My Freedom ROCKS!!

I have decided to throw my Freedom Rock in the pond in our pasture right here on our farm over 1800 miles away from the child abuse that I suffered but where the emotional abuse of my childhood continued even as an adult and where my depressions increased until I no longer believed there was any hope for me. This is also the place where I did my healing. This is the land that I rode my horse on for hours and days on end, walked for hours meditating and contemplating what had happened to me and the false messages that I believed because of it. This is the land that I raised my kids on and the land where I took my life back.   

My freedom ROCK is going to be based on the following quote by Alice Miller

“The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our lives; with cruelty or with tenderness and protection.” Alice Miller

I made a decision quite a while ago that I was done treating myself the same way that I had been treated by others. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Enforcing that decision that I was “done discounting me” has been a whole other ball game. In the beginning I came to realize that I had put myself last so much and for so long that I never even considered what I might have wanted and when asked I didn’t have an answer. The learning curve on this one has been huge for me. Even in wholeness I didn’t listen to myself, just like I had not been listened to. I had to learn to listen to myself and validate what myself was trying to tell me. If I was tired, I had to learn to let myself rest. If I was hungry I had to learn to nourish myself with healthy foods. I had to learn to “catch” the con job that I was doing on myself, telling myself that something good, was not so good.  

In the process of emotional healing I constantly had to reassure myself that I was on the right track. I had to validate that I had been mistreated. (I had been blamed for my problems for so long that I believed I deserved everything that happened to me.) I had to convince myself that I deserved better than the ways that I had been regarded and disregarded for most of my life. I had to start the healing process validating that there was damage that I deserved to heal from. I had to learn to treat myself according to the true definition of love.

And that is a process that I also had to learn to apply to the way that I regarded and treated me.  

I love chocolate and potato chips and convinced myself for years that they were a treat and a comfort that I ‘deserved’. After I ate them however, I never felt good. My reward was really a punishment and I could see flashes of the past intertwined with the ways that I had learned to treat myself. Many of the “rewards” that I had received in my childhood were actually punishments too. Rewards that had “obligation” attached to them and rewards that had a price tag caused me to get my definition of “reward” mixed up. Sometimes rewards were a payment to make up for something bad that happened or a pre payment for something bad that was about to happen. Compliments used for the purpose of grooming me to be compliant made me very wary of compliments; even compliments from myself.  All these things went into the grid of my belief system.  I learned to treat myself the dysfunctional and disrespectful way that I had been treated by others.  I broke agreements that I made with myself, I lied to myself and as a result I no longer trusted myself.

This past year I have been getting deeper at the roots of the trouble I’ve had with self care. I have been looking at where it all began and my own history with “self love and self care”.  I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the way I’ve treated myself and the roots of that treatment and my belief system around that self treatment.  I noticed that I broke agreements with myself. I became aware of how often I lied to myself, conned myself or convinced myself that something that wasn’t good for me, was really not bad for me or that there was a “good reason” to justify it. I saw where I had learned to treat myself that way. I realized that just like with everything else in my life, I had learned it very young. I learned to discount me, just like I had been discounted. And I learned to try harder with myself just like I always tried harder for everyone else but in the end I was never good enough for me; in the end by my own actions, I didn’t show myself love.

About seven months ago as a result of paying closer attention to the way that I regard myself, I started to make some changes in the way that I treat myself and I have been learning to listen to myself when it comes to self care. In the first couple of years of recovery and emotional healing I learned to re-parent myself. I am taking that process to a deeper level now because my understanding is at a deeper level.

SO, my freedom rock is going to be about nurturing my relationship with me in a deeper way and letting go of “self abuse” and self disregard. I am going to take my rock and write my vows to me on it. I am done with discounting myself and my needs. I am going to continue to listen to myself and keep working on regaining my own trust.  

I promised myself that I would finish my book and create a companion work book so that I could generate an income from the full time work that I do here in EFB. The first book has been sitting on my desk waiting to be sorted through for almost a year because I put this website, my blog posts and answering the comments BEFORE myself and my needs. I take breaks when I am burned out instead of before I get burned out, and I spend over $200.00 a month out of my own pocket to support this website. I always told myself that it is my passion for wholeness that drives me to do too much and put the bigger projects that I always had in mind on the back burner but in fact it has been my expectations of myself that have gotten in the way of my completing those projects like my books. It is putting others needs before my own needs, just like I was always trained and taught to do in the past. It is a “left over false belief” that my value can be “proven” by my actions.

One of the readers here shared that she was going to draw a “box” on her Freedom ROCK to represent that she was no longer in it, and she was throwing that BOX into the deep. That really resonated with me as I so often talked about “the box” in the first few years of my emotional healing and could really relate to having been in the box that abuse, neglect and unreasonable expectations from others put me in for most of my life.

I am going to draw an empty box on my Freedom ROCK too.  My box is going to represent “the part of the box” that I still had part of myself in even in recovery. It is going to represent the letting go of unreasonable expectations of myself. It is going to represent that not only have I empowered myself to stand up to abuse and refuse to accept not being treated as equally valuable FROM other people, it will also serve to remind myself that I won’t accept it from ME anymore either!

My freedom rock is going to represent MY declaration of freedom and Wholeness when it comes to self care and self love!

Please share your thoughts and your Freedom ROCKS stories here.  If there are freedom ROCKS stories shared on other freedom ROCKS category posts I might add them to the comments in this post so that people can come and read them all in one place.

Inspiring hope, freedom, wholeness and celebration of life!

Darlene Ouimet                                                             

There are some great ideas for freedom rocks shared in the following related posts and their comments; Freedom ROCKS about page

The Motivation behind Freedom Rocks by Mimi 

What freedom rocks means to me by Lauralee

I heard so many things against speaking about the past.  Questions which are actually statements and judgements more than they are actual questions such as “why do you want to talk about your problems in public” or “why do you want to air your dirty laundry in front of the whole world?” These judgements always concluded with some version of “you are only making yourself look like a fool.” Statements like that carried with them the all too familiar indication that the speakers (the judges) were concerned for ME; that they truly cared about what was “best for me”.

