Archive for belief system
Adult Victims of Child Abuse Still Need to be Heard
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“Child abuse damages a person for life and that damage is in no way diminished by the ignorance of the perpetrator. It is only with the uncovering of the complete truth as it affects all those involved that a genuinely viable solution can be found to the dangers of child abuse”. Alice Miller ~ Banished Knowledge ~ facing childhood injuries
Lately I have been writing a lot on the subject of dysfunctional family systems. I feel like I am just getting started when it comes to sharing about some of the things that were so dysfunctional in my own family. The dysfunctional mother daughter relationship I had with my abusive mother was only one part of it. I had an emotionally unavailable father as well. There was sexual abuse and physical abuse. I was not heard or even seen as a child ~ as though I was not really a person yet. And that “non person” fact seems to be at the root of everything; the discounted voice and disregarded feelings of the child. We live in a whole world of adults who have not been valued as children but who are Read More→
Dealing With Diagnosis Beyond the Labels
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- Darlene Ouimet CTACC
This past week I did an internet radio Broadcast on Blog Talk Radio with Susan Kingsley-Smith from Empowering Solutions.
It was a really good show and the feedback has been fantastic! We talked for 40 minutes about emotional healing starting off with my “in a nut shell account” about where it all started, the history of my depressions and dissociative disorders which were diagnosed several different ways by several different doctors and mental health workers. Susan contributes some of her history as well.
The bulk of the conversation is about where the solutions actually came from and the process of how I took my life back. I talk about the commonality that I discovered between myself and the people that I was speaking to in mental health seminars, which made me realize Read More→
Psychological Abuse and Dysfunctional Parenting
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- emerging alive
I received a comment on the post “More on Mother Daughter Dysfunctional Relationships” from Pam, and it began like this; ~ “I have lots of bad memories from my childhood but what is worse is what I don’t remember. I can’t remember my mother ever holding me. I have no memory of my mother ever supporting me in anything or encouraging me. I don’t remember my mother ever siding with me against someone who had hurt me. I have never felt that my mom liked me. It seems that my mom was angry with me from the time I was born.”
I can totally relate to that with my own mother. I felt like I was born to fill something in her and I failed to do it. And I believed that I was a failure; that I was defective and unlovable. Realizing that was only a fraction of the process to recovery however. The belief system problem was that I believed those things about myself and they were not true about me. I can’t stress this part enough ~ I was NOT born to fulfill a need in my mother. I was NOT a failure. I was NOT defective and unlovable.
Today, I use this comment from Pam to explain the progression of emotional and psychological abuse and dysfunctional family upbringing; how those beliefs are born and incorporated and how they become Read More→
Little Lies Accepted as Truth and Belief System Formation
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- lies build on each other
When my son T.J. was a little guy, between the ages of 3 and 6 he was a big fan of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks Hockey Team. Jim, (my husband) always teased him that the Mighty Ducks played hockey with crutches and canes. His Daddy told him that they didn’t even have a real goalie; that Granny Smith played in net. It was a big joke in our family. T.J. would wear his Mighty Ducks jacket and his Mighty ducks jersey and everyone would ask him if he was a fan and he would tell that the Mighty Ducks were the BEST ever hockey team! And Jimmy would tease him and say “NO WAY… the mighty ducks play with crutches and canes, they can’t really compete with any other hockey team”….. and so it went for a few years.
As you can imagine T.J. was really excited when Daddy finally took him to his first real hockey game to see the Mighty Ducks play against Jim’s favorite team, the Calgary Flames.
But when the two hockey teams skated out onto the ice, his excitement truned to confusion. T.J. was really shocked and in all seriousness said to his father “Dad…. They don’t play hockey with crutches and canes.. they have Read More→
False Normal Systems about Love and Self Love
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I came across this quote, and at first I loved it; “If you put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price”. ~ Author unknown
And then I thought about it a bit more deeply ~ For the most part on “emerging from broken” I am not talking about the value that we put on ourselves, I am talking about the value that was put on us by others and that same value that we accepted. We do need to raise our own value however we can’t do that until we understand how we received our value in the first place. There is a step that has to happen before we can follow the above quote!
The last blog entry was about a coaching session that I did with Carla Dippel about her belief system when it comes to the concept of love. In my recovery, one of the most powerful things that I discovered was about how these false definitions form and how discovering and changing my belief system contributed significantly to my complete recovery from depressions, low self esteem and so many other difficult struggles that I lived with.
