Poetry ~ Overcoming Sexual Abuse with Kate Swift
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Today I am pleased have guest poet Kate Swift’s work on my blog!
Kate Swift from the website “This Tangled Web” in the UK has written and compiled a collection of poetry. This poetry emerged out of the extreme child sexual abuse that she suffered. Kate’s poetry is deep and haunting and it gives the reader permission to talk about sexual abuse. The first step in recovery from sexual abuse is admitting it happened and talking about it. If you were not taken care of as a victim of child sexual abuse, it is important that you get help and support so that you can move beyond that devastating part of your life. I have read the book and I recommend it to anyone who has a history with sexual abuse or is close to someone who has suffered from the effects of being sexually abused.
Kate has graciously allowed me to share a poem that she wrote, with the readers of Emerging from Broken.
SHAME…NOT ME
Shame on you…for damaging me
Shame on you…for your lies and pretence
Shame on you…for your twisted world
Shame on me…NO THERE IS NO SHAME ON ME
Shame on you…for causing me to suffer so
Shame on you…for not hearing my silent screams
Shame on you…for turning your back on me
Shame on me…NO THERE IS NO SHAME ON ME
Kate Swift 2010
(this poem was used with permission)
It is so important for survivors of sexual abuse to realize that the shame does not belong to them, but to the abuser. Thank you Kate for allowing me to post this inspirational poem on my blog.
You can find more of Kate’s work on her website This Tangled Web http://www.thistangledweb.co.uk/
Kate’s book is available at the following websites;
While I am on the subject of sexual abuse, A reader sent me the following link to an article about the American Statistics regarding sexual abuse from the website Parentdish.com. I thought some of the readers here would be interested in checking that out too.
Here is that article: please click: Child Abuse by the Numbers
In truth and freedom,
Darlene Ouimet
Invalidation ~ When the Truth is not True
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- The truth will set you free
As a child, I had no understanding of why things were the way they were. I don’t think I even thought that the rest of the world was any different from my world. My parents lived in denial which stemmed from their own childhoods and the situations that they were raised in. They had organized their worlds around their own wounds and traumas and they developed their own belief systems. I would imagine that years of denial led them to raise their children in a similar way to how they were raised, expecting their children to have that fierce loyalty that they themselves developed for their parents and never questioning why.
I don’t write this blog to blame my parents for their shortcomings; I refer to them only to illustrate what happened to me in the parts that had to do with my parents. I write about how I came to be an emotional mess, constantly struggling with depression due to many different incidents, how I discovered the lies that formed my belief system and how exposing the lies enabled me to see the truth; the same truth that set me free.
I was conditioned to hold it all in. When we are children, we don’t have a choice if we have not been helped through a trauma. We just go forward from there, with the pain and the scars of the trauma. We can only learn positive self care if we are taught self care but because no one helps us through the things that happened to us, we learn to not take care of ourselves we learn not to speak about the trauma or about anything else. We don’t know the difference between what is serious abuse or what is just a person or parent in a bad mood. Everything becomes our version of “normal” We keep silent because either we have been told to keep silent, or because we have learned from experience that we will not have any impact if we do tell. We learn not to speak about our emotions, believing they are wrong and that no one will listen. If we learn that telling won’t make a difference we also learn that we are not important and we try very hard to prove that we are important. If only we believed it ourselves we wouldn’t have to prove it.
So much of this problem comes from being told who we are and who we are not and from being told who we should be and who we should not be. When we are defined by others we are invalidated as an individual and as a person. Invalid. That means NOT VALID. That is a serious thing for a human being and it can cause serious problems with emotional health, physical health self image, self worth and self esteem. One lie (one false belief about ourselves) builds on another lie and we carry the whole mess with us into our adulthoods.
The false beliefs that we have about ourselves have to be undone if we are going to have any lasting freedom from the results that manifested in our lives from being invalidated, mistreated, unloved, devalued, neglected or abused.
We have to relearn how to validate ourselves.
I had to learn how to validate myself. I had to dig into that foundation that was built on those lies, expose it and talk about it so that I could knock it down and start fresh with the truth. I had to face the fear that the situations and the people who taught me “who I was” might actually be right ~ because in facing that fear, I found out they were wrong.
