miss the fantasy of having a loving mother. As I grow closer and closer to the truth about love, I wake up more and more in love….

Please share your thoughts, feelings, discoveries and ideas about love and what it really is when it comes to your mothers and fathers and how the thought of setting boundaries is really a loving action for all instead of a “sin” defining standing up to mistreatment as dishonoring your mother and father.

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet

For additional articles on Mother Daughter or Family issues, please scroll through the Mother Daughter Category and the Family Category on the buttons above.

Related Posts ~ See the phrases through out the post in bold as well as: What If My Mother or Father Dies Before We resolve our relationship?  

Getting Unstuck on the Healing Journey

If you have not already downloaded my complimentary Guide to Getting Unstuck on the Journey to Emotional Healing, please grab a copy of it now! There is a box in the right hand side bar here>>> just fill in your first name (or any name you wish to use) and your primary email address and you will be sent the download link. In this 9 page mini booklet I answer some of the most popular questions that I get here on the Emerging from Broken blog, privately through the contact form and on the Emerging from Broken Facebook Page.

Welcome to the discussion page for the Guide to Getting Unstuck on the Journey to Emotional Healing.

As you may notice when you read the guide, there is a common thread expressed through the most popular questions that I get asked. Behind the questions is the belief that the people who have been authority in our lives are ‘right’. That if the people that have authority in our lives say in words or with actions such as disregard or disrespect, that we don’t deserve better or that we are not worthy, then for some reason their opinion is not questioned as much as it is ‘accepted’.

This is because for most of us it was communicated to us from a very young age that ‘they’ know best and that ‘they’ are right and that ‘they’ are not to be questioned. This belief is linked to the belief that ‘without them’ we may not survive. As an adult I had to work very hard at realizing that I COULD survive; through facing the origins of my belief system and how it was formed I was able to see my own strength; I was able to take my life back and learn to love myself and take care of myself. I learned this by seeing the truth about why I believed that I was ‘less important’ and why I ‘accepted’ that my needs were less valid than the needs of others. Seeing the roots of why I believed this about myself enabled me to see that it was a lie and that I was just as worthy and valid as everyone else on this planet!

People in authority are not always right just because they are in authority. I had not considered that truth when I was a child and growing up because of my dependence on those people. Going against the adults and caregivers in my life threatened my survival and therefore my life. That was true then. Seeing that it was no longer true was a huge part of how I was able to take my life back and overcome the manifestations of trauma, abuse and neglect. (When I refer to the manifestations I am referring to the resulting struggles such as depressions, post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative identity disorder, anxiety, eating disorders, low self-esteem and a few other common issues.)

There is another common belief expressed behind these questions; it leaks out through the questions how many of us had never been taught that we have the right to have boundaries and how habitual it is to accept that our feelings are not valid. I was taught that I ‘had’ to accept things the way they were. The funky part of that teaching is that many of the things I learned to accept were truly unacceptable but they were so normalized that I didn’t know they were wrong; in some cases the treatment was even illegal. I had to learn right from wrong when it came to the ways I was being treated and I had to learn about having healthy boundaries.

These basic rights issues come up over and over again and part of healing and taking my life back was about realizing that I had a right to be happy, I could actually think for myself with my own brain, I could say no and although it took a while for me to stop feeling like a horrible person for saying no, once I really validated that I have rights and choices and found out why I thought I didn’t have that right, it got much easier. I don’t live under obligation anymore. I live in truth.

I finally realized that I did not need to be validated by the very people who invalidated me in order to be okay.  I learned how to move past those old stick points and validate myself by seeing the truth about what happened to me and how I LEARNED to see myself.

I am creating this page for the purpose of discussion about the Guide to Getting Unstuck on the Healing Journey. Please feel free to add your comments, express your feelings and discuss the questions that are covered in the Guide here. Remember that you may use any name you wish to use on this site and that only the name you post in the comment form will appear and be seen by others. Your email address is private. The URL box is optional for people who have a website of their own and would like to be identified with their own site. If you don’t have a website please leave the box blank. I look forward to reading the comments in this discussion!

Exposing Truth, one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet                                                    

on the rocks

“I had a lot of trouble crying; sometimes I needed to cry so bad that I would watch a tear jerker movie by myself so I could get a few tears out. I still have trouble in this area but I have been able to keep going forward anyway. Other than a tear or two, I can’t cry in front of anyone. This comes from not having PERMISSION to cry in the past. I am happy to say that this has not prevented me from healing.”  Darlene Ouimet

I have always had trouble crying. I have not thought about this as deeply in the past as I have been thinking about it lately. I knew that crying made me feel bad about myself. And I have come to understand through the emotional healing process the different ways that I was not given permission to ‘feel’ when I was growing up.

When I post these types of quotes on the Emerging from Broken Facebook page about difficulty with crying or the inability to cry, there are always a lot of comments from others who share about being told not to cry and about being hit or punished for crying. Some people experience an intense fear of starting to cry and never being able to stop. Some share that like me, they have real difficulty crying and many share having both difficulty crying and shame for crying or even shame for wanting to cry.

The message I got when I was a kid was that I didn’t have a right to cry and that my feelings were wrong and the message was that I was exaggerating or lying about my pain whether it was emotional pain or physical pain. I too was often told that if I didn’t stop crying I would be given a reason to cry ~ (said to me by the person who had delivered the blows) when I was crying because I had just been hit with a belt.  Recently I realized that this issue goes even deeper than the fear of crying, shame over crying and the fact that I had been threatened and punished for crying.  

There was another message I received by being told to stop crying that was even more covert than then the messages about my worth or lack of worth and even more manipulative than the message about my rights or lack of rights;

The deeper message that I got about crying was that my emotions, my pain and my hurts burdened other people. I came to believe from being told not to cry, for being told that I had no REASON to cry, and that if I persisted in crying that I would be given a ‘real reason to cry’ that my crying was hurting someone else and that when I cried it was a problem for someone else. Even if I was crying because I had been spanked with the belt, or because I was hurt, my crying was causing further damage and I believed that the labels of ‘inconsiderate’ and ‘self-centered’ applied to me because of that message.

Today I associate crying with harming others instead of with a necessary release of emotion or an expression of physical or emotional pain. I came to believe that if I cried I was ‘making matters worse’ and not just for myself but for the people around me. For a little girl who believed that compliance and obedience was the only way that I would ever be loved, causing a problem was not the way I wanted to go because that went outside of my survival mode and my survival mode was keeping me alive.  

The truth is that I HAD a reason to cry when I was told not to cry but no one cared about my reasons, no one validated my reasons so I learned to invalidate the reason for my tears myself. I learned that I did not have the ‘right’ to cry that I was not permitted to cry, that I didn’t deserve to feel or to hurt, and I put all that info into the grid of understanding I was developing about myself, right alongside the other messages about my worth (or more appropriately messages about my lack of worth) that I received as a result of neglect, abuse, mistreatment and the dismissive lack of interest in me as an individual from the adults in my life.

