Archive for dissociative identity disorder
Depression and Recovery from Mental Health Struggles
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I have talked a lot about taking a look at the truth in order to realize how I arrived with repeated depression, broken, exhausted and ready to throw my life away in my early forties. I had to look at what happened to me through new lenses. I had to realize that I was innocent of blame for the mess in my childhood that resulted in my adult life still being a mess. There is a gap between childhood and adulthood that I discovered is a very common place where many of us get stuck. We reach a certain age in our early twenties and we are told that we are adults and we are responsible for our lives. Stop blaming others, get over it and get on with it. But no one helped me sort it out when I was a kid. I had been treated like I was less important than the adults in my life. SO how was I supposed to suddenly know my value, get over “it” and get on with it? As a child I had this sense of having been abandoned ~ my feelings didn’t matter, I was not taken care of and I did not grow up “properly” as a result. No one helped me with this mess, a mess that I was innocent of creating, BUT nevertheless, it was still my mess. It was finally clear that no one was going to rescue me. It was clear that my family was not going to suddenly wake up and love me. No one was going to suddenly realize my value. It was up to me.
I did not realize that I was a victim. I didn’t like that word and didn’t really understand it. I thought it meant that I was a whiner. I thought a victim was someone who complained all the time about the world and it’s people and about what a tough hand of cards they had been dealt. I wasn’t a whiner. I grew up in a world where depression has a stigma. Deep down no matter how much I heard that depression was common, that many struggled, yada yada yada, there was a stigma surrounding it and I believed it was a weakness. I didn’t want to admit that I was on anti depressants; I would have been seen as weak, lacking in faith, and like everything else in my life, I must be doing something wrong. I tried positive thinking, affirmation, bible study, self help books and seminars. They all worked for a while, but nothing had a lasting effect. I was exhausted. The depressions that I had dealt with since I was ten years old were getting worse and more frequent. I was losing the fight. I felt like I was being held under water, struggling to breathe, fighting to have a voice and a place in this world. And I was losing.
It was time to step back and take a look at my life. I put all the puzzle pieces on the table. The mess was overwhelming. I didn’t think I could face it, I didn’t think that I could sort it out. There was so much confusion, so many mixed messages, so much that I had accepted the blame for and I was so tired. I had to go back to beginning and realize where my emotional growth was stunted. I had to face one thing at a time and break that one thing down. There was abuse that resulted in destructive coping methods. I had been focusing on the destructive coping methods, even questioning WHY I had depression as though that too was my fault and beating myself up for the way that I dealt with everything. I saw myself as a failure because I looked at my life through the expectations of the very people who held me under that water. I had to make my beginning and at first it was only a decision to try. I started with one thing and was willing to look at one abusive situation in my childhood. My therapist chose my first memory of an abusive trauma to take a look at first. I laid it out on the table piece by piece and looked at it the way it happened, bit by bit. I revealed every thought I had that I remembered including the baggage of self blame. I had not even been conscious that I had self blame. I dumped all the thoughts about how I could have prevented it, how I must have done something to cause it onto the table as I focused on this one event. I talked about the adults’ expressions, the eye movement, the secrecy, all of which helped me understand that I was innocent. I recognized the beginning of my dissociative identity disorder. I felt the horror of what had happened to me and for the first time I realized that it happened “TO ME”. I faced the pain of child abuse, and came to understand that I had been wronged.
One event at a time, one small snapshot of truth, one little breakthrough, one new way of looking at it, one little realization and then another.
This was the beginning of Emerging from Broken ~ I invite you to contribute to this post in any way that you wish.
Darlene Ouimet
Dissociated Identity as a Coping Method for Mental Health
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When we find ourselves facing our mental health struggles, we usually realize that avoiding feelings is one of the biggest reasons that we develop coping methods. Sometimes avoiding feelings is the only way to survive the trauma. I realized when I was in my healing process that my dissociated identity disorder was one of the ways that I coped with everything. I had fragmented or broken into alter personalities so that I didn’t really have to feel because “they” (the alters) did it for me.
The way that I understand how this fragmenting takes place is that when a child experiences a traumatic event that is way too much to cope with, a new personality is born to take the memories and feelings and is in a way, separate from the core personality. In my case these other personalities began to deal with certain situations for me. For instance I did a lot of traveling in my twenties, and there was one alter that took over for all of my airport adventures. I didn’t realize that I had this other personality, but I did realize that I was completely different when I traveled. I had all this amazing confidence and wondered where the heck it came from. To this day since I have become whole, I feel very weird and uncomfortable in airports.