The truth will set you free,
Darlene Ouimet
Note: This week I did a ten minute audio interview with Christina Enevoldsen from Overcoming Sexual Abuse ~ here is the link : how we uncover the truth.
For the article I wrote and refer to in the audio about the Dr. discovering that I was being psychologically abused ~ you can find it here: Psychological Abuse ~ how self doubt grows
Foundation of Eating Disorders and Body Issues
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My history with body issues and eating disorders goes way back to even before I was a teenager. My body issues, weight concerns, bulimia etc. have their roots in both sexual abuse and emotional abuse. I have told you about how my mother began to teach me at a very young age that my only power and value was in sexuality, which even as a young child I knew had something to do with my looks and my body. Over the years I realized that my fear of weight gain was equal to my fear of being “just the right weight” because both would result in abuse. With the belief system built on my value being in sexuality and body image, I was afraid that if I threw my image away, I would be rejected by everyone. I got a lot of approval because of my looks. At the same time I had this belief that it was my body and the fact that I was attractive, that attracted abusers. Even from a very young age I suspected that it was my body they wanted to do things to… it was my body that was being used. So I separated from my body. It seems logical when I put it that way. Eventually my body became the enemy.
What was harder to understand was that these two belief systems conflicted with each other. They were polar opposites. If I gained weight, I would be rejected, if I was the perfect weight, I would be used.
Several weeks ago I found a website called “letters to my body” and read a few of the letters that others had written there. The concept of writing a letter to my body and some of the things that other women were saying to their bodies made me realize that I too was angry at my body. I was angry as though my body did this to me. As though I didn’t ever realize that it wasn’t my body that caused the problem. These realizations are always powerful and usually can become the starting point for a new area of growth for me. This particular one was painful.
About a week after I found that website, I was sick with some kind of throat and chest thing and coughing virus for a couple weeks and was talking to transformation coach and author Kim Vazquez on facebook. I told her I was sick. She told me that whenever she is sick she asks her body what it is trying to tell her. It was funny because having just discovered that website “letters to my body” I thought it was a very cool concept to ‘talk to my body”. So later that day I decided to get very quiet, and relax you know, kind of do a meditation and as Kim suggested, I asked my body what it was trying to tell me.
The response that I got was shocking. My body didn’t hesitate. My body said “You neglect me, you devalue me, you treat me with disrespect, you expect too much from me but you don’t take proper care of me and you break your promises to me. You mistreat me and invalidate me. I don’t trust you anymore. “
I was shocked. It was true. I have not been taking care of myself physically this past 2 years. I have gained weight. I am not eating as healthy as I used to. I am not getting regular physical exercise. And even prior to that, I had some odd ways of doing physical health. My body was telling me that I was an abuser. It was saying all the things that I say to identity abusive people. My body said that I am my own abuser.
As a result of this insight, I took a good long look at my history and the way that I view my physical self and it has given me amazing insight into the relationship that I developed with myself as a result of mistreatment from others. There is so much to this whole topic when it comes to mental health recovery. Body issues and eating disorders seem to be connected to many abusive situations and events, so I have decided to make eating disorders and body issues a regular feature in this blog. I welcome your feedback, contributions and comments.
Exposing Truth… one snapshot at a time,
Darlene Ouimet
Why Me? Wrong Answers to Abuse Recovery Questions
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Why Me?
I read the following quote on twitter and it really bugged me: If a person who went through domestic violence asks you “Why me?” then answer; “you’ve been put on this Earth to help others who went through the same thing.”
I think not.
This ticks me off because I used to believe this kind of thing; I accepted it as the truth, but today I see it for the skewed way of thinking that it is. If I believe this saying, then I have to believe that there was some grand plan for my life that included me being mistreated, abused, invalidated and devalued. If I believed this then I would believe that abuse is and mistreatment is for character building and actually has a place in our world.
I was not abused because the universe, fate, God or some other higher power had some amazing plan for my life. A plan that included me being beaten down and squished, devalued, mistreated, abused and invalidated for the first 40 or so years of my life, so that I could emerge from the rubble, bleeding and broken and become this fantastic encouragement to the world and make a huge difference. I think not.