My self-esteem was not nurtured; it was in fact deprived.  The damaging message was not only that I did not have ‘permission to cry’ and not only that I didn’t have ‘the right to cry’ and that my ‘need to cry’ was denied me, it was also that my feelings and my emotions were harming to others.  This message (that I was a burden to others when I had feelings and needs) caused me to believe that I was not significant, not worthy, and therefore not valid as a person in the way I believed that other people were valid.

Through understanding this deeper message that my reasons for having difficulty crying had to do with the message that my tears were a burden to others I noticed  that one of my reactions to feeling like I am going to cry is anger. Anger at myself! I have used anger at myself to stop the tears from coming. And this is exactly what my abuser did to me. She used anger and threats of something worse to follow if I didn’t stop crying in order to MAKE me stop crying.

About two years ago I fell down the basement stairs and landed in a weird position. I still have the bruises and dent on my lower shin were I hit the cement landing. It was a really bad fall and was very painful and I started crying as my husband my son rushed down to help me. For my child who was 19 years old at the time, I tried to hide that I was hurt. I didn’t want to scare him or make it worse for him. For my husband I tried to act like it was my own fault and that I had been careless and stupid. I even commented on how terrible it was that I had crushed the bag of chips that I had been carrying at the time as though the crushed chips was the ‘real tragedy’ here and not the fact that I had fallen and was really hurt. I distinctly remember the rage that I felt towards myself in that moment as I choked off the tears and stopped crying. I stopped crying by reprimanding myself. I told myself that I had been careless and stupid and the fall was my own fault and I had ruined a whole bag of chips. I stopped crying because I didn’t want to hurt them. I didn’t want to burden them with my pain. I didn’t want to admit that I needed anything. I stopped crying because when I was a child I learned that I was wrong to cry and I was taught to suck up the pain so I didn’t get a worse punishment ~ because it was ‘proven’ to me that crying only makes everything worse and that my crying was a problem for other people.

In order for me to move out of my many coping methods and thrive in my life today, it has been extremely important for me to find out what the false messages I was given in childhood were and where they came from, in order to change them back to the truth. These false messages about crying were no different than the other lies I had learned to accept.

The truth about crying is that there is no shame in crying. Although some people do use crying to manipulate others, I have never done that and there is no guilt associated with my need to cry.  I am not a burden to others. I am not going to be punished anymore for crying and if someone reacts to my tears in a way that disrespects me or devalues me, today I know that is not about me and I do not have to accept their reaction as the truth about me. If their reactions are mean or negative and warrant a response from me, I am no longer afraid to stand up for myself. Crying does not define me as weak. Crying does not define me as ‘looking for a worse punishment’ or as ‘looking for attention’.  Crying has value and can add value to my life. I have a right to my emotions today and crying is a wonderful expression of many emotions and an important way to release emotion and is nothing to be ashamed or afraid of.

Please share your thoughts about crying. Is crying difficult for you? How do you feel about your tears or lack of tears.  What formed your belief system about crying and what were the messages that you got about crying? When you are working on this, here is one more little tip; sometimes my reactions (or feelings) to other people crying are also great clues to the messages that I got about crying; I took a look at how I felt when other people cried. There are lots of ways to dig into our belief systems when it comes to getting to the bottom of where we got these messages.

Exposing Truth ~ one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet

Have you downloaded “the Guide to Getting Unstuck on the Emotional Healing Journey” yet? This is a 9 page guide written by me, answering the most common questions that I get asked on Emerging from Broken and the emotional healing process. Just put your first name and primary email (will not be shared) into the form in the upper right side bar and you can get the download. I am going to host a discussion here soon! ~ Darlene

Related Post ~ Stop That Crying or I will give you Something to Cry About”

Narcissism vs. Narcissistic in Mother Daughter Relationship Problems

Someone on the EFB facebook page wrote (in a comment to someone else) that I say that my mother is a narcissist and that she was mentally ill. I have never actually said that. I have said that my mother has narcissistic tendencies. I don’t actually think that my mother is a narcissist OR that she is mentally ill. (I don’t give much weight to the way the ‘mentally ill’ diagnosis is used in our society. I recovered by realizing that my depressions were a result of ‘what happened to me’ and that they had become an ineffective coping method for me.) Having said that, my mother suffers from depressions and she has for years and for the most part she has behaved towards me in a way that communicated that she thinks that she is more important than I am. She is disrespectful when it comes to me and she reacts to me in narcissistic ways communicating that my needs are not as valid as hers.

Her actions towards me are very discounting but that doesn’t make her a narcissist. Those things don’t make my mother a narcissist simply because she isn’t the same way with everyone. If my mother is a narcissist, there is a lot of evidence that she is able to control it. At best I might say that when it comes to the way my mother regards ME, she leans toward narcissistic tendencies.

A true mental health disorder is not controllable. People who have a true disorder can’t turn it on and turn it off. They can’t convince other people that they are wonderful and then in the privacy of home treat their own children like dirt. It doesn’t work that way. True narcissists are not well liked in society because they are narcissistic with everyone. They truly believe that they are more important than everyone else and it really shows.  

The reason that I bring this up is because for me a huge part of my healing came by understanding how the abusive parent, teacher, partner or friend, can actually choose how they behave. Just like I can choose how I treat other people, my mother, my family, my friends and co-workers can too.  And if I have a choice, then so does everyone else, unless I excuse their choice by labeling them with a serious disorder like Narcissism or Narcissistic personality disorder.  When their behaviour is within their control, the truth is that they don’t bother to try.

For so long I wanted to believe that my mother could not love me because she was sick. I wanted to believe her incapability because the alternative truth was way too painful to face. When I believed that she was sick and unable to love me and see me for who I am, I felt sorry for her. I believed that if I was the perfect child that she would finally love me so I kept trying harder. I believed that if I walked on egg shells that I would finally be good enough. But the truth is that I WAS always good enough and that she didn’t exercise her CHOICE in how she treated me. She wanted to garner sympathy for herself but it was manipulative and for her own gain, NOT because she had a narcissism problem.  Treating me the way she did “worked for her” ~ it got her what she wanted. She wanted her way. And yes ~ behaving in controlling and manipulative things to get her way is narcissistic, but it isn’t always “narcissism”.  

I don’t doubt that my mother’s depressions were real. I had enough depressions myself to know there is nothing fake about them so I am not saying my mother faked her problems. What I am saying is that she burdened ME with them. And because of her manipulative and controlling ways, I believed that her problems and depressions had something to do with me. I believed that I could help her and of course I couldn’t help her. I have written extensively about the way my belief system formed through the messages communicated to me because of the ways that I was treated and how it became a huge part of my survival mode to keep trying harder to convince the adults and caregivers in my life that I WAS worthy of being loved.