When I faced the cold hard truth, I began to comprehend the actuality reality; I realized that their concern was never for me. I didn’t need to make myself look like a fool, they did that for me all of my life. I think of the times they delighted in finding ways to embarrass me or humiliate me in front of others. In fact I think that some of their motives were based on discrediting me in case I ever revealed the truth.  They were not concerned about MY dirty laundry. They were only concerned about what I was exposing about THEM. They didn’t want me to expose THEIR dirty laundry.  And I think this would be a good time to add that if they didn’t KNOW what they were doing was wrong, if they didn’t “know any better” then WHY did they know that they needed to keep me quiet about it?

The biggest reason that people persuaded me not to talk about child abuse and dysfunctional family stuff was either because THEY didn’t want to be exposed or because they knew that if they sided with me or even if they validated me, then they would have to face their own dysfunctional family stuff. They were not trying to help me live a better life in freedom and wholeness with their “just let it go” directives. They were concerned with covering their own butts and staying in denial by not facing the truth and so they could keep getting away with all the stuff that everyone knows deep down is wrong.

The legal definitions of child abuse and neglect were a huge eye opener for me. But an even bigger eye opener was when I realized the lengths that so many people went to, to make sure I kept quiet.  Like I said, if they did not know their behaviour was wrong, they would not have spent so much energy making sure it didn’t come out in the open. 

I wish I had found a website or like this when I was searching for answers all those years. Nobody was talking about holding family accountable for abuse or about exposing abusers… everyone seemed to be talking about forgiveness or letting go of the past. “Live for today” and “acceptance is the answer” but nobody wanted to talk about WHAT we were supposed to accept! Were they really telling me to accept that people messed with my head, discounted and devalued me, took advantage of me, taught me that something was “wrong with me”, abused, mistreated and objectified me, and telling me that I should just “get over it”? In that dysfunctional recovery system, everyone endorsed “keeping the silence” and no one wanted to talk about spending some time actually validating the dysfunction first. I was never able to put the past behind me until I actually validated the damage that was done. There are even therapists out there that will refuse to work with you if you want to talk about the past!

I spent over 25 years of my adult life trying to let go and let God and get over it, accept it, forgive and feel sorry for the sick people in my past and I ended up having increasingly difficult chronic depressions.  I spent only 2 years facing and validate it and all the results that I ever could have hoped for were achieved. So what is so wrong with my way? At least I am living proof that it worked!

I speak and I write EFB because it is my story and MINE to tell. I celebrate the permission I give myself to tell my story after years of being silenced.  It is validating for me and for others to hear the benefits of living in truth. Finding, facing and embracing the truth is what set me free from oppression, depression and the low self esteem that hindered me all of my life before I faced the lies so I could embrace this truth.

I will speak my truth. I will tell my story. Look at my life today! I am free. I am living a full and happy life bursting with wholeness and freedom in the sunlight of the truth and no longer in the shadow of the lie.  The fact that they are not happy for me is actually more proof of the dysfunctional system they live in. Like crabs in a bucket, clambering over each other to get out but only pulling each other back down because really, no one wants another little crab to escape into freedom if the darkness of the bucket is the fate of the rest. Well too bad for them. I finally stood up to them and stood up for me. I finally chose ME over them. I escaped. I don’t live in that darkness anymore and it feels GREAT to have the sun on my face!

Note: speaking up for myself and drawing boundaries does not always mean that I have to confront controlling and manipulative people; in many cases they walked away from the relationship as soon as they sensed that I had caught on to the disrespect and devaluing treatment. They skulked away like guilty dogs, which tells a tale now doesn’t it?  

Please share your thoughts about being told to leave the past in the past.

Another snapshot of truth;

Darlene Ouimet

Legal definitions of Child Neglect and Child Abuse and also see US department of Health

Related Posts: Standing up to Damaging Advice and Unhelpful Trauma Directives

Forgive the Abusers ~ A bit of a Rant

Manipulative and Controlling People and some abuse tactics

Who says it wasn't that bad?

It wasn’t that bad. What happened to me wasn’t “that bad” and I told myself that for YEARS.  When I was in my early twenties and struggling with trying to quit the coping methods of alcohol and drug use, some of my memories of child sexual abuse were coming up and I was trying really hard to get rid of them without resorting to alcohol or drugs. At that point in my life I had never told anyone (outside of family but they didn’t validate the abuse OR me) what had happened to me.

One day I was having coffee with a friend of mine who I had met in a 12 step program. In an attempt to mentor me and validate an issue that I was struggling with he told me that from as young as he can remember his parents sandwiched him in between themselves while they had sex. He told me that he can never remember a time growing up when he didn’t have sex with both his parents. He told me that by the time he was 5 he liked it and by the time he was a young teenager, he loved it. He didn’t know it wasn’t “normal”.  It was his normal.  And now he was struggling to learn what the truth about “normal” actually was and to overcome the damage that had occurred in his life. He was having all kind of relationship problems as a result of child sexual abuse.

Although I felt extreme compassion for him, I didn’t hear any of what he was trying to communicate to me. He was trying to communicate that it wasn’t his fault and that his body reacted to being sexually stimulated. He had been sexualized from a very young age. All I heard was how horrible his childhood was and how horrific the child sexual abuse that he endured was. And the biggest thing I “heard” was that what had happened to me did not compare with what he had survived.

 I remember thinking “what the hell do I have to complain about? It wasn’t that bad for me.”

I found so much comfort in that statement.  I told myself things like “at least my parents didn’t do ‘that’ to me.” It was as though I believed that because they didn’t take me to bed with them and have sex with me from as young as I could remember that the things that did happen to me were irrelevant. I could just forget the abuse I suffered because it wasn’t “that bad.” I could just be grateful that “that” didn’t happen to me.  I used the extremely abusive and dysfunctional family situation that my friend told me about to cancel any right I had to feel hurt by the dysfunctional family situation that I had lived in just because I decided that it wasn’t “as bad” as what he went through.

I told myself in an almost reprimanding way that If he lived through that, then I can live through the “little bit” of pain that I had in my own childhood.  Every time I thought about my own childhood and the abuse I suffered, I thought about his situation of horrific child sexual abuse and I minimized what happened to me. And I used his situation to trump mine and to discount and discredit my pain and my hurt. I used his story to invalidate my own story.  I told myself that I was a wimp, told myself to suck it up, told myself to be grateful that what happened to him didn’t happen to me. I invalidated my own rights, so I could stay in denial of the child sexual abuse that DID happen to me. 

