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Official Notice to Oppressors, Abusers and Perpetrators
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Official Notice to the oppressors, abusers and perpetrators of emotional and psychological abuse; ~ you were wrong about me. You ARE wrong about me. I don’t need YOU to make me better. I am better than you know. I am stronger than you ever dreamed. I don’t need you to make me anything. I am better without you. Watch me fly and wave good bye to you from my position of freedom high above the clouds.
“Sometimes our teachers teach us more than they themselves have learned” Darlene Ouimet
You smiled at me, nodding and tilting your head as though you really understood what I was telling you. You made it easy for me to talk about my pain. I felt heard. I felt like finally someone understood. No one had ever really understood me. Certainly no one had ever validated my pain. And since validation was what I needed, it was so easy for you to use that knowledge against me. You validated me yes, but in the end it was only so that you could get what YOU wanted. You were a predator but I was so starved for acknowledgement that I didn’t recognize you as one.
All the while you smiled and listened attentively you were thinking about how you could capture me for your own and take me for your own possession. But I didn’t see it.
I kept telling myself that you would never take advantage of me. I must be misunderstanding the tiny red flags coming up for me; I always misunderstood… all my life I had been told that I misunderstood. I thought that I must be Read More→
Unhealthy Parenting ~ The Foundation is Passed on to Me
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- Darlene and Bodie
In my recovery it has been important for me to realize how my parents did not have a sense of their own value and therefore did not know how to help me to see my own value. I think that when we are adult children and we struggle with self esteem, we have some funky and skewed systems in place, causing us to believe that the road to wholeness and freedom is on a path that it isn’t on at all. It can get really confusing if at the heart of it we believe that someone else can restore our value, or that we can be the source of defining value for another. If you have not read my last post “The Beginning of Broken ~ Family Foundations”, please read it first as it gives more context for this post.
Somewhere along the way my mother thought that her children would restore her value. I think this is what so often happens. Parents try to get their value restored through their children. Children can’t accomplish that; nobody can restore value for another person. But I really wanted my mother to be okay, and thought that if only I could love her enough, that she would love me too and I tried harder and harder but I failed her. Her disappointment became blame which seeped out unto me and became a part of the way that I viewed myself.
When my oldest son was 12 he began to roll his eyes at me, speaking to me and looking at me like I was a little crazy. Since I had struggled with depression for many years, deep down I thought maybe I was crazy. My greatest joy and most important work in life up till then had been raising these 3 kids but I had this feeling that I was failing. Pretty much my only goal in life had been not to do what my mother did to me, but it was all going wrong and I was seriously considering giving up. I thought the kids might be better off without me, and that my husband might be able to do a better job on his own. I sought help as a last resort.
I was very sure that I could do things better with my own kids. I had a few ideas about where my parents failed me, but I didn’t often consider that my self esteem got stunted because their self esteem was stunted. When my parents didn’t succeed in showing me my value, and although I worked hard in many different ways to find my value, I failed, mostly because I looked for evidence of value in the wrong places. I didn’t have anywhere to start from. The foundation was never laid, so I looked for my worth in my work, through other people, through my talents and things like that.
When I had my own children, deep down I thought that I would do better with raising them and that in succeeding in doing better, in successfully raising my own kids, that THEY would be the proof of my value. I thought successful parenting would “define” me and prove that I was a valuable person. I started to have increasing mental health breakdowns as I realized that I was not having the success that I dreamed of, nor was my value being established. I had to throw all my old ideas out the window and learn a new way of looking at things in order to heal from the illnesses that I struggled with. I had to think outside the confines of the box that was passed down to me in order to find freedom and wholeness on this side of broken.
What are your thoughts on these ideas? As always I welcome your comments, as your views only enhance the effectiveness of my purpose.
Bright Blessings,
Darlene Ouimet
Transformation and Understanding
Posted by: | CommentsTaking a thinking break, I looked over to my calendar. The saying for February was about growing quietly but persistently… I liked that one. Suddenly I realized that it was time to turn it over to March! Pulling it off my cubicle wall, I excitedly peeled up the next page to read this month’s quote. It read:
“The most powerful agent of growth and transformation is something much more basic than any technique; a change of heart.” ~John Welwood
In a split second, I took my pen, crossed out “heart” and wrote a different word underneath.
A change of heart… My heart has to change? How?…
It was as if I was a little girl in church again and the pastor was telling me that I needed to change my heart. Feet dangling above the floor… innocent eyes and ears drinking in every detail, every voice inflection, every verse read, every song sung. Change my heart? Make it somehow… better?
Does this mean I have to change how I feel? Yes, I guess it must be that. I have to have better feelings. So some feelings are bad, and some feelings are good. Okay… so how do I change the bad feelings to good feelings? Because that “good” heart?- that’s what I want. Oh, and having a change of heart means I need to be good on the outside too? Maybe that will help… Okay, give me the list of what’s good and I will work very hard at it. Very hard! If I can work hard enough at this list, then will I get that good heart? Where do I go for the stamp of approval? What signs can I look for to know that my heart really has changed for the better?