I can use my adversities and the struggles that I had to overcome to encourage others, yes, but that isn’t why they happened. We all want the answer to the question “why did this happen to me?” The answer that this was so that we can use our adversity to help others ~ is just the best answer many of us can come up with, but I often think that the reason we come up with that answer is because we don’t want to look at the real answer. People, sick people, abused us psychologically, mentally and emotionally, physically, or sexually ~ the point isn’t how it happened; the point is that it did happen. Sometimes these people were our parents, OR we are afraid to look at the possibility that our parents knew something was wrong and didn’t do anything about it or didn’t look farther into it. The truth will set you free, but we are deathly afraid of it. Some of us were beaten and lived in horrific situations of domestic violence, often daily. Even witnessing abuse is terribly traumatic. I can’t believe that this was “meant to be”.
Some of us were sexually abused and physically abused and completely invalidated in our own homes by people we trusted, people that were supposed to take care of us and we lived in fear, guilt, shame and confusion. Others of us suffered sexual abuse by a neighbor, an uncle, aunt or grandparent, and we were coerced into not telling. I can’t accept that this is because God had a plan to use that situation to better the rest of the world in the future. That would be almost as bad as the abuse itself.
Some of us were called stupid, selfish, useless, ugly and all other manner of abusive and devaluing statements against our personhood. Some of us were told called liars, trouble makers, and told that our feelings were “wrong”. ~ do you really want to accept that this was “all God’s plan” for your life? What kind of God would organize the world that way? No wonder there is so much controversy about God. No wonder people hate the very concept of a God. But it isn’t God that decided this would be the way, it is Man who blames God for the outcome of the world.
All of these types of abuse ~ physical abuse and domestic violence, sexual abuse and psychological abuse, and even witnessing any of these kinds of abuse attack us at the core of who we are. They rip away at our individuality and our personhood; they force us to try and deal with things we have no way to comprehend how to deal with; they tear down our chances of productivity and cause damage that we so often don’t realize was the cause as we grow up in years, resulting in depressions, physical illness, mental breakdowns and mental health problems, low self esteem, failure to thrive in life, oh the list goes on.
Every so often I go on a rant. This was one of those times. Thank you for reading; I would love to hear your comments!
Exposing Truth, one snapshot at a time;
Darlene Ouimet
Patient Rights by Mental Health Advocate Nikki Stone
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- Nikki Stone
Please join me in welcoming Nikki Stone, Mississippi Mental Health Advocate, as she shares a personal experience of being devalued harassed, neglected and psychologically abused by the mental health system and the resulting breakdown. ~ I hope that you will share your own stories and reactions in the comments section. Darlene
Patient Rights ~ by Nikki Stone
In my own experience with the mental health facilities in the state of Mississippi I was not very well informed of my own personal rights. It was not until I took the Peer to peer course in 2008 that NAMI provides that I realized that I have rights first as a person needing medical treatment and second as a patient.
When I was first diagnosed with Bipolar 1 Disorder in 2003 I did not get a word of encouragement about treatment or the essential tools of recovery. Instead I was told to meet with a group of others who had just been diagnosed, like myself. We sat and listened while a nurse went into details what the medications could do to us. To me it was traumatic and to add to it I had no community support.
The next day I was ushered in to see the doctor who had never met me before but by the time I walked thru the door to the makes-shift office she already had a treatment plan. The reason I was there in the first place was to adjust my medicine, which could not been done as an out patient. I had agreed to go and was prepared to receive treatment; we could not get the medication to help alleviate the deep depression on outpatient treatment. At that point I sat and listen to the doctor but when she got thru telling me what she wanted to put me on (which would have made me an absolute zombie) I knew I had to take a stand for myself so I refused the treatment and told her I wanted to sign myself out of the hospital.