I told myself “But it wasn’t every day”

I told myself “But it wasn’t both my parents together

I told myself “But there was far more emotional abuse than any other kind of abuse…”

I told myself “But it wasn’t “violent” sexual abuse”

And I told myself “but I deserved the beatings…

But but but…

People comment on this blog all the time saying “Oh my gosh Darlene, it wasn’t that bad for me.” Sometimes people tell me that they don’t think they have a right to call what happened to them “abuse” or that they feel as though they don’t have a “right” to feel as though they had been wronged in childhood. And these feelings are common! I had them all too. It wasn’t “that bad” for me either. In fact even today when people write to me saying that they are grateful that their lives were not as bad as mine was and go on to tell me of their childhoods, my first reaction is “WHAT? You think what happened to me was worse than what happened to you!!”

 Denial is a funny thing. Denial enabled me to avoid facing the damage that happened to me. Denial was one of my favorite survival tools.  When I hear these kinds of statements today, I think about my friend who told me his story of family dysfunction, incest and child sexual abuse and how I thought the same things. That it wasn’t “that bad”.

Most survivors of child sexual abuse, domestic violence, and psychological or emotional abuse will all say the same thing when reading about someone else’s child abuse stories. They will say to themselves or to the other person; it wasn’t that bad for me. It wasn’t “that” bad. 

It was when I finally faced what that statement was doing for me that I reached a new level of healing and understanding.  Like a coping method, that statement allowed me to stay in denial of the truth that I had been abused, devalued, discounted, not protected as a person.  I had to set aside the story about my friend and the child sexual abuse that he lived with almost daily, and validate my own life experience. I had to face and validate that what happened to me was just as damaging to me as what happened to him was damaging to him.  It WAS that bad.

Abuse is abuse and for the record, emotional abuse, verbal abuse and psychological abuse is no less damaging then physical abuse or sexual abuse; the damage is done to the person ~ the value of the person being abused is diminished. The value of the “victim of abuse” is defined as not worthy of more, not lovable, not important.  The self esteem is squashed, tarnished, broken, harmed and torn apart.  And it is the damage that has to be validated and faced in order for healing from that damage to take place. 

There is no “not that bad” when it comes to being devalued or discounted. There is no “it wasn’t that bad” when it comes to helpless powerless children.

Please share your thoughts on this topic.  It might interest you to know that even while I was writing it I was still reminding myself that what happened to me WAS THAT BAD.

There is freedom on the other side of broken;

Darlene Ouimet

Related Posts ~ Sexual Abuse ~ Devalued, Discounted and Unprotected

I organized my world around trauma and abuse

Also see the colored words within the body of the article for other posts

I convinced myself of many things in order to cope with child abuse, emotional abuse and being defined as less important than others in my life.  

I was unable to cope with the truth so I changed the truth to suit me. I learned how to view “unhealthy attention” as though it was healthy and validating in order to cope with my dysfunctional world the way that it was and by doing so I was able to pretend that my world was actually functional. I found a way to believe that I was special.   

But in order to feel loved and to believe that I had at least some degree of self worth, I had to change my understanding of the word “special”. I had to warp my definition of that word in order to fit it to the actual circumstances.  The things I accepted as “proof” and validation that I was “special” became pretty sick and unhealthy.

I remember when I was about 13 or 14 years old, my mother started commenting about the way men were looking at me. I remember that it was embarrassing to me. She would whisper to me in the grocery store “Darlene, did you see the way that man looked at you??” She told me that I was attractive to older men as though this was some great gift I had.  I felt uncomfortable about it, but at the same time I felt validated by my mom. I felt like “finally!! I have done something right!” She looked so happy when she told me these things. She looked pleased with me. It was important to her that I was attractive and she was saying that I was. I found some value for myself when she commented on these “older men” who were looking at me with appreciation.  

I thought I was special because my mother wanted to take me out to bars with her to pick up men when I was 17. I thought that meant that I was attractive; SHE thought I was attractive. I thought she was validating me and I longed for her approval and acceptance, so I accepted this as the way I could get it. 

I believed that I was special when I was sought out by older men when I was too young to be in any kind of man/ woman relationship with them.

My mother usually took me to hotel bars; bars where men were staying on business trips. The men that hit on me in the bars I was in with my mother were married men. In my youth and naive way of thinking I thought that I must be “really special” if they were giving me attention when they were married. This kind of thinking sounds really sick now but it comes from the situations that I was put into without knowing that this kind of thing was not “normal” or right.

I remember the duality of the way that I processed this kind of dysfunctional relationship that I had with my mother and the men that were hitting on me. On the one hand I thought I was special. On the other hand I was scared of what might happen.  One night this man hit on me and it was clear that he was married; he was wearing a wedding band for one thing.  But he asked me to go out to the lobby of the hotel with him.  He made a phone call to his wife while he had his arm around me. I was SO uncomfortable. I wanted to run. On the phone he asked his wife about her day and about the kids while he was stroking my arm and rubbing my hip and he kept smiling at me.

Thoughts were firing through my mind at warp speed. I didn’t really know what the hell he was doing and I felt dirty, but there was the thrill of danger, mixed with the relief of acceptance and approval. At the same time I was wondering why my mother wasn’t worried about where I was. I felt sick to my stomach and I felt powerless. I felt like a hooker, but somehow the whole thing felt like a compliment. I felt special; I felt like I had some kind of exotic power that this man would take this RISK “for me” in that way.  At some level I knew he was using me but I was too young to understand the cheap thrill he was getting talking to his wife with a 17 year old girl tucked into his side.  He winked at me which scared me and reassured me at the same time. I wanted to walk away but I didn’t think, (didn’t know) that I had a choice. When had I EVER had a choice? How would I have learned that I had a choice? I didn’t want to be rejected by him; I didn’t want to disappoint my mother. Where the hell WAS my mother?? 

And under all of these thoughts, I had just a whisper of a feeling that I wanted to avoid feeling more than anything else. I couldn’t face the truth that both this man and my mother had absolutely NO regard for me at all. I was just a means to an end for that married man. Perhaps he thought he would get me in bed at the end of the night? I was nothing to him. I was nothing. I was just some object some “thing” to distract him from the tedium of being on a business trip out of town with nothing to do in the evening. I was just a good story to tell to the boys at home. He had to have known that I was just a kid; even though I was in a bar I could not legally have been less than 19.  