I don’t think the writer meant for his words to be taken in quite this way… but that is how they struck me today. Instead of the phrase change of heart, I’ll be looking at the phrase change of understanding for this coming month.
Understanding. After I wrote it, I thought about that word. I pictured something strong standing up on the inside of me, strong legs and strong arms holding up my heart, holding it in place, letting it breath, letting it pump and flow and give and receive and BE alive. Understanding. Knowing that way before it got so confused with other people’s versions of “good”, my heart was good. It was born that way. It’s not my heart that needs to change. The thing that creates the vitality of transformation is a change in the underpinnings of what I believe about myself and a new understanding of where the faulty underpinnings came from in the first place.
~Carla~
The Power of Acceptance
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This week I felt a real mixture of things. Restlessness… mixed with this sense of acceptance of exactly where I am right now. I’ve never been in this kind of place before. I’ve felt content at certain parts of my journey, but this contentment was usually dependent on an outside condition, a person or something that I felt defined me as me. And it didn’t last.
So this acceptance is something different. It’s rooted from something deep down… It’s starting to happen more and more. Sometimes it unnerves me. For most of my life, I relied on pain to motivate me. Guilt. Shame. I pushed and pushed myself to achieve or be some kind of idealized person, striving to satisfy other people’s expectations of me, the church’s expectations, what I thought God’s expectations of me were… (more on guilt in another post!)
In my process of healing, I am learning to trust my heart. A huge part of my old belief system was this belief that I was inherently bad at my core. I believed all my motivations and intentions were purely selfish and that I couldn’t trust myself to be good without really trying hard to be good, to act good. Digging out this lie and believing instead that I am good deep down without having to try changes how my growth is motivated. Though I still struggle with that old belief system from time to time, I am becoming motivated to continue growing now because I believe I deserve to be truly happy and fulfilled, not because I feel so guilty about how bad I am.
Acceptance of my current place, my current stage, my current “being” is very powerful. I’m saying to myself, “Here is where you are, and you are good. If you didn’t change a single thing about yourself from here on in, you would still be okay. You don’t have to work harder to increase or prove your value.”
I remember just after I had come home from college I was struggling with this truth. I had gained 20 pounds over my last year there. I had always believed I had to be slim in order to be okay, so this extra weight caused me a lot of anxiety. I remember the feelings, looking at myself in the mirror from all angles, needing to buy bigger clothes, feeling my stomach when I laid in bed at night, trying to test if I really was “fat”… Sometimes I would actually grab my waist in anger until it hurt. I felt disgust towards myself.
I decided to start exercising to lose the weight. But something powerful happened before that habit really started helping me. I was starting out on one of my first walks outside and suddenly just knew that I had to let go of this self-hatred related to my weight gain. It was dragging me down, making my efforts counter-productive, like a big iron plow I was dragging behind me all the time. I remember this feeling of acceptance washing over me, acceptance of exactly where I was at. I actually physically hugged myself and somehow in that moment was able to let go of the slave-master, self bullying way of motivating myself to change. The compassion that was living deep down inside awakened and overtook me at just the right moment, freeing me. Coming to that place of acceptance totally changed how I felt inside. I carried out my new exercising habits with this attitude of love for myself rather than hate and guilt.
I believe we were all created to thrive, and as I continue to remain true to my heart and where it is leading me, I will never stop growing. I don’t have to be afraid of feeling content in the “now.” This acceptance isn’t resigned or numb or deadened. It’s part of how I love myself. It’s an inspiring place to be, having a dynamic of peace mixed with a dynamic of being excited to move on to the next thing. Each stage of growth involves a plateau afterwards (and sometimes before!), a place to celebrate and rest and regroup for the next stage of the journey.
Relationships based on Wholeness and Truth
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From my last post, “The Decision to Wake up and Live” Carla asked:
“Darlene, I can relate to a lot of these fears and am also starting to feel gratitude for difficult decisions I made in my past that make for a much more fulfilling present. I’m interested in what you say about being “afraid of how I would have to relate to others if I was to embrace wholeness.” Can you expand on that? What’s it like to relate to others in wholeness now?”
Here is my answer;
Carla, I was specifically referring to not dissociating when I wrote that part of the post. I was so afraid of facing people and facing my fears of them. When I used dissociation, as a way to deal with situations and a way to deal with others, as soon as someone said anything that made me feel unsafe, I just disconnected. Since I was working on my dissociative identity disorder and working on becoming one, I knew that when I was no longer dissociating I would have to actually be in the moment, face the fear, reassure myself that I was not in danger and actually deal with people.
Once I got through that part, then I moved on to the fear of standing up for myself and I think that is what your question is about. There were people in my life that disrespected me and disregarded me. There were people that didn’t ever consider my feelings and I began to realize that it was up to me to set the boundary in order for that treatment to stop. I only wanted to be treated as equally valuable, which is not really a lot to ask, but I also knew that this request would be hard for people who had devalued me my whole life. So I was afraid that I would be rejected again and that I would be laughed at and looked down on if I stuck up for myself. I imagined that I was so worthless to them, that they would say that I was not worth the effort for them to care about my feelings. I thought that rejection would kill me, and although a few people in my life did react this way, it didn’t kill me. It made me stronger. It made me more determined to move forward in my recovery.