During the whole 24 hour ordeal I was never given a hospital bracelet and they continuously got my name wrong even though I had written it on all the forms etc. I remember at one point sitting in the day room and there was a woman sitting near me. She and I had talked and she asked me if I would do her a favor. Not sure of what the favor was yet I told her I would. She asked me to take a look at her hip that it was bothering her. As she lowered her jogging pants slightly I looked at her hip and it look like hamburger meat I asked her what happen and she said they had been giving her a lot of shots. To be honest in my opinion the veins in her hip looked as though they were destroyed. I was able to leave after a 24 hour ordeal of harassment and neglect. By the time I got home I was a basket case seven months later in January of 2007 I had a nervous breakdown and the nervous breakdown caused damage to my frontal lobe area of my brain, I now have petit mal seizures.
This could have totally destroyed me but it hasn’t; I am now an active Mental Health Advocate in my state.
Nikki Stone
Nikki is also a gifted photographer; please check out her beautiful pictures at
The Photography and Graphic Art of NkstOne
I Organized my World around Trauma and Abuse
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“Most people have been mistreated to one degree or another in their lives, but the experience of being mistreated alone does not cause someone to develop a victim’s outlook. It is only when a person is abused and then left to deal with it on their own that the victim mentality begins to form. The abused child begins to organize his/her world around the wound.” Mic Hunter author of “Abused Boys the Neglected Victims of Sexual Abuse”
This is so true and it is such a good point. In my experience this is not about any one kind of abuse; this statement is true for all types of abuse. It is also important to understand that it does not matter how many times we experienced a trauma or traumatic event. If we did not have help to deal with it at the time, the consequences are deeper, greater and more difficult to live with. When we are children, we have no choice but or organize our world around the abuse. We have to accept it somehow; there is no other option. When we can’t fathom the “why” did this happen we can easily sink into depression, develop behavior problems, physical illnesses, nightmares and all sorts of other manifestations result. When we can’t make sense of what happened or is happening we find other ways to cope.
In my case, coping methods often caused new problems, and I developed coping methods to deal with coping methods, all because I thought they kept me safer; I had childhood depressions, I got physically ill, I withdrew, I made up stories to get attention. (which made it easy for everyone to say that I was the problem in the first place) I was too young to deal with the abuse myself and when my thinking started to derail, (as it is bound to do when we are coping with overwhelming burdens on our own) it just got worse.
Not being seen as an individual who had emotional needs, just by itself, is cause to develop coping methods. If not being heard, not having a voice or trying to have a voice and having no impact is devastating to an adult, how much more so devastating would it be to a child? It is no wonder that we develop coping methods. It is understandable that depression, eating disorders, ill health, stomach aches, nightmares, nervous habits and behavior problems develop.
I tell a story (Psychological abuse ~ How Self Doubt Grows) about how I was not protected from a psychologically abusive teacher when I was in grade five which clearly represents the progression of the struggle to be heard and protected. I had to deal with and process this psychological abuse on my own. I didn’t come up with TRUE conclusions. I sunk into a depression and got really sick. Because this situation was not dealt when it started, the teacher, the abuser, got away with it and her devaluing attitude and psychological abuse towards me got worse. I concluded that my only course of action was to ‘try harder’ to win her favor.
Abusers enjoy watching their victims struggle to suck up to them. As a victim I thought it would work to bend myself into a pretzel for the controller or the person who was abusing me (this is true for physical abuse, sexual abuse and all psychological abuse) and as a victim I believed when it didn’t work that I just needed to try harder, work harder to find the right “key” the right way to prove that I was worthy of the abusers love. Abusers become like a puppet master, enjoying the game of seeing just how far the victim will go to please the abuser. Just how much of the spirit of this victim can the abuser break? It is as though the abuser establishes their own value by how much control the victim gives them and how hard the victim tries to be what they want, but it never ends. It is never enough. These puppet masters always want more.
When I began the process of looking at the things that happened to me and how I processed them as a child, and then looked at how my belief system developed, I realized that in some ways it was the after effects that were the most damaging in the long term. So many of the beliefs that I adopted as the truth, were developed because no one helped me deal with anything. As children we cannot deal with any kind of abuse or devaluing behavior on our own with any kind of effectiveness. As adults we must remember that we were merely children and it was not our defect, nor are we to blame, that we could not overcome the traumatic event on our own.
Please contribute or share your feelings about this post.