And to my toxic mother I was just someone to go to the bar with. I was likely a good man magnet too. What did she care about what could happen to me? As an adult it took me YEARS to face that what my mother was doing was wrong (not to mention illegal!) and that her actions showed how little regard she had for me. This was all about her.

Talk about an example of dysfunctional mother daughter relationship.

The world might have judged me accountable for being in this situation if the world had known about it so to protect myself, I couldn’t tell the world. I had to keep it to myself. In my world the girl always got blamed. That man was married and fooling around on his wife but I would have been labeled as the tramp that had enticed him. I would have been judged as a home wrecker and a slut.  I knew that stuff already so I went along with him… smiled at him while he sweet talked his wife as he winked at me somehow knowing that I wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t expose him and that I would submit to this objectifying treatment.  In order to comfort myself, I told myself that this defined me as “the special one” in the situation.  

By the time I was 18 years old I had lived without value long enough to believe that there was something wrong with me. I was full of shame and disappointment; full of self loathing, full of self disgust. I wasn’t even legal age yet and I believed that no one would ever love me. And even though I believed that all I needed was to be rescued by a man, I didn’t trust them anymore.

This story represents the how I took a situation and broke it down in order to understand my belief system and how it formed and how this situation resulted in being one of the ways that I came to view myself. Because of circumstances that I didn’t know how to process, I decided that I was special because my toxic mother thought that I was attractive enough to take to bars when I was underage. This conclusion was a lie. That didn’t make me special at all. Believing that I was special because a married man was attracted to me and therefore used me to boost his ego was not a healthy self view and it was a lie about me. The way he acted didn’t define my value in a good way at all. I was coping with the fact that my mother was using me and putting me in a very dangerous situation by reassuring myself that her actions defined me as special. And the pain that I had to face was that her actions defined me as nothing. Not important, not worthy of respect or protection, not loved, and certainly not special.  The truth is that my mother and I had an extremely dysfunctional mother daughter relationship.

~Just a little more context ~ Although this was nowhere near the first time that my toxic mother had taken me to bars with her, (she had started doing that when I was still living at home) I was living with my boyfriend at the time of this occurrence and on this night he was in jail serving time for impaired driving. I told myself that my mother must have thought that if I was old enough to live with a man then I was old enough to drink in bars with her.

But here is the funny thing and the conflict that I never saw the truth about; the reason that I was living with my boyfriend was because my mother had told me to get out of her house for staying out too late twice.  I wonder why I wasn’t old enough to stay out late, but I was old enough to go to bars and help her pick up men?

Like I said, my mother and I had an extremely dysfunctional mother daughter relationship.

Please share your thoughts on this subject of the fear of not being special and switching the truth around in order to avoid the truth and cope with the pain.

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet

For Related posts on Mother Daughter Dysfunctional Relationship or Toxic Mother Daughter Relationship please see the “Mother Daughter Category”  ( also see links (the words) in highlighted bold print throughout the article)

Seeking understanding and validation from the WRONG people

Darlene Ouimet ~ Smile

One of the biggest uncomfortable and reoccurring memories that I have is of constantly being told to smile. It was not encouragement, it was a directive. I didn’t realize it at the time, I was too young when it started but today I know that it was a judgment of me. It was said “as a judgment”  

I wonder why no one asked me why I was so unhappy. I bet my mother would say that she did ask. But what I remember is her asking why I didn’t smile more like this; “Why don’t you smile Darlene… you always look so sullen.” That was a rhetorical question.  She didn’t want an answer. She was not concerned. She just didn’t want me to look “sullen”.

It is important to keep in mind however, that it doesn’t matter what her intention was. It was what I heard that matters because the message that I got from this “request” or “judgment” is the damage that I had to overcome. The message received was the damage. That is what I am talking about when I talk about overcoming damage and having to find out what the damage actually was in the first place.

I was extremely quiet. Perhaps “withdrawn” is a better word.  Didn’t anyone think that there was a reason for that? 

I heard the whispers about me. I heard the question “what is wrong with her?” many times. I don’t think that statement or question helped me become the happy child that they “wanted” me to be. It made it worse.

I overheard a conversation once between my mother and her sister (my Aunt) when I was somewhere around the age of 8 or 9.  They were discussing my “sullenness” and my constant headaches. It was not so much that they were concerned about me that struck me, but they were trying to decide what was WRONG with me.  I connected the word sullen with the smile directive and put all those messages together. My belief system had already begun to form that something was wrong with me and this conversation just added another layer to it. (I did not think about “why” I was so withdrawn. Only that they thought something was wrong with me)

I was getting worried about me too.  Something was “wrong with me” and nobody knew what! My grandfather got sick and he had cancer and was going to die.  Perhaps that is what was “wrong with me”. Maybe that is why I had so many headaches. 

I had heard about kids who were “different” at school; kids who were born “not normal” and I worried that maybe THAT was what was wrong with me.  I had to find out what was wrong with me so I could overcome it, fix it or hide it.  If I didn’t figure it out, I would never be acceptable ~ never be good enough and never be loved!

I heard my Aunt say that perhaps my difficult birth and the fact that they Doctors used forceps caused more damage than anyone had considered. She said that perhaps the Doctors didn’t know there was damage because I was just a new born baby.  The message that I got was that “what was wrong with me” may have been caused at birth.  Can you see how this false message began to form a “belief” in my belief system?  

Hearing this stuff made things far worse for me. Hearing their judgments increased my fear of being rejected and of being thrown away. Hearing this stuff confirmed that something WAS wrong with me, (just as I already suspected) and that I wasn’t good enough or worthy enough.  If only I could just pretend to be happy and remember to smile. I couldn’t force myself to smile and that make me feel like a failure. My belief system was well on the way to cementing the self blame.

When I was in my twenties I overheard another conversation; I heard this same Aunt telling someone that I had brain damage from the difficult birthing experience.  Now, the “perhaps” part got dumped out of that story. (because my mother was not part of the conversation). She could say this “behind my mother’s back” and because it was so “normal” and common for me to hear this kind of “backstabbing” I didn’t really think much of it.  The way that I processed it was to feel sad that people were still wondering “what is wrong with me” and I was still wondering what was wrong with me too.  I believed that I had “failed” to HIDE whatever was wrong with me.