It has been helpful for me as it may be for you to read about narcissistic mothers and narcissistic personality disorder; my mother fits that description so well in so many of the ways she treated me in our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship but the bottom line is that my mother is not a true narcissist and it has been far more helpful towards my freedom, wholeness and recovery to face that truth.  As painful as it is, realizing that my mother excused her behaviour, sometimes even illegal behaviour because she was selfish and put herself first when it came to me, has been far more helpful than when I believed that she could not help the ways she acted and was not really accountable for the danger she put me in because she was ‘sick’ and that she didn’t actually have any choice about the way she behaved when it came to me.

In my early work I wrote a lot about how I came to understand that the ways I behaved and the difficulties that I had were ‘not my fault’ and that my inability to function as an emotionally healthy adult was a result of my dysfunctional and traumatic childhood.

But when it comes to my kids, I can’t use those things as an excuse to my kids. I can see how my abusive childhood ill prepared me to be a loving, healthy and emotionally balanced parent, but that doesn’t change the fact that my kids did not have the best mother I could have been and they have a right to be hurt by some of that stuff.

So although today I still feel sorry for my mother, I have to be honest with myself about the damage that she caused me with her disregard for my emotional health without looking at the dysfunctional and traumatic childhood that SHE herself had. I had to stop trying to diagnose my mother in order to ‘understand her’ because trying to understand her was part of my old survival mode that I was trying so hard to break out of.  

And the truth is that the damage caused to me wasn’t “less” because the person may have been ‘sick’.

I am not attempting to clarify this difference between narcissism and narcissistic behaviour today because of what was said on facebook; I am trying to clarify this because for 20 years I tried to recover from dissociative identity disorder, trauma and serious, continuous depressions without facing the truth about the way I had been raised as “less than” and the way that it affected me because I either believed that I really was ‘less than” or I excused the people who did the damage in the first place because of whatever ‘happened to them’ or ‘was wrong with them’. 

My old survival mode, the one that I developed in childhood, taught me to always blame myself and that ‘the problem’ always had its roots in me and that meant that if my parents actually had something ‘wrong with them’ that my defect was that I was not understanding enough.  I practiced patience and tolerance when I was being abused and mistreated. Freedom came when I learned to call a spade a spade and validate the damage that was caused to me. I threw patience and tolerance for abuse out the window along with diagnosis used to excuse perpetrators of abuse, neglect and trauma, so that I could stop this cycle of abuse and take my life back from the abusers and controllers.  My childhood survival mode no longer serves me as it did when I was a child without a choice so I needed to find a way to go forward with a new view of the real truth.

Narcissism is not my mother’s issue although as I said she has narcissistic tendencies when it comes to me, but it is not my concern anymore what her problem is. All I know is that when I put into words that all I really wanted was mutual respect, she choose not to grant me that and I love myself enough today to decide NOT to tolerate the disrespectful way that she regarded and disregarded me with anymore.  My mother believes that ‘entitlement’ when it comes to me, is her right as a parent and there is nothing that I can do about that when it comes to her. But I DO have a choice when it comes to me.

For the sake of further clarity, I am not saying that some of the readers here don’t have genuinely narcissistic parents.  I am not asking anyone to stop calling their parents narcissists; please feel free to call either or both of your parents a “Narcissist” here in EFB. (I am just saying that through my own investigation about narcissistic parents and narcissism, that diagnosis doesn’t actually apply to my mother.) I know that these people exist and how difficult it is to draw the necessary boundaries. Keep in mind however that the bottom line is still the same; nothing excuses the damage they caused and the damage must be validated (at least by you yourself) before healing takes place.

There are very few people who have genuine narcissism and there is a big difference between narcissism and narcissistic. Please share your thoughts about this subject and please keep in mind what I have said about the bottom line here. It was so easy to go down the rabbit trail leading no-where when I was stuck trying to figure out what was wrong with “them” instead of sticking to what happened to me in order to validate the damage.

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet

I have been told that EFB and the info here is priceless; but for me it has a price. Please consider making a donation to help cover my expenses. Thanks! (there is a donate button in the right side bar above.)

For related posts see highlighted links throughout the  body of the post.

More Related Posts: Survival Mode and an Alternate View of Narcissism  and Shifting my Thinking On the Journey to Overcoming Emotional Damage

Don’t forget to download your copy of the free guide to getting unstuck; just fill out the form under the picture at the top of the right hand sidebar here in this site and you will be sent a confirmation email~ as soon as you confirm your request, you will receive the download link for the guide! I am going to start a discussion on the info in the guide soon! ~ Darlene

though the road may be hard there is light..

 What if My Mother or Father Dies Before We Resolve our Relationship?

“I used to worry that my mother or father might die before we ever have any kind of understanding or resolution between us. As I grew in understanding about the truth and got to the bottom root of all the dysfunction, I was set free from that fear.” ~ Darlene Ouimet

It is one thing for me to worry that my parents might die, but it is a whole other insulting thing when people ask me how I will FEEL if my parents die and they ask it as a judgement question; a judgement against me. It’s all in the voice infliction; the tone they use and I used to react to that tone in the way that I reacted to it when I was a kid. That tone was meant to snap me back to compliant and ‘respectful’ and it worked on me. My “guilt, shame and self-blame button” was very sensitized.

 People share with me all the time how folks throw the following statement and question at them; “your father/mother is getting old and is in poor health, how are you going to feel if he/she dies?”  My response to this question is; “what does his or her health have to do with the reason that I don’t communicate with my parents?”  My parents had their whole lives to make a positive difference when it came to me. They made their choices, and apparently through the grid of how these type of statements are meant to be taken, my parents choices are acceptable but my choice NOT to put up with abusive and disrespectful disregarding treatment is NOT acceptable? That is insane.  It’s like people are so brainwashed by this whole thing that they don’t even realize how stupid it sounds to be told to accept abuse/neglect/disrespect just because ‘they’ are ‘family’.

I wonder why no one ever asks parents estranged from their kids “how are you going to feel if your son or daughter dies?” Judging by the way my parents act, they won’t feel anything.  

There are laws in place to protect children from some of the things that happened to me. Why are my parents exempt from those laws? Why is it up to me to put their minds at ease as they get closer to their final days on this earth? If I will reap what I sow, why does that saying not apply to them?

When people say “Your mother is getting old; she is sick, what if she dies?” I still fail to see what her health has to do with any of this. That question is a rabbit trail leading nowhere. Do they mean that my mother is old so I should let ‘bygones be bygones’ and forget all about it? What does one have to do with the other? What does the fact that my parents are getting older have to do with any of this? What about ME? What about what happened to me? Why doesn’t that matter? That is what I am addressing now. That is why I don’t see them; because I finally understood that I mattered ~ even if I only mattered to me. I finally mattered enough that I stood up to the way that they treated me and said “no more”.  And they refused to validate that there was ever a problem and they took the stand that the only problem was me, just as they always did. There was no place for my voice but none the less I HAVE a voice; and I have a choice too.