The bottom line is that I had let others define me. I had let others decide that I was not worth much, and they treated me that way, and because I believed them, I let them. When I began to live in wholeness, I began to redefine myself, to own the truth about myself and embrace that I am not worthless, I am worthy. I am worthy of life, happiness, respect, love and I am valuable. I have something to offer others in relationships. I am not just a servant. I don’t deserve to be the fall guy for everyone else’s unhappiness. With that redefining of myself, I learned that in those situations where I was being discounted as a person, I could ask questions such as “why are you talking to me like that? Why do you think you can treat me like that?” and these questions were empowering for me. (they also caused people to pause…as though I had slapped them.. lol)
Just because someone treats me as though I don’t matter, doesn’t mean that I don’t matter. Just because someone thinks I am stupid or unimportant, doesn’t mean that I am. It is one thing for me to know that, but a whole other thing for me to draw the line against being treated like that. Living in wholeness and relating in truth has a lot to do with this kind of understanding.
Oh and one last thing; although most people didn’t like this new me at first, (the one that refused to be treated like dirt) I have flourished in the true definition of myself and have wonderful relationships today, based on truth and equality.
Darlene Ouimet
My Hungry Heart ~ Part 3 of 3
Posted by: | CommentsI grew up striving to find proof outside of myself that I truly was okay. This was my addiction. It was 2 fold: one part of it was constantly trying to figure out what other people thought of me, and the other part involved modifying my “outsides,” morphing myself, to try and fulfill what I believed other people’s expectations of me were. Like all addictions, it was extremely burdensome, but I did it to help myself survive.
My family life created the vacuum, let the big question “am I okay?” go unanswered. The church that I grew up in contributed to my dis-ease, creating bars that held me back from finding the answer. Church introduced me to self-examination. I fully value being self-aware, but the purpose of this examination was to create guilt and shame.“Examine your heart before doing this or that… Make sure your motives are right… Man looks at the outside, but God looks at the inside [so make sure your insides are good]…” Constant, heavy, suspicious examination. This became one of my biggest slave masters and I became a master at doing it. I was striving desperately for the answer to my question, but if an answer felt “too good to be true” I doubted it. I doubted myself all the time, because how could I know whether my “insides” were good or bad, whether I was on the right track? This self-doubt was the root of my depression and angst.
At age 26 I was so weary. A friend recommended a counsellor to me and I was willing to try whatever it took to find relief. This counsellor was able to help me discover the real truth about myself, for myself. He was a light, already fired up, someone I could spend some time with to get my own light burning again. He was a master not at “fixing me”, but at fanning into flame the truth that was still burning deep down inside myself. The truth he helped me to discover was that my heart is good. Fully and completely good. No questions asked, no proof required, in all its ramifications and outward actions, uniquely beautiful and good intentioned. It was the kind of truth-discovering that’s hard to explain. It just feels really good, like Christmas morning… Deep down, unabashed, grinning ear to ear truth. For someone like me, it was easy to doubt at first, to be suspicious of. But after awhile, my hungry heart couldn’t get enough. For a time, I needed this source outside of myself and outside of the church to tell me this truth, over and over again. Now that my own light is burning brighter, I’m getting the hang of it for myself. I’m rebuilding my foundation, setting myself up for a life of living as my true self, fulfilled and excited to be alive.
My Hungry Heart ~ Part 2 of 3
Posted by: | CommentsThere’s this phenomenon in nature that happens with baby ducks and geese called imprinting. The gist of it is that the very first thing the baby bird sees when it first hatches is what the baby bird thinks it is. So, if it sees a human first after being hatched, it truly believes that that is what it is too. Ideally, the baby duck will imprint to its mother, so that it can learn to live as a duck, learn to fly, mate, migrate and flourish.
My parents have their own stories, and what they did not receive or find in their own lifetimes they did not to pass on to me. They raised me to be a good girl, to be well-behaved, to not talk back or fight or be angry. I was smart, and was applauded for being smart, at church and in school. But the hunger and depression that I experienced in later years was proof that something was missing.
I was once asked, “When you were a little girl, did your mom or dad hold you on their lap and just talk with you and say, ‘So, what’s Carla thinking about today? What’s going on inside? What do you think or feel about this or that?’” The question hit me deep and the tears sprang to my eyes; no, I had no memory of that kind of interaction with my parents.
One of the biggest things we need to know as children in order to flourish as people is that who we are, just as we are, is valuable. What we think, what we feel, is important. What I knew as a child was that I was valuable if I was “good”; I failed to learn that who I was, who I am, IS good enough, no questions asked, no proof required. That “imprinting” didn’t happen. And so the outside world became my “parent”, so to speak. I began the painful and addictive habit of constantly looking outside of myself, to everyone else, to tell me that I was okay.
~Carla~