I was labeled “sullen” but no one wanted to know why. No one was interested enough to dig into the where that may have come from. How does a child become so unhappy and withdrawn? I was content to believe that something was simply “wrong with me” and I was born with something wrong with me. Even I stopped questioning why I was so withdrawn and tried to accept that I was just different and likely defective.

Maybe they already knew why I was so unhappy, but pretending that our lives were “normal” was more important than doing something about it.  OR maybe they were just as unhappy as children and they thought that all children are unhappy. Or maybe the accepted that life is really not a happy journey and why should MY childhood be any different than the one they had themselves?  None of that matters though, because the damage from the message is what I had to face in order to overcome it.  The damaging messages that now lived in my belief system had to be discovered at the roots and set back to the truth.

No wonder so many people question the meaning of life. The cycle goes round and round ~ passed from generation to generation.  No wonder there is so much depression, anxiety, addiction and overall coping when most of the world is resistant to looking at the roots of where it began. It is easier to accept a mal functioning gene; I know.. I accepted that for many years too, but it was when I faced the real roots of my belief system that I found freedom. It was when I began to understand where these false beliefs originated; where and how my belief system formed, that I was able to see the lies and overcome those false beliefs.

There was nothing wrong with me.  I was withdrawn because I was being abused; I had endured (and was still enduring) sexual abuse, physical abuse and emotional /psychological abuse.  I used the fact that I didn’t “smile enough” as one of the many answers to the question, “what is wrong with me” because that is what survivor mode is all about.  We take the blame on ourselves because we are too young to know any different. Taking the blame (self blame) is part of the coping method. Imagine the fear and hopelessness if we blame the adults in charge of our care. I had to find out the things like this “smile example” that I used to confirmed the lies forming in my belief system in the first place.  

Today I smile! My smile is natural; not something I have to think about and not something that I am EVER reminded to do.  My smile is born out of freedom and wholeness and from living in the truth. My smile comes from inside of me and shines through. I like my smile. I FEEL my smile in my heart as though it is a live part of me.

Perhaps after many years of not smiling, I had a lot of catching up to do!

Please share your thoughts! I look forward to how hearing about how this article will impact people.

There is Freedom on the other side of Broken

Darlene Ouimet

related posts see highlighted words in colour  also see: Manipulative and Controlling people and some control tactics

Beleif System Formation via the message Received in Childhood

If there is ONE place that I recommend starting the emotional healing process, it is starting with the damage.  That might sound easy, but I had to actually find out what “the damage” to me was. 

I had to find out how I got broken.  What happened to my self esteem in the first place? How did my self esteem get so low? What happened to me? That was where the keys were and those were the keys that led to freedom. 

I remember when I realized that my depressions and dissociative issues came from somewhere; I sat stunned, repeating to myself over and over ~ What happened to ME?

I had to look at the roots. I thought that I was born depressed.  But the more I thought about it, how could that be?? There were actual events that caused damage and my depressions were in fact related to those events! I just had to see it. I had to finally SEE it. 

The biggest obstacles in my way were avoiding looking at how I used by others, how I was objectified and not considered to be equally human, and how I was failed by others. By avoiding looking at the truth about that, I was able to excuse the damage they caused.  I excused them because I had to. As a child, survival is of the utmost importance and if we start complaining about the people who are failing us, but are also in charge of our welfare, it is a pretty sure fact that we are not going to survive.

When I tell stories about teachers who were bullies or outsiders who devalued or abused me, I get a huge response. It is much easier to face the truth about someone outside of the family that hurt me and damaged me than it is to face the truth that my parents let me down, but the truth is that my parents knew about the bullying and the way it was effecting me, (I was sick in bed for months) and they avoided doing anything about it until I was so sick that the Dr whose care I was under, figured it out and MADE them do something about it.  As I have written before, my parents tried to resist the Doctor, but he threatened to get a court order on my behalf.

If the damage, (including the emotional damage) is excused and ignored… there is further damage. I am saying “so what” if my parents were “sick”. They did a lot of damage with their “sickness” and instead of looking at them and making excuses for them, it was time to look at the damage ~ to call it like it is ~ and heal from it. EVEN if it makes them angry; even if it hurts them; even if they rejected me and even though they deny it, lie about it and don’t agree with me or validate my truth. They started covering their butts when I was a baby, why would now be any different? It finally had to be about me or I would have ended up just like them; dysfunctional, sick, chronically depressed and unhappy.

It was one thing to face the damage that the teacher herself caused to me. That was the easy part. It was way harder to face how much emotional damage was caused to me because my parents were unwilling to act on the information that they got, (even from the doctor) in favor of saving face in the community.

My parents were still discounting me and devaluing me when I was a grown woman married and with 3 children. My father was still disinterested in me or in my life and didn’t seem to acknowledge that I was alive. His phone calls were still all about him. No matter what was going on in my life, he switched the subject in order to talk about himself and what was going on in his life. Every phone call or visit from him was a painful reminder that I was not valid or important to him.  

I was in my 40’s and my mother was still accusing me of enticing her boyfriends when I was a teenager and how it was because I had a crush on one of her boyfriends when I was just turning 14 was what caused him to come to my room in the night and molest me. My mother was still putting me down and accusing me of being the biggest problem that she ever had.  I was not allowed to have a voice, I was not allowed to look at the truth; the fog spin that she created was way too thick for me to see through it.

I was getting really tired of carrying the entire burden of the relationship with my parents. There was no pay off. They still invalidated me.

My biggest fear was that my parents would reject me if I faced the truth.

The truth is that my parents rejected me when they didn’t take care of me in the first place. They rejected me when they refused to hear me and silenced my voice and instead protected the people hurting me. They rejected me when they called me “dramatic, and a story teller”.  They rejected me when the way the rest of the world saw them, was more important than I was.  They were still rejecting me in the exact same ways. That is what I had to face. That was the damage.

I had to start by facing the damage.  The truth is that both my parents were broken. I had to finally say “SO WHAT?”  Whatever happened to them did not excuse or make up for what happened to me and knowing about how hard “they had it”, didn’t help me to heal. There was no solution in realizing that my parents were abused and devalued too. There was no solution in knowing that my mother suffered from chronic depression. It didn’t cancel the way that I was treated.