People will say ~”Your parents are getting old, you should give them a break”. Why doesn`t anyone ever ask my parents when they are going to give ME a break?  I understand that my parents are not admitting to anyone the reason WHY I don’t see them, or why I drew a boundary in the first place, so I can understand people not telling my parents that they should make the effort everyone thinks that I should make, but I don’t understand why people stick up for them and try to shame me, when I HAVE legitimate reasons for not seeing them. This sick and dysfunctional family system has its roots in the universal and widely accepted belief that PARENTS have rights that their children DON’T have.

Most of the time people don’t even care to hear the reasons adult children have for not seeing their parents; they just tell these adult children they are wrong. They automatically defend the parents without even hearing or caring about the reason behind the broken relationship. That is offensive.

It is dismissive and discounting. It is even more offensive when the reasons for not seeing parents ARE revealed and people still judge the adult child to be the one in the wrong. That is what this “what if your parents die” question is about. It is about parental rights and entitlement ~ something that YOU as their child don’t have in a dysfunctional family system.  People are so afraid that if they ‘hear you’ and validate your reasons for not having relationship with your parents, or for going no contact, that they might have to think about the dysfunctional relationships they have with their parents or even worse, with their grown kids. So often parents equate regarding their children as equally valuable with giving up their power and control over them. (and If giving up their power and control in favor of embracing equal value is something that they are not willing to consider doing, they insist on going down rabbit holes and changing the subject, always turning it back on the child, rather than giving their child a chance to be heard.)

Why do the controlling and abusive people have all the ‘human rights?’ When am I going to have the right to be treated with respect? What about me? It’s time that we stopped seeing the question “what about me” as selfish and self-centered! Why are these abusive and disrespectful people MORE valid than I am? When am I going to be VALID? And the answer to that question for me was “WHEN I DECIDED THAT I AM”

Something I had to realize and a big part of my healing process was that I am valid and that I have rights too. And I have the right to be treated with love and respect.  If my parents are getting old or if either of them is sick, that doesn’t change the fact that I have rights and it doesn’t change the facts about the way that I was treated by them in the past. They are not sorry. They don’t acknowledge the abuse. They never wanted to change or tried to change. So why is it up to me to be there for them when they were never there for me? (and although I am well aware that they fed and clothed me, they housed me, they took care of my physical needs, SO WHAT?? They decided to have a baby, legally that is the least that they HAVE to do.)  This whole subject is just another great example of the power differential between parents and children and however ‘socially acceptable’ it is, it is still wrong. I have equal value even if I am the only one in the world who sees that truth.

Just because so many people including my family don’t validate my equality, doesn’t mean I am wrong about it or that I don’t in fact have it. I do; we all do.  Each of us, every single human being has equal value.  I am not the one who is wrong for deciding that I was finally going to validate MY equal rights and value.

If my parents die before there is any resolution followed by reconciliation it isn’t because I didn’t try. I tried my whole life.

Please share your thoughts, feelings and fears around this subject of what if my parents die before there is resolution. The most common questions asked in this website and through private email are about the connection between healing and dysfunctional family issues. I answer several of them in the free guide available for download in the top right side bar here.

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time

Darlene Ouimet

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This article is linked to related posts, they are highlighted and in bold print.

Other Related posts ~ Emotionally unavailable Father the Message of Passive Abuse

Abusers who blame Victims and the People who support them

I was innocent

I have written about how my mother accused me of flirting with her boyfriend’s when I was only a young teenage girl. I have expressed the pain of being accused of causing one of her boyfriends to come into my bedroom in the night and how it was communicated to me by my mother that I must have done something to send him the message that I wanted him to… and that I ‘invited him’ by some action that I wasn’t aware of. I have expressed the terror of “causing this to happen again” that I lived with for so long after that, because I was not protected or believed and instead I was blamed.  And soon after that it was as though my mother saw me as a threat to HER after her, which makes sense if she really believed that I HAD done something to attract him even though I was an innocent teenager and a victim of his assault. By the time I was 15 my mother was accusing me of acting inappropriately with her men.

But there was another consequence to that event that I have not written about; my mother flirted with my boyfriends. It was very confusing to me when my mother expressed inappropriate interest in some of the boys in my life. She said inappropriate things to them. She acted in a way that confused me, embarrassed me and hurt me. I felt powerless and stunned ~ I can’t even express everything about HOW it made me feel when my mother did this stuff. I still don’t have the words.

The first time I heard the expression ‘Cougar’ as a description for a mature woman who goes after young men, I cringed. The though repulsed me and I felt creeped out. In my mind’s eye I felt like I was physically trying to push something away from me. 

As is common for me when a new ‘reminder of the past pops up” I thought those feelings of disgust that I had had something to do with me…that perhaps I needed to check my actions in case I was acting like a cougar, but I quickly realized that if this expression had existed when I was a teenager, my mother may have been called a cougar. She certainly fit the description of one. That little fact was the actual trigger of my reaction to the word and concept of what a “Cougar” is. My mother may have been a cougar.

I started to recall the feelings that came up for me back then when my mother acted flirty towards my male friends. What a terrible feeling it was to feel ‘threatened’ by my own mother; to feel afraid that my own mother might try to get something going on with one of my boyfriends or with one of my friends that was 25 years younger than her.  I can’t even label the feelings in a way that sits right with me; I don’t know if I felt ‘jealous’ ~ but I suppose that whatever that feeling is, it is related to jealousy in the way that I was afraid that she was trying to take my romantic interest away from me or that she wanted to have a romance of her own with MY guy. I don’t think that type of jealously is something that is normal for a daughter to feel about her mother. I think it is caused by the actions of the mother.

I felt ‘uncertain’ about my own mother’s intentions towards my boyfriends. It’s so odd, and it isn’t easy to explain. I felt ‘powerless’ and perhaps that was her intent; to remind me that in all situations, and even when it comes to MY boyfriends, she wanted to remind me that I WAS powerless. She wanted to remind me that she is the queen, the god and that she is always in control of whatever was going on in my life. My mother seemed to have to remind me that she could make me or break me. She had to make sure that I always knew that I was not ever going to be as important as her and that no matter what, she could take whatever happiness that I had. She had to remind me that she owned me and that she held ALL the power.

My own mother was ‘competing with me’ in the dating arena to feel her own power.  What a sick way to feel better about herself and to build her own ego up. What a sick way for her to validate her own attractiveness.  At my expense; she invalidated me, she walked over me in order to feel better about herself. And that is not at all related to parental love. That kind of sick treatment towards a daughter is toxic.

I don’t know what was worse, the feeling of embarrassment, that my mother was flirting with my friends, or the awkward “not knowing how to respond or act” feeling.  I still remember not even knowing how to get my head around the idea that when I was 17 my mother was flirting with one of my 20 year old friends.  And he was awkward at first, but then he started flirting back. It was horrifying. I was so scared that they were going to hook up later.

When I was 18 years old my mother flirted with my boyfriend. She sat on his lap and put her arms around his neck and said some flirty stuff to him.  I remember how ‘helpless’ she made me feel. I felt frozen and powerless, unable to react, unable to STOP her or to stand up to her. I was unable to confront her. I was shut down and reminded that I didn’t matter.  Even my boyfriend was not ‘off limits’ when it came to her.