Exposing Truth, one snapshot at a time;
Darlene Ouimet
Importance of Recognizing Progress in Recovery
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“It is important to give yourself credit for all your successes, no matter how small. If you wait to get to the end of the healing process, until you’re ‘finished,’ before you recognize your progress, you’ll wait forever. Each small step is a building block, and accomplishment in and of itself, and by acknowledging each step along the way you make room for further growth”. Courage to heal workbook by Laura Davis.
I thought it would be fun to pool my thoughts with Christina Enevoldsen and Patty Hite from Overcoming Sexual Abuse on this post about rewarding ourselves and recognizing our progress along the way on the journey to the other side of broken.
Christian Enevoldsen writes:
“I learned as a child to think in terms of my inadequacies, so I discounted any progress if it fell short of where I wanted or expected to be. I couldn’t see how far I’d come; only how far I still had to go. I’d verbally flog myself after I finished anything. I secretly hoped that if I put myself down, others would disagree with me and come to my defense. I thought if I focused on my flaws, I’d keep improving and wouldn’t get complacent with my achievements. Trying to be good enough felt like it was a life or death battle.
A big part of my healing from sexual abuse has been to accept my weaknesses and love myself in the midst of them. I know I’m just as valuable right now as I will be when I’m all bright and shiny at the end of this process. That helps me to accept not only myself right now, but my work right now. I approve of my progress. Even if it’s a little thing, it came from me and that makes it good. It’s the baby steps that are the foundation of healing and any other successes in life. Those things that look like gigantic leaps to others are really just a lot of baby step strung together. Others may not be very impressed with me or with what I do, but I know where I came from. I know what it’s taken me to get to this place. And I’m DAMN impressed.”
Patty Meyer Hite writes:
h step along the way you make room for further growth.” Courage to Heal WB by Laura Davis
“I too had a hard time acknowledging my achievements in the beginning. Especially when all we focus on are the bad things that has happened to us and the whys and the why not’s. It’s hard to focus on “how far we have come.”
But it is soooooo important to. I compared myself to my kids. Every little thing they do, as children, is exciting. They learn how to tie a shoe, how to write their names, how to read a book. They learn a new cheer or they caught a fly ball. With every triumph, we as parents should encourage them. I would clap my hands, tell them how proud I was of them and always give them a hug. Sometimes, I would pat them on the back, tell them, “Way to go”, and take them out for pizza. Compliments were big in my house toward my kids. They still are even though the kids are now adults.
We need this. We need a pat on the back, a “job well done” and a special treat. Even if our parents (especially if our parents) didn’t do it for us, it is time to do it for ourselves. If no one is there to encourage our efforts, we need to do it ourselves. We are valuable and we deserve it!”
Darlene Ouimet writes:
Self acknowledgement was a huge problem for me. I never gave myself credit for anything because nothing was ever good enough. Nothing was ever good enough for me because when I was a kid nothing was ever good enough for them. (teachers, parents, elders) I was conditioned to try harder no matter what I was trying for. It was the slow process of not being acknowledged for achievements that wore me down. It isn’t that I was always told I my efforts were not good enough; sometimes it was just that nothing was said. Sometimes it was a frown, sometimes it was a scowl, or an impatient huff. So I tried harder to get what I considered to be approval. A smile or any kind of approval or acknowledgement that I was even there would have gone miles towards my self esteem. This was not the case, so I learned to try harder and never rest or be satisfied with my effort. I learned to believe that I was never enough in almost every area of my life.
One time my therapist asked me to write a list of my accomplishments ~ to write down anything and everything I had ever done that I felt good about starting at about the age of 18. I thought I was going to throw up at the very idea of doing that exercise. I was sure that I was going to have to come back the next week and tell him there was nothing. What I realized is that there was nothing I could write down that I believed was good enough. When I looked at the origins of that belief, and saw where it came from and how it developed, I was able to write down some of the things that I felt good about, and then what happened that caused me to feel not good enough afterwards. I saw that I let others continue to suck my joy and ask me for more even after I left my childhood family. By then, if my efforts were good enough, I told myself it wasn’t good enough; I looked for ways that I could have done more, done better and I no longer trusted anyone who was pleased with my efforts.