I had to stop running from the truth. I stopped accepting that depression was a “gene” that I was born with and instead, face the roots of my distress. In order to heal, I had to find out how I got broken.  What happened to my self esteem in the first place? How did my self esteem get so low? What happened to me? That was where the keys to emotional healing were hidden and those were the keys that led to freedom from depression, low self esteem, dissociative identity disorder, and many other issues that I had. 

Depressions, dissociative identity, illnesses and addictions all manifested in my life as a result of not being protected, emotional neglect, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse and spiritual abuse.  The roots of all of these were grounded in being unloved in the true definition of love.

Finding and facing the damage led me to learning the truth about my value. Self love and self esteem finally became possible when I faced where the broken began.

Please share your thoughts on facing the damage.

There is freedom on the other side of broken

Darlene Ouimet

Emerging from Broken on Facebook ~ (comments here are not linked to that page)

Pondering Freedom

I was dying my whole life; I just didn’t know it until I started living.

The fog that I grew up with was almost completely transparent. I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I lived in a false normal and growing up like that was the way it was. It was my truth and my “real”. I didn’t know that there was any other way. I didn’t know that I didn’t know there was indeed another way; most of my life, my reality and my truth were dysfunctional.  The adults, the reality all malfunctioned.

And therefore so did I.

That is what living in a dysfunctional family was like for me. Those were the effects of psychological abuse emotional abuse and trauma. That is the effect of being groomed and being trained in silence, compliance, obedience and obligation. That is what happens when a child is taught that their value as an individual is not the same as the value of others. There are consequences and negative results when we are raised in a false normal.

Psychological abuse is at the root of all forms of abuse. It is part of the grooming process. Emotional abuse and neglect makes a statement to a child. Abuse in any form makes a statement about human value. It teaches things that to the child that no child should be taught.  It teaches the WRONG thing.

Sexual and physical abuse leave a child living in fear every day of their lives. It doesn’t make “sense”; abuse is incomprehensible and as a child I had to try to understand. Trying to understand something that is incomprehensible as a child is impossible.  So, I “tried” to understand “them” for the rest of my life and as I was slowly dying I didn’t realize that my life was being extinguished by the very people who did all the harm in the first place.  Perhaps the people who didn’t take care of me properly didn’t realize that there was harm being done. Perhaps those who covered it all up didn’t know that they were contributing to murder and to the death of a child. “Understanding them” didn’t change the damage. Perhaps the perpetrators of the abuse itself were sick people who also came from dysfunctional families, but that didn’t change or excuse the damage they perpetrated on me either.  

I was taught to protect them when they didn’t protect me. I was taught to value them above myself although they didn’t value me.  The proof of this was in their actions and inactions. I was taught to consider what “they needed” when no one considered what I needed.

And as I was growing up and even into adulthood, every time I felt like life was going to be okay, I was squished. Like a happy puppy being slapped away with a newspaper, I was shushed, I was reprimanded and I was told in words, looks, actions and inaction that I was not worthy. And not by just ONE person. Many people contributed to the devaluing of me and my personhood. I felt like I had a sign on me somewhere that I could not see, and the sign read “if it makes you feel better about you, kick me down, I can take it” And instead of realizing that I was not the one at fault, I tried harder. I tried to understand them so that I could excuse them.

I WANTED to make them feel better because I believed that if they felt better about themselves, they would love me.  This is psychological abuse and I had to finally accept that love doesn’t work that way.

Not worthy of love. Not worthy of protection. Not worthy. I didn’t know that they had no right to declare me unworthy. I didn’t know that they were WRONG. I believed that they knew if I had value or not. What child would question that?  Children don’t process problems through the grid of truth, but rather through the grid of understanding based on what they have been taught.

Protecting and valuing the very people who disregarded my human value made sense to me because as a child that was survival. I HAD to find a way to survive the dysfunctional world that I lived in. That world was “my normal”. That false normal world was all I knew. I had to find a way to cope with my increasing sense of failure and lack of human worth. Compliance and hope was my daily diet. I pinned my hopes on the fact that one day I would find the KEY that would enable them to love me and that was all I understood.

As an adult, I needed to find a new way to cope because as long as I didn’t see the truth, I was stuck in that childhood survival mode.

My process of emotional healing was about finding out what those wrong messages were and how they got stuck in my mind so that I could overcome them and replace them with healthy truth so that I could LIVE again. That is what I am doing on this site. I am sharing all that. I am sharing the truth that set me free.

As an adult, I had to face the damage. I had to find the truth about the way it should have been. I had to get a glimpse of what real love was and what a functional loving family would have looked like. In this was I was able to heal myself and then stop the cycle within my own family, take my life back and now make a difference within the world with my message.

Psychological, emotional abuse and neglect makes a statement to a child. Emotional Abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, domestic violence and abuse in general, makes a statement about human value. It teaches things that no child should be taught.  It teaches the WRONG thing.

Emerging from Broken is about how I found a new way. It is about how I moved from coping to conquering. Emerging from Broken is about how I moved from surviving to thriving and about how I moved from dysfunctional to functional.

There is freedom on the other side of broken;

Darlene Ouimet

Related posts ~ “Stop that Crying or I will give you something to Cry about”

“Over coming Self Blame”

trapped in the deep

I was fifteen or sixteen when I worked in that Real Estate office as a receptionist on the weekends. I answered the phones, and typed offers for the salesmen.  My mother’s disgusting boyfriend got me the job. That should have been the first red flag.

There was this one chubby salesman named Ron who gave me the creeps. He was about 40 years old. He was just a little too friendly. He would come up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. He tried to rub my back. I was terrified of him and didn’t even understand why. It was one of those feelings that today I have come to realize was my intuition. It was my “radar” warning me about a predator. That man had really bad motives when it came to me.

One day he came up to my desk and showed me some porn pictures. At first he was on the other side of the reception desk. He handed them to me; I took one look at them and handed them back without speaking. They looked like snapshots and they were mostly of naked people having oral sex.  Those snapshots were pretty graphic. He came around to my side of the desk and at first I tried to look away, but he told me to look at the pictures. Something about him scared me and so I did as I was told and looked at the pictures. He slowly flipped through them, and I looked at them one by one. I was horrified and terrified, but I didn’t turn away. I thought if I was strong, if I showed no reaction, that he would lose interest in me. I thought that if I just pretended that it wasn’t bothering me, he would not ask me to do those things to him. And then another one of the salesman joined in on this humiliating event. They were egging each other on, asking me if I had “ever done that” and asking if “I would like that” or if I would like to “do that”.  I was scared to death, but I never even flinched. I just kept looking at the pictures as he put one behind the other.  I was sure that I had to stay neutral to be safe. (Today that reminds me of how and why I’d learned that staying neutral would be the safest choice.)