I didn’t want to ‘feel’ as though I couldn’t ‘trust’ my own mother, it just felt so ‘wrong’ but what do you do when your mother does stuff like that? How was I supposed to feel? I couldn’t even put a name on those feelings. I was confused by her actions. I was shocked. I was uncomfortable and embarrassed. It was awkward.

But I didn’t have the words to confront her about it because she was my mother. How could my own mother be ‘a cougar’ when it came to MY boyfriend? My boyfriend and I didn’t even discuss it. It was one of those things that just got swept under the carpet where it grew and festered, destroying and corroding the already difficult and damaged toxic relationship that I had with my mother.

What kind of mother does that? What kind of mother has to send that kind of message to her own daughter? For years I asked myself what it was about me that caused my mother to treat me the way that she did. I wondered what it was about me that caused her to have so little regard for my feelings.

Today I realize that my mother’s feelings towards me were not about me; they were about her. The fact that she regarded me as competition when it came to her boyfriends was not about me, or anything that I did, it was about her.  The fact that my toxic mother accused me of attracting her boyfriend into my room was not about me, it was about her. The way that my sick mother saw me as a threat to her, was not about me it was about her. The way that she communicated to me that I could never measure up to her was not about me… It was always about her…

Today I realize that it wasn’t about me. And the bottom line is that was the problem in the first place… nothing was ever about me.

Please share your thoughts. This post relates to all actions that discount and disrespect the daughter or son in the parent/child relationship. These feelings and the message communicated by the parent can be communicated in many other ways besides the way that I have highlighted here.

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time,

Darlene Ouimet

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Related Posts ~ The artilce about the night my mothers boyfriend came into my bedroom

Dysfunctional Mother Daughter relationship Category

Pure Truth

“When someone is unrelentingly critical of you, always finds fault, can never be pleased, and blames you for everything that goes wrong, it is the insidious nature and cumulative effects of the abuse that do the damage. Over time, this type of abuse eats away at your self-confidence and sense of self-worth, undermining any good feelings you have about yourself and about your accomplishments.” The Emotionally Abusive Relationship by Beverly Engle

Although this quote is aimed at the victim for the purpose of exposing how the self-esteem gets torn down, the first time I read this quote I thought of my mother and how much she said that I hurt her; she always said that I was the problem and that I did this to her ~ that I tore HER down;

“Darlene, you are so critical”

“Darlene, I can never do anything right in your eyes, I am always wrong”.

“Darlene, there is no pleasing you”

And overtime I believed that my words, actions and behavior (although I could not figure out what I was doing that was so offending) had eaten away at her self-confidence and harmed her sense of self-worth and undermined any good feelings that she ever had about herself and her accomplishments. I believed everything she said about me. I believed that I was the critical one and that I was the one doing all the damage.

When I became an adult she adjusted her accusations. She used a different voice infliction when she said things like;

 “Darlene you always were so hard on me”.  This was to remind me that I was “always” this way and always the problem.

“Darlene I have always been afraid that you would take your kids away from me and use them as a weapon against me”.  She said this as a kind of reverse psychology or a warning that if I did it, she had predicted that I would do it because I am a mean and spiteful daughter who has always done mean and spiteful things to her. And I set out to prove that I would never do something ‘like that’.

This is the brainwashing; this is what happened that caused me to try harder with her and to try so hard to ‘understand her.’ I tried to reassure her, to soothe her and to be the daughter she always wanted.

And when I started to look at the way SHE treated me in this profoundly dysfunctional mother daughter relationship we had, I became aware that now I was saying some of the same critical type things about her too.  When I started to look at the truth about how toxic our mother daughter relationship was, I felt guilty because I believed that I was being critical of my mother, and I had tried so hard all my life to prove her wrong about me! In the first couple years of my healing process I kept saying stuff like “well in all fairness to my mother, I was not the perfect daughter because of…. And I would list my faults. Just like I was trained to do; I was trained to look at me, always to look at me and my faults and to take the blame. Looking at my faults is not such a bad thing, but the lack of mutuality in our relationship is a ridiculous thing. This started when I was a kid and I had been convinced mostly through the actions and results of those actions at the hands of the adults in my life, that I was the failure and that if I could be different, THEN I would be loved. There was no accountability on the part of the adults!

Today I refer to that thought process as “the spin”. I would spin around and around in my mind about why my mother was justified in her criticisms and judgments of ME which I somehow believed nullified my judgments of her. I could never validate that something really was wrong with the way she treated me, because I was so convinced that I was at least as much of a problem for her as she was for me. I didn’t see how she was “the parent”, or how she expected me to be more responsible for the success of our relationship than she was. I didn’t look at HOW I learned to have a relationship in the first place. I didn’t realize that my self-esteem was never put in place because my parents didn’t put it in place. I didn’t consider for one minute that the truth was that it had been up to them to give me a healthy emotional foundation in the first place.  I had learned to LOOK at myself in a critical way and to never look at anyone else in a critical way. There is something really warped about that.

In the healing process, this is a huge stick point for many people.  In reading the quote I used above; “When someone is unrelentingly critical of you, always finds fault, can never be pleased, and blames you for everything that goes wrong, it is the insidious nature and cumulative effects of the abuse that do the damage. Over time, this type of abuse eats away at your self-confidence and sense of self-worth, undermining any good feelings you have about yourself and about your accomplishments.” The Emotionally Abusive Relationship by Beverly Engle ~ My first reaction was that I had been the one who was hurting my mother with MY criticism.  I had effectively been taught and groomed to turn the spotlight on myself.

Statements like the examples I used above and statements like “Oh you think you are so perfect” or “sorry I’m not perfect” are actually deflections meant to make me believe that the problem was my “unreasonable expectations” of her; I picture my mother as wearing wonder woman type shiny wrist cuffs to deflect the statements I made to her, BACK on to me. She didn’t hear me, she had no intention of listening to me, she just found a way to put the responsibility of our relationship back on me.

When I was around 33 years old, just after my second baby was born, my mother told me all the things that I had ever done that had ‘disappointed her’ and all of my faults and failures and when I wanted to say a few things about how she made me feel, she threatened to have a breakdown and reminded me that she was too fragile to listen to me. That was the first time I had ever really tried to stand up to her and when she threatened to go home, I said go and she did.  

There was NO communication when I tried to sort any of this out. She had no intention of actually discussing any of it with me. She used statements to deflect whatever it was that I had to say causing me to look at me again, instead of at her. She was very efficient at getting me to see how I caused the problem for her and never the other way around.

Sorting this out was really hard. It was extremely valuable for me to learn to examine the motives on both sides; My motive was not to hurt her. My motive was not to be right, but to be heard, to have a say, to have some impact on the relationship. My motive for approaching her with anything that was bothering me was to improve our relationship. My motive was loved based both for her and for me. Her motive was more about being right. Her motive was about being in control. She didn’t want to communicate with me, she didn’t allow me to have impact on her life, she didn’t see any need to look at HER part in the relationships or why it was so difficult between us. Her motive was ultimately NOT love based. Her motive was not what was best for me and ultimately not what was best for her either.