Shortly after this project that I did for my self growth and recovery, with the help of my therapist I set a few goals. When I accomplished the first really big one, my therapist suggested that I reward myself. I didn’t know how. I realized that I didn’t know how to give myself a pat on the back OR any other type of credit. I was so stuck and once again scared about “not doing it right or good enough”. For several weeks he asked me if I had chosen my reward, and I resisted. We ended up having to spend some time talking about HOW to reward myself.
That first reward is in my living room and each day I see it, I remember “I can”. I can take care of myself, I am worthy, I can do anything that I put my mind to. I can overcome the past. I can fly. I can emerge from broken and have a new life. And I DID and I DO.
What are your thoughts about acknowledging yourself? Does it make you uncomfortable? Does it make you feel weird? Does it come easy? Please feel free to share your experience with us and our readers.
Darlene Ouimet
Parent Child Relationship What a Confusing Mess
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I wrote a blog post a few days ago called “Parent Child Relationships ~ When Loyalty costs too much, about parent child relationships and when my parents split up, that triggered a few new things in me. I intended to write about how my mother leaned on me when I was 12 years old, because my Dad left us and my intention was to focus mostly on her actions and how they affected me and how dysfunctional our mother daughter relationship was. BUT I found myself getting really angry at my father. In some ways I feel like I never really had a father and I’ve known for a long time that whatever smidge of a father daughter relationship we had, it wasn’t much. Writing that post however was emotionally draining and I knew that I needed to process the feelings and anger that was coming up for me. Memories and feelings were coming at me from all different directions and so as I have learned to do, I sorted them out and separated them from each other in order to get a better understanding.
Here is how it played out;
~I was angry at my mother (in that instance) because she made me feel responsible for the outcome of her. But the anger at her self centeredness and selfish behavior came up too. I have always felt guilty for feeling that way.
~I was also angry at my father for moving her and us so far away from everyone that could have supported my mother. I had not really thought about his part in it to this degree before. With the anger came many other memories and flashes of memories that I had never thought about in this depth before either. Sometimes I tend to think I only have to look at the “REALLY” bad stuff in order to move on but this is not true.
Mixed in with both of those realizations was the deep down suspicion that I might have been able to save their marriage… that maybe if only I had been a better kid ~ and all that type of stuff. I felt like I had failed my mother somehow, and my father never noticed me anyway, which I thought must have been MY defect. I thought that if I had been “different” or “good enough” he would have noticed me for sure.
Right away I reminded myself that the defect in our father daughter relationship was HIS. He didn’t try. His lack of interest in me had to do with him as a father. Not with me as a daughter.
Next thing I did was get the “my fault stuff” out of the way by looking at the truth about the marriage breakup itself and assure myself that I have nothing to feel guilty about. I asked myself these kinds of questions:
~What was MY part in the event? ~ Well actually it had nothing to do with me (other then my pain of my parents splitting up and getting a divorce) and this was a truth that I never considered before. I had NO failure or responsibility in it at all.
~What could I have done differently? This is a question that I heard in 12 step programs since I was 18 years old. I took it out of context though and used it to hurt myself, reprimand myself, and reaffirm the belief that I always had a choice and the outcome was always something to do with me. In this case, there WAS nothing I could have done differently. I could not say to my mother when I was at the age of 12 ~ “MOM, do not make me responsible for your life. I will not support you in this way, you need professional help.” I didn’t understand any of that back then; I didn’t even have any context to put it into. But in the mind of a child, I thought there must have been something that I could have done, and I somehow failed to figure it out. I believed that this was my downfall, my defect ~ that I could not figure out how to fix things or stop things that really I had NO control over, but when you are made to feel like you are always responsible for the outcome of everything, and if that outcome is a beating or sexual abuse or being ignored, your ideas of what you can “do differently”~ get warped. I carried that old belief with me into my adulthood. I had to start taking this information into consideration and I had to become aware of it, in order to change my belief system.
It’s like there is this missing space between childhood and adulthood that needs to be looked at. And this works to the controller or abusers advantage too. We don’t fight them when we are kids, and as soon as we are in our twenties, (sometimes younger) they start preaching at us that we are adults now and our outcomes are our choices. Our messes are ours. It is SO dang hard to sort out!