There was a hot tub out back at the real estate office. They tried to talk me into going in it with them. They said that I didn’t need a bathing suit. They told me I could go in my underwear if that made me more comfortable. (like I could possibly EVER be comfortable in a hot tub with two disgusting older married men who showed me porn pictures)  They laughed at how uncomfortable I was when they were around me. I had this one boss there that I liked, but I didn’t tell on those men. I didn’t tell my boss and I didn’t tell my mother. I didn’t even think about telling! (Today that reminds me of how I learned that telling wouldn’t help me anyway so why bother. I was way too young to have to deal with all this stuff alone.)

They never let up on me until I finally had the guts to quit that job before they could complete their version of the grooming process.

I did not know what “sexual harassment” was. I didn’t know what sexual harassment was in the work place, or at school, or with boyfriends.  I did not know that what these nasty older men were doing was illegal. I didn’t know I had rights. I especially didn’t know why the hell I froze and just looked at the pictures! The thing that stuck out the most in my memory was that I froze and complied. I may have even laughed trying to be tough and make them think I wasn’t scared to death. I may have even mumbled the answers to some of the questions.  

And I was haunted by the question to myself about what I would have done if they had forced me to go in that hot tub with them. What if they had pushed me harder? What would I have done if they had demanded that I go? Deep down I was pretty sure I knew the answer…

Silence is consent and all I could think about was that I looked at the pictures and didn’t say no. I didn’t try to stop them. I didn’t report them. I felt as though I had actually gone along with them. For years I beat myself up over that day and the fact that I didn’t “do anything” about it. I didn’t stand up for myself. I didn’t call them dirty pigs. I didn’t say NO. 

I was so angry at myself kicking myself with questions like “Why did I freeze like that”? I bombarded myself with berating statements like “I should have…..” and “why didn’t I?”  It was many years later that I even considered that the TRUTH is that both those men should have been charged and would have been held accountable for the crimes they committed against me. This thing they were doing  was sexual abuse.

I was in my forties when I finally learned that “freezing” is what many children do when they are being abused and overpowered by an adult. I had learned to freeze and dissociate when I was just over two years old. It had become one of my main coping methods. I learned very young that compliance was the safest way to go. I had learned not to react, not to fight and I had learned that fighting or reacting would only make it worse for me. 

What I hadn’t realized as I grew up was that I would continue to believe that inaction is the best course of action well after I was old enough to say no. I could have gotten those men in trouble. I could have called the police, but I had been trained to accept unacceptable behaviour. I had been taught that I was not going to be believed OR protected. I had no reason to believe that was ever going to change.

I continued beating myself until I realized the truth about why I chose passive submission most of the times I had been abused from the age of 13 or 14 onwards.  There was a conflict in my belief system. As a grown woman I understood that silence was consent; what I didn’t realize was that my compliance and silence was also the childhood coping method that worked for me.  Silence and compliance was learned behaviour and the only way that I knew and since it was the only way all those years growing up, why would I try or even think to try another way just because I got older? Logically I told myself I “should have known better or should have done something” but the truth was that what worked for me best as a child always won out. I would freeze, dissociate and comply.  

I didn’t tell on those men because I had been groomed from a very young age not to tell. I didn’t fight because I had been taught from a very young age that fighting would only make it worse. I didn’t do anything because I didn’t know that I had any rights or any choices. I didn’t really learn my rights or choices until I was over 40 years old. My power had been taken from me from a very young age and I since I had never had any power in my own life, I didn’t know that I could ever have any.

Today, I know the truth about rights and choices. Today I have my power back.

Please share your thoughts. This post can be applied to any situation where adults misused their power over another person.

There is freedom on the other side of broken,

Darlene Ouimet

This is going to be an exciting year for Emerging from Broken. If you would like to receive updates about events, news about my upcoming book or other newsworthy updates, please subscribe to “get the latest news” button at the top of the blog on the right sidebar. Don’t forget to check your email and confirm your subscription.

Related Posts ~ Adult Victims of Child Abuse Still need to be Heard

Dysfunctional Family Law and Family Belief Systems

Effects of Abuse. Guilt, Shame and Solutions

unhelpful directives

People always told me things like “deal with it” and “get over it” and “put it behind you” They always seemed so impatient with me and even exasperated that I was still “there” and not over it.

Has anyone ever given you instructions on HOW to “deal with it”? Have you been giving information about HOW to get over it, that didn’t include statements to which you have to keep asking “how do I do that”?

Just get over it  (HOW?)  Just put it behind you. (HOW?) ~ “give it to God”. (HOW?) To which the answer was “Have faith” (HOW?) well you get the picture.

I was told to accept things with statements like “nothing happens by mistake” And while I totally love that expression when I was in the right place at just the right time and suddenly met the person who was going to change my life, what about when someone uses that expression “nothing happens by mistake” when you are trying to comprehend the leftover emotions from child abuse? That expression becomes a way to try to make you grateful for having been abused!

What about people who tell me that I would not be the person that I am today if I had not been abused; that the abuse made me a stronger person. (again that I should be grateful that I was abused) But the truth is that I will never know how I would have turned out. I don’t know how strong I would have been if I had never been abused.  Perhaps my brilliant mind would have been capable of finding the cure for cancer or creating brilliant best selling thrillers instead of writing about overcoming depressions and child abuse. I will never know what my gifts could have been used for and although I love what I do, I will never be grateful for the abuse just because it enables me to make a difference in the world now.

Perhaps even God has a different idea about this whole thing. I wonder if He would suggest any of those lame and unhelpful directives.

What if dealing with it is embracing the justifiable anger and rage for the damage that was done against you and for the time that you lost out of your life because of it. What if dealing with it is acknowledging to yourself that it was not fair, not right and a rotten horrible and usually illegal CRIME that was forced onto you? (and remember that emotional abuse and neglect are crimes too) What if dealing with it is feeling all the feelings that you were never given permission to feel when the damage was done?