When I wanted to talk to my mother about our dysfunctional toxic mother daughter relationship it wasn’t to fight back or to fight to have a voice. It wasn’t so that I could have control over her. My motive was the desire for a BETTER relationship for both of us. A mutually respectful relationship. I told her that I could no longer accept the way she treated me. That was love for both of us; I had learned that self-love does not accept abusive disrespectful treatment. I had also learned that putting up with the way she treated me communicated to her that it was okay for her to do it, and letting her treat me like I didn’t matter was not loving for her either.  We don’t put up with that treatment out of LOVE for the people doing it; we put up with it out of fear of the consequences if we draw a boundary against it.

All I did was decide that our toxic mother daughter relationship problems were not MY fault.

Then I decided that since I realized it wasn’t my fault, I wasn’t taking the blame for it anymore.

Then I drew a boundary which bluntly stated was; “either you stop treating me in this disrespectful way or I will not have this relationship with you”.

She picked “not having a relationship with me”. OUCH. But at least I knew the truth. It was easier to move forward when I knew the truth.  It wasn’t exactly the validation that I wanted but it was validating to know my suspicions were true.

At the end of the day I know that my mother is not a happy person. I also know now that it isn’t MY FAULT.

The hurt little girl part of me thinks that my mother must be happy now that “her problem’ which was me, is no longer in her life. But the healthy adult part of me thinks that my mother could have been much happier if she embraced the idea of having a ‘real relationship’ with me. A mutually respectful relationship based on equal value instead of rejecting me because I stood up to the existing toxic mother daughter relationship we had. But as she always said to me ~ she made her bed…..

OUCH…

Please share your thoughts about being taught that you were the one who failed and if you somehow believed it. Are you out of ‘the fog’ and ‘the spin’ or are you still coming out of them. It’s okay to be IN the process.  I had to be IN the process to get to the other side; Looking forward to your comments!

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet

For more posts about Toxic Mother Daughter Relationships scroll through the mother daughter category, (button at the top of the page)

Related Post~ “Emotionally Unavailable Father and The message of Passive Abuse”

Recently someone wrote, telling me that because she stood up to her dysfunctional family and drew a boundary, she is now missing out on ‘the good things in life’. The first question that came to my mind was “what good things are you missing out on because you drew a boundary?” In my coaching practice, the homework would be: Define ‘good things’ ~ what are ‘the good things’? What do you feel that you are missing now, that you had before? Why did you have to draw a boundary in the first place?

And the answers to these types of questions are always very revealing. When I answered these questions for myself I found out some of the lies that I believed and how they were rooted in the shaky foundation of my belief system.

For most people including me, those ‘good things’ that had to do with my dysfunctional family were a fantasy.  I ‘wished’ that I had a loving family. The reality of those ‘good things’ was something very different from how I fantasised it was or hoped that it could one day be.

Christmas dinner and family holidays or celebrations were stressful for me and this continued on with when I married into my husband’s family too. Every family thing I went to was a reminder of how insignificant that I was even when at the time I wasn’t able to articulate how those occasions made me feel.

The boundary that I drew with my father was different than the boundaries that I drew when it came to over (more obvious) abuse. A couple of years ago I told my father that seeing him was a reminder of how little he knew about me and how disinterested he was in me as an individual. The way he disregards me is a constant reminder of how little I matter to him.  It has always been that way.

My father is passive abusive. His emotional abuse is very covert.  Mostly he just doesn’t care, doesn’t listen when I talk to him, doesn’t know anything about me, my life or my kids because he doesn’t care to know and he doesn’t listen to anyone who tries to tell him. To the general public, (and according to my siblings) my father is regarded as this ‘nice’ guy and he is never violent, never mean and never hurtful with his words, but the truth is that his relationship style is dismissive and disinterested all of which is very hurtful. I spent many years in childhood and in adulthood ‘begging’ (in all kinds of ways) my emotionally abusive father to notice me. The fact that he didn’t was and is very hurtful.  There is a very loud message that is delivered to me when I am disregarded.  The message is that I don’t matter, that I am not important, that I am not worth listening to and that I don’t have anything to contribute to his life. My father is emotionally unavailable, and that is very hurtful. Love is an action and love doesn’t damage self-esteem. Love doesn’t define a ‘loved one’ as insignificant.

After years of trying to tell my passive abusive father that his constant cutting me off whenever I tried to tell him about me, and that his lack of interest in my life was a problem for me ~ and due to the fact that there wasn’t any change on his part, I gave up; I finally realized that he wasn’t going to change.

Once I accepted that my emotionally unavailable father wasn’t going to change, I had a choice to make. I could just accept his treatment of me and feel frustrated and hurt every time I saw him or I could decide that I didn’t want to accept the way he treats me anymore.  I made choice number 2 because it was the only choice that supported my newfound self-value. I deserve better than he can or will give me.

To hear my father tell this story he has no idea why I “suddenly stopped talking to him” although I explained it on the phone in the same detail that I have written in this post.  I had to realize that the fact that he denies ‘understanding’ my explanation or even ever having heard it is also about him.

When I realized that being around my emotionally abusive father was a constant hurtful reminder of how devalued I was by him I began to realize that the same was true for all the people in my life who by their actions towards me, showed that they didn’t care about ME.   Even though with all those other people I had already drawn my boundaries much sooner than I had with my passive abusive and emotionally unavailable father, I had not actually realized that part of why I felt so anxious in their company was due to the same devaluing and dismissive treatment of me. Only the details were different. The action parts of the word “love” and the word “respect” were missing.

BUT the message was the same! The message is that I don’t matter, that I am not important, I am not worth listening to and that I don’t have anything to contribute. That message is like a death sentence. That message kept me struggling with depressions my entire life; feeling like I was being held under water and fighting for every breath. That message about me made me try harder and harder to BE whatever and whoever it was they wanted me to be, all the while never realizing that that message spoke louder about THEM than it did about me.

I realized that although other abusive toxic and dysfunctional relationships that I had with other family were much more overt, (obvious)  that the passive abusive nature of my father, the frustration was the same! Being around those people was a constant reminder of how insignificant that I was to them.   No wonder I didn’t like family get-togethers.  I couldn’t put it into words when I was in the fog, but when I came out of the fog, it hit me like a ton of bricks; being around most of those people was a constant painful reminder of how regarded me as ‘less’ than themselves and how they used many opportunities to make that point clear to me. Love doesn’t damage self-esteem. There were no ‘good things’ about that!

I am actually a very social person. I love having people over for dinner, or going out with friends. I love being with people! In my relationships today, I am not discounted. I am not ignored. I am not ‘cut off’ mid-sentence because no one is interested in what I am saying. No one rolls their eyes at me to indicate what I am saying is ‘stupid’.  No one pretends that they didn’t hear me to indicate that what I am saying is too dumb to even validate that they heard me.