In this case there were several things that I needed to look at separately; the anger and disappointment in my mother, the anger and disappointment in my father and what I believed to be my failure. In looking separately at the mother daughter relationship stuff and the father daughter relationship stuff and separating it all out from my failure stuff, I was able to get a clearer picture of all three and where my belief system worked against me. This helped me to get a clearer picture of the whole truth, the real truth and it also exposed the false truth that I had accepted all those years since I was 12.
I hope that I have been at least semi clear in illustrating how confusing this whole thing is to unravel. This has been just one snapshot of how I take something apart in order to see the truth, and how many other things get in the way of doing that. Please share your thoughts.
Exposing Truth, one snapshot at a time.
Darlene Ouimet
Note: I had these same deep down beliefs about the sexual abuse, emotional abuse and parental neglect; that I should have been able to figure out something to STOP them. Up until about 6 years ago, I never believed that I had “no choice”. As an adult I was taught and accepted that I was accountable for the events and the results in my life. I applied that teaching to my childhood and to the past without realizing it and it automatically reinforced the belief that I had since childhood that it was my fault, that I had a choice and that I was responsible. Several years ago I realized all my adult struggles resulted from the child hood events that molded my belief system and that I HAD to figure out the missing pieces of the puzzle in order to recover!
Parent Child Relationship When Loyalty Costs too Much
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When it comes to parent child relationships I often feel as though I struggle to explain or communicate the difference between how I felt about the past when it was in the past, how I felt about it when I was in the healing stages of it and how I feel about it now. This comes up a lot on the blog and on the facebook page for Emerging from Broken so I thought I would write about it.
This blog gets hundreds of views every day. The comments don’t reflect that though, and I get these private emails from people who don’t want to write publically, especially about parent stuff. By some of the questions that I get asked, I understand why this is; most of us have really big loyalty issues when it comes to our parents and our parent child relationships. This has to do with several things; our belief systems, our upbringing and the way that society frowns on anyone revealing family secrets ~ even if the whole family could recover from the pain of the past if they were revealed ~ some things are just taboo.
I sometimes wonder how different my life would be today if my mother were willing to pursue wholeness and freedom herself? How different would it be if she were willing to work on our mother daughter relationship stuff with me? But sadly this isn’t the case.
I know one thing for sure, it would not change the past. What happened, really happened and it was dysfunctional, devaluing and abusive much of the time. So my decision was to get on with the present and future and to do that I ended up having to deal with the past. (Again) But this time I went deeper then I had gone before. I ventured into previously uncharted waters. The truth about my parents and just how dysfunctional the parent child relationships were.
When I talk about anger and blame towards my abusers as well as my parents ~ anger and blame were a necessary part of my healing. I had to look at the truth ~ almost from a neutral point of view if I were ever going to heal from it. I can only say this in retrospect as I didn’t realize that this would be a key before I did it.
I was so wrapped up in should and should not’s and because I believed expressions like “if you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future you are peeing on today” I was stuck. So I had to look at what my life story was as though I was looking at it through someone else’s eyes. Some of the events of my life were shocking and yet I didn’t think so. I felt guilty for feeling even a glimmer of hurt or anger towards my parents, especially my mother because I felt so sorry for her. It was almost easier to just accept the blame for our difficult mother daughter relationship.
If someone else told me the exact same things had happened to them (that had happened to me) I was horrified. I could feel justifiable anger, outrage, shock, disgust, sadness, sympathy compassion and love, but I could not feel these things for myself about my own life or about the things that had happened to ME. I can’t stress enough how convinced that I am that taking a look at my life story through different eyes was one of the biggest keys to the eventual restoration of my emotional health and overall mental health. This was also one of the biggest keys to overcoming depression. Seeing things from a neutral view point, was a huge key to my overcoming dissociative identity disorder and the integration of all my “alter personalities” and a major key to my wholeness and freedom.
