Self Esteem ~ How did YOU Learn YOUR Importance?
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- Beautiful Self Esteem
I was raised to believe that I had less importance than the adults in my life. At first glance that may sit okay with most people. Perhaps it feels “right” and “logical”. Perhaps I had no reason to believe otherwise in the first place. As children we are not born with truth filters. We learn what we are taught is the truth. We accept what is modeled to us AS truth. But the truth we are taught is often false truth.
Emerging from Broken is largely about how I uncovered that false truth and re wired my brain to understand and accept the true truth.
It felt right and even logical to accept that adults were more important than I was when I thought about it the way that I believed “importance was measured.” I was a child; a dependent child. I believed that the adults were important because they provided. They brought home the food and until I was a young teen, they cooked it. Adults provided me with clothing and shelter. They sent me to school where other important adults taught me what I needed to learn in order for me to become an adult myself. Adults met my physical needs and in many ways they had all the power; both good and bad. Looking at it that way, I could easily agree that Read More→
Dysfunctional Family Christmas and Giving the Wrong Gift
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- the wrong gift
The Ghost of Dysfunctional Christmas Past ~ Part 2
How come I could NEVER find the right gift for my Mother? I never seemed to be able to make her happy. My Christmas gifts as well as any other gifts I found for her never had the desired effect one wants when giving a gift to someone.
There was always this disappointment she showed when she opened a gift from me. Her face would fall. She would look uncomfortable. She wouldn’t say much about whatever I had chosen for her. I agonized over what I would get her, and then I worried about it until the day I gave it to her. I dreaded her reaction. I guess I was hoping that her face would light up. I was hoping for approval.
I got so that I HATED thinking about what she might like for a gift and what I should get her. There was so much anxiety around gift giving that I couldn’t actually concentrate on the celebration itself. There was so much “obligation” around all these events that I didn’t understand back then.
My mother never made it easy for me by pointing out or mentioning a specific gift she wanted. It was as if my “guessing what the right gift would be to get for her” was part of what would make her happy. It was a though if she “told” me what she wanted, that would ruin it. In order for the gift to be “special”, I had to Read More→
Dysfunctional Family Christmas and Being Alone
By · CommentsThe Ghosts of Dysfunctional Christmas Past 
When I was fifteen years old, it was my father’s turn to have us kids for Christmas. I was the middle child of three teenagers. We lived with our mother just outside of Toronto Ontario. We were going to take the train to our fathers house in Montreal Quebec. But my mother didn’t want me to go that year. My mother guilt tripped me about how alone she would be and how hard it would be for her to be by herself for Christmas.
So I stayed with her and my brothers went to Montreal without me.
My insecure and narcissistic mother was always painting such nasty pictures of my father, and deep down I was extremely torn between the two of them. I knew it would make my mother happier if I turned against him and I was always worried about her happiness. I felt guilty for wanting to see my father. I did not want my mother to know that I actually wanted to go to my fathers place for Christmas. SO when I decided not to go there for Christmas, I thought that my compliance with my unloving mother’s wishes in the case of that Christmas would gain me great points with her! I believed that finally I was going to prove to her that she was the most important person to me and then she would finally love me! I had dreams and hopes of Read More→
daggers of self blame
Looking back on my life, it is evermore clear to me how hard I looked for excuses to blame myself for the dysfunction in my life. There is a very good reason that children take on the blame: it was safer to blame themselves. Blaming “them” was fruitless. I could not “make them change” but “I knew” I could always “try harder”. I believed that if I could “do good enough” that they would finally love me.
It was very hard for me to learn to see things through a new grid because I had been consistently taught things a certain way. The way that I was taught things became my grid of understanding. My grid of understanding was the way that I saw and believed that life worked. Dysfunction was my normal. I believed things worked in life a certain way, because that is how I was “taught” life worked. As I got older, outside influences added to those teachings, confirming them and cementing them firmly in my mind. This is what I call my belief system.
One of the things that I have discovered about my belief system is that although when I got older I was taught that I can change my thinking by practicing a new thought or belief over and over again, (positive affirmations or positive thinking) the truth was that until I found the original false belief and Read More→
Some people act as though they believe that there is not enough love in the world to go around. They act as though they need to make sure that they are getting all your love and no one else is getting any of it as though if you love anyone else these controlling people will “miss out” on some of your love. In the past I put a lot of effort into trying to make these people feel like my love for them would never run out because I mistakenly believed that my love for them, could save them and if I could save them, they would love me back and that would save me.
And at the same time it seems as though these controlling and manipulative people also believe and go to great length to communicate, that if you love yourself, you will be spending your love allowance on yourself instead of on them. Heaven forbid that happens! This “don’t love yourself” concept is taught in tons of ways always with the threat of becoming a horrible selfish person if you do anything to nurture or acknowledge your own value.