Real relationship gives everyone equal value. Real relationship, healthy, functional and equal value based relationship is co-creative and mutually respectful. Those are the good things! I didn’t have them before when it came to my own family or with my in-laws but today I have choices and I exercise my right to have a choice in relationships. I don’t have to accept unacceptable treatment or disregard or any kind of overt or covert abuse that ultimately serves to make me feel bad about myself. 

Please share your thoughts about the reality of relationships. Have you ever noticed that you have not been regarded in action part of love and respect? Abuse isn’t always aggressive and very often it is hidden, (covert) which is much harder to see than more obvious (overt) abuse is. It was in coming out of this fog and into the light of the truth that helped me so much on my quest for freedom and wholeness.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This week A woman lodged a complaint in paypal asking for her donation to the EFB website to be refunded. She told paypal that she did not get the service that she paid for because I didn’t answer her comment. I refunded her donation however I want to state that donations are NOT for that purpose. Donations help to pay the expenses~ tech support, security and back up costs but they are not payment for my responses on comments nor have I ever received enough in donations to have any sort of an income from the work that I do here. The emerging from broken blog is a free resource however it isn’t cost free for me to run it therefore donations to offset those costs are still very much appreciated.  As much as I want to answer everyone, due to the high volume of comments and email that I get I am no longer able to answer them all. ~Darlene

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time

Darlene Ouimet

For related posts see the highlighted phrases in bold throughout this post. One more related post is “Why Setting Boundaries is NOT as easy as it sounds”

Defining Sexual Abuse and Devine Sex by Pam Witzemann

Pam Witzemann

As a teenager, I wasn’t able to protect myself from sexual abuse because I had no definition of sexual abuse, other than violent force such as rape. I wasn’t able to define my own sexual abuse, until I understood what human sexual relationships were meant to be, what I call sacred or divine sex.

I grew up in the sixties and came of age during the seventies. As a child, I received many conflicting and confusing messages about sex. In those days, most people considered it the female’s duty to enforce sexual morality. I was taught that men really couldn’t control themselves sexually and it was up to me to “say no and mean no”.

I don’t think I ever heard the term “sexual abuse” as a child and even as a teenager I didn’t know there were adults who wanted to have sex with children. I was even taught that it was physically impossible to rape a woman and this was demonstrated to me, by my father, with a moving coke bottle and a broom handle. He was drunk at the time, as my parents always were when giving me my weekly Friday night lecture on sex and on life in general.

I know that alcohol distorted my concepts about sex and sexual relationships, as it distorted my understanding of almost everything. I was taught to believe that even though a woman ‘couldn’t be raped’, if she fought hard enough, women did often accuse men of rape as a cover for giving in to sex. I was taught when that happened and a girl lost her virginity, she no longer had any value to offer men and became “used merchandise”.

When I was fourteen and intimidated into submitting to sex with my girlfriend’s older brother, it never occurred to me that I’d been raped. I’d said “no” but wasn’t able to enforce “no” and in my mind, I was bad, I didn’t fight hard enough and I was “used merchandise”. I no longer had any value. No other future but marriage was ever presented to me, in a serious way, and I believed my life was over. I knew the way my parents taught me about sex felt creepy and I hated those Friday nights at the kitchen table, but I wouldn’t be able to define that experience (and other inappropriate expressions of their own sexuality) as emotional incest, until about one year ago. I blamed myself for the rape that took my virginity, until I was forty-nine years old.

My parents taught me a very distorted version of the repressive, sexual morality that was common, at that time. However, the sexual revolution was taking place, too and it proved to be even more confusing and filled with more mixed messages than what my parents taught me. It seemed that everyone was experimenting with new kinds of sexual relationships and birth control made “free love” possible. It also, made it very easy for adult men to prey on young, teenaged girls. In a way, it was a relief to me, at nearly sixteen, to think that maybe, being used merchandise wasn’t so bad. However, I still felt deep-down that I was bad and the way I was taught about sex and my first experience with it, did nothing to help me construct healthy boundaries around sex.

I didn’t communicate with people very well. I was very shy and in a lot of emotional pain. I was sick a lot as a small child and spent my entire third year of life, sick and in bed because my parents neglected to take me to a doctor soon enough. I wasn’t able to start school until I was seven and I was the size of a small four-year-old. I didn’t fit in with the other children because my life experience was so different from most children. I did have siblings and they were friends. They were out riding horses and playing together, while I was kept inside in bed.

My emotional responses were often, inappropriate because I learned them from drunks. Even now, there is an alone-ness about me that is just a part of who I am. At sixteen, there were many avenues of emotional need for a child predator to use against me, no force was necessary. Making me complicit in the abuse insured my acceptance of it and my silence.

The sexual revolution and the drugs that I’d begun using to numb my emotional pain and temporarily fill the void of alone-ness that never stopped aching, made me even more vulnerable to men who liked to have sex with young, teenaged girls. I was also, so small at sixteen that I looked to be no older than twelve. I was a child predator’s dream girl and at sixteen I became a sex-toy. I was coerced with flattery that made me feel like a woman, a woman with value, but my value was in being a toy. I was plied with a route of escape from my abusive home and was offered food and shelter. I was told that I was loved. I was given all the drugs I wanted and they helped me do those things that I really didn’t want to do. I had no idea that what was happening was sexual abuse because my life experience taught me that abuse was sex. I had nothing different to compare it to.

Soon, I became an avid abuser of myself.

There is one thing I know from being an abused child. It is possible to know in your heart that certain treatment is creepy and vile, even shameful when you can’t understand it with your mind. My life as a sex-toy ended when I was a little over seventeen but I carried those shameful, creepy, vile feelings, as my own, for many decades. There was too much pain there to cope with and there are times that I wonder if I’d really known how little I was loved and de-valued as a child, would I have survived to become an adult? Would I have been able to maintain any level of sanity? Somehow, even with all that was done to me that should have stripped every measure of child-like innocence away from me, I maintained a certain level of innocence and gullibility that served as an inner shield, that kept the real-me from utter destruction.

Still, I was shattered into a million pieces and at seventeen, I really had no idea who I was. Like a broken mirror, I reflected back in shards whatever someone else wanted to see. Now, I’m not sure if anyone had ever really seen ME but only recognized me as an object for their personal gratification. I was broken before I ever became.

I tried to end it all at eighteen but failed. I lived to plunge even deeper into drug abuse and at nineteen, I was homeless, weighed 75 pounds, and was sick with what would be diagnosed twenty years later, as hepatitis c. I drug myself back home, at that point.  When I found faith, I found a reason to live but I buried my past alive, as I struggled to be someone else and build a different life.

I was successful in hiding what I’d been for many years. I did everything I could to disassociate from who I was before and the life I’d lived. My husband is a good man and he loved me, as I was never loved by anyone before. We’re a good team and we built a good life together, but I was haunted by my past, dogged by shame and confused about my past behavior. I never once, thought to blame anyone but myself for anything that had happened.