As a child, I surrendered all my power over to my parents, teachers, and elders. When those people treated me with less value then I deserved or abused and controlled me in ways that were not acceptable, I complied and surrendered even more of my will. I had no choice as a child. It wasn’t a decision I made, it was survival and it was necessary. But this became my way of life and when we live under dysfunctional control, we become accustomed to living under dysfunctional control. This becomes a habit that is familiar and even comfortable. I grew into an adult in this familiar comfortable fog and I continued to give control to the abusers or controllers. Often when we are adults this control and abuse is psychological and emotional when it comes to our parents but none the less is in not really love. It is not a healthy, functional, love based parent child relationship.
But there I was in it anyway and in order to survive and cope I convinced myself that it wasn’t really wrong. “My poor mother didn’t know any better.” (true but so what?) Until I had nowhere else to turn and I was an emotional mess and I realized through getting some help to navigate through the false and the true, I suddenly realized that if I remained “loyal” to my parents, and if I didn’t want to look at this stuff that had happened to me at their hands through the lens of truth in order to place the burden back on them and realize that this was not my fault, then I was actually giving them control over MY recovery and my will to recover, in order to protect them. (as we have learned to do our whole lives)
This isn’t about loyalty. I was fighting for my life, and I had to get really honest. I had to accept the past the way that it was ~ the plain honest way that it was without the loyalty and excuses that I consistently made for them all my life. What I am trying to express in this blog is about emerging OUT of victim mentality and into wholeness and freedom and real relationship.
In love and in truth,
Darlene Ouimet
Today I’m highlighting a snapshot of where the dysfunctional mother daughter relationship began between my mother and I. The emotional abuse and dysfunction began before this event, but this was the point of no return.
Just a couple of months shy of my 13th birthday, my parents separated. That in and of itself isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a kid, but as in everything else in life it all depends on how it is handled. Kids need a little help handling that kind of a thing and neither of my parents was very helpful. For my mother it was all about her. For my father it was all about him.
My father had just been transferred and we had to move from Montreal Quebec to Mississauga Ontario and away from all the friends we had. My mother didn’t have any support. Even long distance phone calls back then were an expense that we couldn’t afford. I am not sure why my Dad picked that time to leave, but that is the way it was. My mother had a serious breakdown and since my mother was susceptible to having mental health breakdowns and serious depressions, it wasn’t surprising.
I was the only girl in the family. I am not sure what my brothers went through. I don’t remember if I ever talked about it with them or not. As for me though, my mother leaned on me. I became her confidant her support and her friend. It might not have been so bad if she had not been suicidal.
We lived in a newly developed neighbourhood in a beautiful new house. It was so new that many of the homes were not finished being built and there was no grass in yet. We were living in a construction site and there were huge holes, wooden ramps and plank sidewalks. The ground was uneven everywhere. My mother would go walking in the dark of night and because everything was so new, there were no streetlights yet. I pictured her weeping and stumbling around the neighbourhood alone in the dark. I pictured her that way because she told me that wandered around in the dark and she was hoping she would fall in one of those construction site holes and die. I felt so sorry for her. I wanted to help her; I wanted to be the friend she needed to support her through that time in her life. I believed that the whole burden of whether she lived or died was on my shoulders. I was only 12 years old.
This one incident impacted me and the rest of my life in such a huge way. What 12 year old would refuse this burden? How was I supposed to deal with this? What choice did I really have? Looking back my father was not exactly the kind of dad that I believed would have taken care of me if my mother died, I mean if you think about it, he was the one who moved her away from all her friends just a few months before he left her and I don’t recall even one time when he talked to me about how difficult this was or even asked me how I was doing. Why didn’t he see how distraught she was, and why didn’t he realize that I was staggering under the burden of her dilemma and thinking that it was up to me if she made it or not? What would have become of me if my mother did commit suicide especially if my father didn’t care? And finally, why did my mother forget that I was only 12.
This incident laid the foundation for the rest of the dysfunctional mother daughter relationship my mother and I had to play out. I suppose that this laid the foundation for the nonexistent father daughter relationship I had with my father too. Things might have been tough before, but now they were disastrous.
If you are interested in more history regarding my mother daughter relationship stuff, please visit the mother daughter category button under the header graphic. This story is an example of emotional abuse by both my parents. Stay tuned; I will continue.
Please feel free to share your viewpoints or your experiences. As always I truly appreciate your comments.
Darlene Ouimet