We all have beliefs about many things that we don’t realize we have. We don’t even really realize that we have these “wrong ideas” about certain things because we have had that idea for so long it has become our normal. But for me, most of my beliefs were a “false normal” or a “false truth” In the coaching session that I did with Carla, I asked her specific questions that enabled her to discover her beliefs about love and she discovered her “false normal beliefs” when it came to love. These beliefs come from many influences, not just from our families. They can come from anywhere and from a multiple of experiences; we learn from teachers, neighbours, books and media. We learn our “normal” from many places and combinations of events…. continue Read More→
Coaching with Darlene on My Definition of Love
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I am really excited to welcome my friend and guest blogger Carla Dippel. Today Carla is writing about a coaching session we recently did. This post is an excellent example of how to dig down and discover your belief system about a specific concept; in this case “love”. As always please feel free to contribute to this wonderful post by leaving your feedback and comments. ~ Darlene Ouimet, founder of Emerging from Broken
Cocahing with Darlene on my Definition of Love by Carla Dippel
A few weeks ago, I was freaking out about love. I felt anxious, confused, and stuck. I had this sense that I was missing something, that I was scrambling in the surface of myself while there was much deeper stuff going on beneath that I couldn’t get at. I described this “freaking out”-ness to Darlene. In her masterful way, she asked me a couple simple questions that changed everything. I really cared about working through this struggle because I really cared about the part of my life that it was affecting. So I decided to be open and reveal the truth as honestly as possible. I had hope that in doing this I would find better answers than the ones I was working with at the time.
First Darlene asked me to reveal my definition of love. She added, “Don’t worry about sounding silly or trying to have the RIGHT answer. Just write what naturally comes out, what you believe off the top of your head.” I had this sense of taking my focus off the leaves of the tree that were sick and shifting it to the soil. What was really down there?… I felt afraid to be so honest. I don’t like feeling vulnerable or sounding stupid (especially). But I went to work. Here is what came out, un-edited and un-analzyed: Read More→
How Blame, Guilt and Shame get Misapplied to Self
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a childs mind
The belief system that I am constantly speaking of does not form all at once or form completely from one event. This is where it gets complicated. Other events factor into it, some of them normal healthy childhood events that may have familiar feelings attached to them, and it is really easy to lump them all together.
When a child is devalued, abused, or discounted, it is a matter of necessity, (survival) to build an understanding or comprehension, and that comprehension becomes like a filter that we look through. Child sexual abuse, being put down, called a liar, made fun of and ignored, and being physically harmed all became part of my history and the way that I processed that history became part of this “grid or filter” that I viewed all events through.
Being ignored on the playground at school brought up familiar feelings of rejection. My mind searched through my history for a reason that I had been rejected, and quickly related it to the feelings surrounding a trauma event. (Continued….) Read More→
How One Trauma Led to Several False Beliefs
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- in the mind of a child
I remember when I was talking about my first memory of being sexually abused. As I was speaking out loud about the details, being prompted for other tiny details and trying to remember even the thoughts I had about the trauma, I suddenly realized that I thought I could have stopped it. That ONE single belief caused a whole spiral of other problems for me and developed a very strong set of lies in my belief system. Because I thought I could have stopped the sexual abuse from happening, I also took responsibility for it happening. That led me to believe that I was a bad person. None of these thoughts were conscious. They happened as a result of that first subconscious belief that I could have stopped an adult from sexually assaulting me. Because I thought I could have stopped it, but I didn’t stop it, I was filled with guilt and shame. Guilt and shame that wasn’t mine, but guilt and shame that I thought was mine.
Here is the breakdown: Read More→
Self Esteem, My Value and Learning to Love My Self
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- CELEBRATE ME
The process of learning to love myself is best understood backwards; there are so many layers and levels to it; so much confusion. There was so much deception; deception that I had come to believe was truth, and on top of that deception, there was this thick layer of fog kind of hiding things, making my memories murky. At the core of my belief system were mixed messages and among them a very confusing conflict; I was sexually abused at a young age and at the same time raised to believe that my only value was in my looks and appeal. My parents were very popular and seemed to be well liked, but with me, my mother was controlling, unloving and very sexual; my father was disinterested, un-relational and emotionally unavailable. These things made up my life and formed my identity and resulted in a dissociated mess. I had some serious sorting, revealing and re-organizing to do in order to heal.
It was in finding out why I did not value myself that I realized the lies I believed from the past. It was in discovering the lies about my past that I was able to find the actual truth. The lies, once I really looked at them, were obviously lies that I had been raised, fed and nurtured on and then I had to set those lies right.