Even though I learned about sexual abuse, I never applied that knowledge to my own childhood experience. I blamed everything on my parent’s alcohol abuse and my drug abuse. I was blind to the deeper issues that led to the substance abuse and I buried the sexual abuse deep inside and locked it away with a little girl’s understanding. It wasn’t until my children were teenagers and I was faced with issues in my own parenting, that I was able to define my first sexual experiences as abuse. I now realize that the child abuse I suffered was horrific and it is amazing that I lived to tell about it, at all.

I wish I could say that things are better for young women now than they were for me, but I can’t. Society still sends mixed, confusing messages about the boundaries around sexual relationships. Today, anything goes and just as I only understood violent force as rape, people are still blind to what sexual abuse really is. Age of consent is arbitrary and though I want it maintained as a legal protection, sexual abuse is about violating the most sacred, intimate boundaries of another person.

Sexual abuse denies the humanity of the victim. Sexual abuse is using violence, manipulation, intimidation, bribery, authority, or any other method to force another to open themselves, completely to be used by another. Sexual abuse violates the natural intent of sexual relationships, which is the bonding of two people, in mutual love and respect, in an act of love. Sex is meant to be a divine experience.

Sexual abuse steals the completeness of that divine experience from a child, forever. In fact, that ideal of a sexual relationship is all but lost in our culture, today. Our society is sexually insane (by the legal definition of an inability to tell right from wrong) and it is no wonder that children sold for sexual abuse, is the third largest black market in the world. What happened to me was horrific but it is mild compared to what is happening to many children now.

To rebuild my life, I had to carefully, redefine my understanding of what sex is meant to be. That process ended with a mindful definition of sexual abuse that is nothing like the old, repressive, Victorian morality of the past and nothing like the boundary-less sexuality of the present. Sex is to be enjoyed within healthy boundaries that maintain respect for each individual. It should be a divine experience, an expression of love, the kind of love that is necessary for raising and nurturing children.

 Sex should never for one person’s entertainment or sexual gratification. It should never be an expression of power, control, or violent domination. It should never be exploited for money. Sexual abuse laws are important for punishing offenders but laws will never end sexual abuse and abuse is anything that destroys what should be a sacred experience between two people who love and respect each other.

It is the mindful construction of healthy boundaries around sexuality that will make my childhood experience of sex rare and the rare experience of divine sex, more common.

Pam Witzemann                                    

As always we invite you to share your thoughts with us on this difficult subject. Please remember that you are welcome to use any name you wish to use in the comment form and that only the name you use will be seen by others. ~ Darlene

Pam Witzemann was born in Santa Fe, NM and is married, has raised two boys and has two grandsons. Pam and her husband have had their own business for over twenty years. Pam is a painter and a writer and hopes to make these pursuits more than a hobby in her later years. Pam authors the blog Boomer Back-Beat; a place where baby boomers find inspiration in the process of aging.

 Related posts by Pam; “To be objectified is to be dehumanized”

The process of forgiving my childhood abusers (also by Pam)

I had to learn to shift my thinking in this process of overcoming the damage caused by emotional abuse. There were a few rather large shifts that I had to make in order to make progress and there was a process to shifting my thinking! It didn’t just happen overnight. 

Instead of trying to understand why ‘they’ didn’t like me or why ‘they’ didn’t love me and why I didn’t fit in and why ‘they’ treated me so badly and what was wrong with me, I started to try to understand why I kept trying.

 I started to ask myself new questions;

Although I had some suspicions that most of my relationships were not fair to me, deep down why did I believe I was the one that was wrong about everything ~ which kept me trying to fix me?  

Although I has some suspicions that there were some things my family was doing wrong, why was I so easily convinced that I was the problem in the relationship which also kept me trying to fix me?  

Why didn’t I expect to be treated the way they insisted that I treat them? 

Why did I accept such a one sided definition of love that so obviously had two very different sets of rules; a set for them and a set for me?

And as I started to ask myself different questions, I started to find different answers.

There were some levels to this process of healing from emotional damage. These levels are important to consider because each new discovery has a realization and a reaction. Very often it was the reaction to the realization that sent me backwards to the comfortable and familiar coping methods of compliance and obedience that no longer served me.

~As I began to realize that maybe I was not the biggest problem in the relationship and that perhaps there was something valid about my suspicions (labeled by others as feelings that were probably wrong) that I was always being ignored, shut up, discounted invalidated and disrespected  ~

~THEN I started to consider that perhaps I was spending too much time on thinking about how I could change me (believing that changing me would change the way they treated me) instead of thinking a bit more about the lack of equal value towards me and I started looking a little more closely at why I didn’t stand up to the ways that I was treated in a more proactive way. ~

~But as soon as I had that thought, the fear reaction came in. As soon as I seriously considered drawing a boundary, my ultimate fear of being cast away from my family without further consideration became what made me reject the thought about drawing that boundary. For years I was willing to go back to ‘trying to understand them’ and ‘trying to change me’ rather than face that fear of rejection. I was extremely afraid of the probability of their rejection as though my very life was at stake; so afraid that I was unwilling to look at truth and consider that continuing to put up with the way I was disregarded may have been worse than being rejected. When I look back on that today, that thought alone was telling. It revealed my own suspicions (what if they didn’t actually care if I was in their lives or not?) and in my still present childhood coping method I was doing everything I could not to face those suspicions.

The truth is that I was putting a ton of work into relationships with people that I knew deep down would dump me if I stood up to them and that was a horrifying realization. I had all those red flags and those warning signals telling me to comply and obey were overriding the belief that I deserved better than that. My fear of rejection was stronger than my desire to have mutually respectful relationships.

It all started in childhood when I believed that rejection is death ~ fear of rejection becomes a survival instinct.  Through that grid of understanding, it is understandable that we carry that fear of rejection from family forward with us. It is how we survived and how we coped with any kind of mistreatment as children.

My biggest fear was that if I refused to comply with their wishes and if I drew a boundary and stood up to them ~ then they would reject me. I was in that place for a while, sort of just hanging out between the longing for freedom and claiming my equal value by enforcing it in my relationships and the fear of being rejected if I did insist on being valued and respected.

But as I began to see the truth about that fear a deeper truth emerged; the deeper truth is that I was afraid of something that had already happened. Being disregarded as an equally valuable human being IS rejection.  It was through finally understanding that truth, that I was able to see things more clearly and draw self-supporting and self-valuing boundaries.

Please share your thoughts about shifting your thinking, reactions to realizations or any other thoughts you have about love and self-love, equal value, coping methods that no longer serve or coming out of the fog. I look forward to hearing from you. Remember that you may use any name you wish in the comment form and your email will not be shared. If you subscribe to comments, you must return to the blog if you wish to post an additional reply. (Replying in email will not go back to the blog post itself.)  

Exposing Truth, one snapshot at a time,

Darlene Ouimet

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