They picked on the way that I dressed. They picked at the way I did my hair. They picked at me all the time to make sure that I was feeling bad about myself. To make sure that I was trying harder. To make sure that my self esteem was kept low. To make sure that I was always questioning myself and not questioning them. And all of it was presented as thought their judgement was “for my own good”. That this “picking at me” and criticizing me was going to make me a better Read More→
Depression began at a very young age for me. I think that fact added to the belief that I was somehow defective and different from other people.
Depression always began with a sinking feeling. Sometimes I fought it. When I fought depression it felt like I was fighting in a mud bog and I was too tired to battle my way out. It felt like my legs were tangled up in vines or underwater foliage and I couldn’t get free of them. They were pulling me under. I could see and feel hands grabbing at me, trying to drag me down. “Something” or “someone” was pulling me under.
Sometimes I felt like someone was sitting on my chest and holding me down. Holding me back; Keeping me under; I felt like I was fighting just to be seen. I felt like I was drowning in a deep black swamp and people were standing around but they didn’t notice me. People, only a few feet away and they could not see how close to death that I was. And they didn’t CARE. They were laughing and talking as though they were at a cocktail party and no one cared that I was thrashing around, fighting for my life and sinking in that swamp.
Many times I thought it would be so much easier just to give in and let the dark water close over me. But it never took me completely. No matter how tired I got, I lived a partial death but Read More→
Belief System Formation about Money and Worthiness
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It was bad enough that my parents divorced, but then they started fighting about child support. My mother had custody and my father paid child support. My mother said she didn’t have enough money from my father; my father said that he couldn’t afford what he was paying. No one seemed to care about the difficult emotions that I was going through as a child whose parents had split up. They only seemed to care about what it was costing them.
Imagine the message I got as that child. I was 13 years old when the child support argument started. The message that they communicated to me was that my father thought I was a financial burden. My mother thought I was a financial burden too. No one thought I was “worth it”. I felt as though suddenly everyone wished I was never born because now that they divorced, no one wanted to be financially responsible for me.
My needing to be supported seemed to be causing a lot of fighting and anxiety and fighting and anxiety went against everything that I had EVER learned about survival. As a survivor I lived by the rule “don’t cause fighting or anxiety”. Now I was caught in the crossfire of this divorce and it seemed that I was causing a very big problem.
I started stealing my clothes within a year of their separation. I would do almost anything not to be a burden to my parents. Stealing was like “my contribution” to helping out with the financial burden that I was. But stealing also made me feel really bad about myself and added to the growing body of evidence that Read More→
EMOTIONAL HEALING DOES NOT DEPEND ON….
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“Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is YOU who will get you where you want to go, no one else.” Les Brown
There is a critical fact that I had to DRILL into my brain in order to get the full benefit of the process of emotional healing.
EMOTIONAL HEALING DEPENDS ON ME
My emotional healing would not have been accelerated if my mother or father suddenly admitted their part in all the dysfunction that I grew up with. It would have been wonderful and today it might mean that we could restore our relationship and heal the damage there, but it would not be the source of my emotional healing. It would not be the necessary fuel.
Emotional healing would not have happened more rapidly if my parents sincerely apologized to me for the damage that they contributed to in my childhood. It might have helped a bit but it would not be where the healing comes from.
My emotional healing would not have happened faster if Read More→
When a shark bites the damage needs to be attended to and then that damage needs to heal. The fact that something may have been wrong with the shark doesn’t assist in healing that damage nor does it change the facts about that damage.
Many of us come up with the term “narcissism” when we look into our family history and conclude that our mothers had narcissistic personality disorder. Sometimes it is the father that fits the description. The diagnosis of Narcissism seems to answer so many mysteries and questions.
At first, realizing that my Mother had the symptoms and all the signs of narcissism I was relieved that I finally realized and even understood what was wrong with her. I felt like I had finally found the answer. I had this kind of “OH NOW I UNDERSTAND” feeling. But the more I thought about it, I wasn’t any farther ahead knowing that she fit the description of being a narcissistic mother.
She also suffers from depression and is on medication for that too. But that knowledge also didn’t help me overcome the damage that has been caused to ME because the damage is there regardless of Read More→
False Beliefs like I KNOW I Would be OKAY if …
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- Darlene and Jim
My parents split up and eventually divorced when I was just turning 13 years old. After my mother went through her suicidal phase she started dating. She had not been separated from my father for very long when she started dating. Men and dating became her priority.
Through her behaviour she communicated to me that attracting men was the way to cope with low self esteem and pain. Looking back on what she taught me and how she impacted my belief system, she herself believed that men and having a man in her life was what she needed more than anything else. She believed that she needed a man in order to survive. She needed a man in order for her to feel complete or even good about herself. Men defined her as worthy and good enough. Her self esteem came from them. Their attraction to her identified her. Having a man meant that my mom was okay.
I had learned from my mother’s actions, words and teachings that men were the most important connection or relationship a woman can have. Because belief systems grow from layers of information, add to that teaching what I learned from the media (movies and books) and from observing Read More→