But I had to do the work.
I had to dig through all that information. I had to face the pain. And each blog post is filled with stories about why and how I came to the false conclusion that I came to and processes of how those discoveries helped me to dispel the lies. I can tell you how I did this, but I can’t do it for you.
I already doubted my memories were accurate because I was told that I made up stories and was punished for it. My mother told me that I needed too much attention. My father told me that I talked to hear myself talk.
The truth is that I didn’t have enough attention. I made up stories to get someone to notice me. I was ignored when I told the truth and there were some big things that happened to me that I should have been protected from, but I wasn’t. Continued… Read More→
Coping Methods ~ Trying to Escape Myself
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- Staying with Me
No matter which coping method issue that I look at within myself I have determined the core of it to be related to trying to leave myself. There is a disconnection from myself that I developed when I was a child; it was my way to escape and I became attached to it. Every time I examine one of those “still tangled threads” I keep coming back to this disconnection that it seems I actually seek; escaping myself. I am convinced that at least one of the reasons that I am attached to this “leaving myself” is because when I was a child, dissociation is what worked for me.
Now I have to remind myself that any form of coping method, although it may have worked at one time, is an escape from me that doesn’t work anymore.
I used to have dissociative identity disorder. I had the kind that was once called multiple personality disorder. The name of it was changed to dissociative identity disorder because lots of people leave themselves or dissociate from themselves and from their identity without actually becoming someone else or having alter personalities. Although I did have alter personalities and I did switch, I have found many similarities to others with dissociative identity disorder that were simply just “dissociated”.
Recovery for me has been about coming home to myself. It is a journey back to me and it is not an easy journey because for about 43 years I tried my hardest to get away from me; dissociating was the way that I did life. Somewhere between leaving me and coming back to me are the actual steps that I took to get the wholeness that I have today and that is what I write about.
As I take this recovery journey, I become more and more aware that the answers are within me, but when I forget that I start looking for answers outside of me. I mistakenly think that validation from others is going to help me. I think that having more friends is going to help me. I think that having the most popular blog on the internet is going to help me or losing weight and getting fit is going to help me and I chase those things for a time and come up feeling disappointed and not knowing why. I have to remember that that my validation does not come from outside of myself.
When I stay totally present it is as though I become “too aware” of myself. Life without coping methods means mega increased self awareness. When I become really aware of myself, I am subconsciously afraid that I might find out that I’m a disappointment, a failure and just plain not good enough. In the past I took on all that self blame and shame and I needed to keep dissociating because I was too scared to be me, because I thought “me” was so bad. Deep down I am afraid that with too much self awareness, all those memories about being unlovable and unworthy might come rushing up to the surface. The fear has always been rooted in being afraid to find out that the beliefs I adopted about myself as a child, the beliefs that were “taught” to me through actions, abuse, and the behaviour of others, might be true.
I have not switched personalities for several years now and I rarely dissociate the way that I used to either. I have found myself and my purpose. I live my life with passion and conviction and go after my goals with determination. I love my children and I work on my relationship with each of them and on my relationship with my husband almost daily. I love life. I love the freedom that I have found but sometimes I get going the wrong way too and I suddenly realize that I am facing something I haven’t faced before. And usually when I take a closer look I realize that I have tried to disconnect from myself again. I find myself, and then I get scared and try to leave myself, all the while trying not to admit that I am trying to get away from me again.
It is as though I believe that I can leave myself, in order to deal with myself, without having to feel anything myself. It never works, but I still try. So for me, this journey is about remembering to STAY with me and that is about self love, self acceptance, self validation and self empowerment.
“They” said it was me… But they were wrong. And I have to keep reminding myself that they were wrong, because none of this leaving myself or trying to escape awareness of myself, is conscious. It happens without thought. And so becoming more conscious is actually the goal. The more I face the fear of being present with myself, the more I realize that the fears are not real. I am afraid of lies; lies that I have spent years undoing and replacing with the truth.
I long for connection, freedom and peace but it is only in coming back to me that I find the freedom and peace that I long for and it is only in self connection that I get to keep it so that I can give it away. The good news is that the more often that I connect to myself, the more I remember that the keys to freedom are within.
And it is key for me to catch myself when I try to leave myself.
What are your thoughts about this topic? Have you ever related a coping method to escaping yourself?
Darlene Ouimet
Founder of Emerging from Broken.
Related Posts ~ Keys to Living in the Present