What if dealing with it IS talking about it? What if dealing with it means talking about every little detail as many times as you needed to state them, for as long as it takes until you understand and realize that you didn’t deserve the treatment that you got. What if dealing with it means you talk about until someone else agrees with you, that you were unjustly treated, without telling you to “get over it” or “put it behind you?” and thereby validated your pain by not trying to get you to ignore it because the “truth is” that it makes them uncomfortable.

What if you were not told to “get over it”?

What if dealing with it meant confronting the person who did it to you or confronting the person who ignored what happened to you if that was what you needed to do in order to get over it?

The real message out there in the world is “don’t deal with it.” The real message is sweep it under the carpet where it will fester and grow bigger and bigger and manifest itself as depression and mental illness, dissociated identity, multiple personality, bi polar disorder, borderline personality disorder, post traumatic stress disorder and yes, even narcissistic personality disorder. 

“Put it behind you” is the same as saying “don’t deal with it”. Stop talking about it means “don’t deal with it. Get over it really means “don’t deal with it” Anger is a sin means “don’t deal with it” Don’t think about it, don’t acknowledge what happened to you…although they don’t realize that what they are saying is actually “don’t deal with it and let it slowly kill you.  Let it take whatever ever small part of you that is still left”.

Not dealing with it was like denying that it was ever a problem.  And the truth can only set you free if you face it.

You will never find any of those recommendations written by me in this website.  It was dealing with this stuff, facing all of it and talking about all of it until I finally believed that I was not the problem that cleared the fog and opened the doors of my prison. It was in talking about it enough that I finally realized that I did not cause any of it to happen to me, that I finally overcame it and took my life back. It was by looking at it long enough to realize what I had come to believe about myself because of what happened to me, that I was able to overturn all those false messages that I had accepted as truth.

I think we have been living under the false definition of the phrase “deal with it”

So here in Emerging from Broken I say “deal with it” in every way that you can! Your LIFE depends on it!

Freedom is on the other side of broken;

Darlene Ouimet

I saw a poster on facebook.  It reminded me of the extremely foggy place that I emerged from.  It reminded me of the lies that I told myself in order to resist looking at the truth about my life. Believing this type of statement, (or trying to) became a big part of how I survived. It was also how I beat myself up. 

The poster states: “What screws us up most in life is the picture in our heads of how it’s supposed to be”

~ Survival thinking was: “As soon as I can achieve this standard and realize that my own thinking and expectations are the problem then, I will be able to put the problem (which is really all in my head) behind me.”

~ Self abusive thinking was: “I am a failure at getting over the past because I am the one who is wrong about it; I should be able to realize that my expectations are way out of line.”

Again, The poster states: “What screws us up most in life is the picture in our heads of how it’s supposed to be”

This poster is intended to be motivational and inspirational. The poster is inferring that “fantasy thinking” is the root of the problem. That unreasonable visions of how it should have been “screws us up”.  That this fictional thought in my head is what screwed ME up.

I have heard this type of teaching in 12 step programs, self help books, churches and religious teachings and from countless people.  I learned and tried to accept that my problem was that I longed for some sort of “perfect family” like we saw on television and that there is no such family. I learned to tell myself to “get real” and get over the past. Just “let it go”. I learned and tried to accept that my “expectations” got in the way of my ability to accept reality as though the reality that I was trying to accept was actually good.  As though the bad stuff wasn’t bad but that I had some unreasonable wish for how it was “supposed to be.”  I was conditioned and brainwashed to believe that I was making a big deal over “nothing” and that the breakdown of my mental health and self esteem issues were not only of my own making but also my own fault, my “failure” and my weakness”.  I learned that I had “a problem” instead of that this was all caused FROM a problem that had nothing to do with my choice.

The fact is that my reality was not good. If what screwed me up in life was the picture in my head of how it was supposed to be, then what screwed me up was that I thought I was supposed to be safe and protected. I thought I was supposed to be loved and even nurtured. I thought that I should not have had to live in fear of the next beating or the next sexual assault.  I thought THAT was how it was supposed to be. 

I was caught in a fog spin by these so called inspirational and motivational quotes.  These kinds of sayings and quotes were the things that I lived by. I would have posted this quote 10 years ago without blinking an eye. These so called motivational and inspirational quotes supported me in escaping the truth of what my life was really like.  As long as I was telling myself that it wasn’t “that bad” and that I had the wrong idea about what it should have been like, I didn’t face what actually had in fact happened to me.

And what had in fact happened is NOT the way it SHOULD have been.

It is not motivating or inspiring to try to convince people that they have a misconception about their own lives.  It causes further damage. It adds to the trauma that being mistreated and devalued already caused. It is not helpful when people or organizations try to encourage people to move forward before the actual truth has been validated.  It is abusive to invalidate the truth by teaching that facing it or talking about it is the same as whining and even the same as lying about it.

Facing the fact that things in my life were NOT the way that they should have been was one of the first things that gave me hope for recovery from the issues that I struggled with overcoming. Being told and then realizing myself that what happened to me was wrong, that is was child abuse and emotional neglect, and that it was not something that I should try to accept as being “meant to be” or something that “made me stronger” or fabrications and exaggerations that were “all in my head” helped to set me free. Understanding how much these beliefs held me back was like silky healing balm on festering wounds.

Overturning these beliefs became keys in the rusty locks of the prison I had been trapped in since childhood.  My childhood (and because of this brainwashing, continuing on into adulthood) was NOT the way it SHOULD have been.  It was NOT my weakness, my imagination or fantasy thinking that was the problem; it was that the things that happened to me were WRONG and those things CAUSED the problems. 

I was screwed up because of the way things actually were. 

I found wholeness and freedom by facing the way that things actually were.

NOTE: I spent over 25 years trying to change my thinking about what was wrong with me by accepting that it was ME.  It only took me 3 years to find freedom and wholeness by facing the root causes of my struggles.  

Please share your thoughts and insights with me and the other readers here.  Remember that you do not have to use your real name in the comment form. Your email address will not be shared and only the name you choose will show up in the comment thread.

Exposing Truth one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet                                       

Related Posts ~ The Problem with Statements like “Get Over It” 

~When Inspirational Material triggers Self Blame

Emerging from Broken on Facebook