Different personalities took care of different situations. That was how dissociated identity disorder worked for me. When I got scared or even just uncomfortable, I disconnected from myself and the situation, and an alter personality took over for me. The purpose of “the alters” was to take care of me, my fears and my feelings. I was no longer able to deal with life, so they got me through. They took on the feelings and the memories as though they were separate from the real me.
There is an upside to it; these alter personalities got me through, they were how I survived. “They” dealt with everything for me, and as I got older, I even recognized a few of them and appreciated what I thought were just radically different sides of me. They got me places that I was afraid to go, they helped me do things that I was afraid to do.
There was also a downside to it; my life was a mess, I was not happy and the bottom line was that really, even with the alters, I still couldn’t cope. In becoming aware of some of my personalities, I was afraid of a few of them and the things that I-they would do often scared me. I was confused a lot of the time and had a lot of noise and chatter going on in my head. I never felt like me and I had these imposter issues. Sometimes I did things that “I” would never do, which was really confusing.
When I look back on my life with multiple personalities, it all looks very hazy as though I was on drugs or something. It was crazy and exhausting and when I got married and started having babies, I was so afraid of my strange behaviour that I completely shut down and eventually I never wanting to do anything or go anywhere and the depressions that I had on and off for most of my life got worse.
When I went into therapy, finally willing to face my dissociative behaviour I was terrified to learn how to live without dissociating but I was also sick of being sick and confused all the time. I had lost hope of ever living without depression and I hadn’t considered depression or dissociation as being types of coping methods. In a way I felt defeated, and in that defeat I think I surrendered the armour that I had built around myself, the ways that I coped and the walls that I had built around me, to protect my real self from the world. I gave up and I think it went a long way towards healing.
It turns out that coping methods are a lot of work! In the end it is far easier to just be one whole person. By facing the past and feeling those feelings I was able to heal. The reason that I used so many coping methods was really about the scared child inside me. I was still viewing the world as a powerless child because due to the circumstances of my upbringing, I was not able to grow up properly. By talking a look at the belief systems that I had adopted, I was able to go back and re-parent myself so that I could grow up and begin to view the world as an adult. When some of the wreckage of the past was exposed and seen for what it really was and the building of a new foundation was underway, eventually I didn’t need all those coping methods and my real life began.
Keep striving to go forward ~ You are worth it!
Darlene Ouimet
If you would like to contribute to this post, as always I invite you to leave your comments.
Sharing Interesting Information on a Saturday
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I wrote a post about learning to love myself for Dr. Kathleen Young’s Blog, “Treating Trauma in Chicago”, and it dawned on me that I should mention it on my blog too!
In the post I attempt to articulate the process of how I learned to love myself after 40 years of mental health problems, low self esteem, dissociated identity disorder and multiple depressions. It wasn’t easy to fit that into a one document but I gave it my best effort and I hope that you will read it.
My Post “Learning To Love Myself ~ The Beauty in the Broken“
I would also like to say; Welcome back Carla!
Carla has been on vacation in Florida with her family this past 9 days and she is coming back tonight! I have missed her and look forward to her return!
This past week Carla was also a guest blogger on the blog ”Coming out of the Trees“. I encourage you to visit Marie’s blog and read Carla’s post “The Guilt Sentinel”
Patricia Singleton, author of the blog “Spiritual Journey of a Lightworker” is a regular reader and commenter of ours here on Emerging from Broken. Patricia is an incest survivor and recently did a wonderful radio interview with radio talk show host Cyrus Webb ~ Conversations Live~ where she tells her powerful story. You can listen to the replay here;
Cyrus Webb interviews Patricia Singleton on Conversations Live
Enjoy!
Darlene Ouimet
I wasn’t Really Old Enough to Know Better
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My last post “The Twisted Accountability Tactic & How it Works” caused a few comments using the phrase “old enough to know better” or “I should have known better”. This is an interesting expression; one that I beat myself up with for a very long time. I didn’t understand my choices or why I made them. I did things that were destructive to myself, my self esteem; often they were dangerous and even life threatening. It wasn’t until my therapist explained to me several times what happens to a child who is taught that their value is not as high as the value of the adult that is devaluing them. This is what had happened to me.
My beliefs about myself and my self-worth and the lack of value that I felt about myself actually left me with limited choices as an adult. I didn’t really understand what it meant that I had a choice. I beat myself up for things that happened and choices that I made because I knew that some of those things were wrong, and yet… why the heck was I doing them? What was I thinking? These were questions that I asked myself regularly from the age of 15 or 16 and well into my adulthood.
How the heck did it happen to me? How did I get myself into the situation? I know this is very complicated to understand, but that is why I write what I write. ~ I believe that one of the keys to freedom and wholeness is in realizing why we “didn’t know better” when we “should have known better”. Why we seemed to do things even as an adult that made us feel so bad about ourselves and why we chose to do them even when we knew deep down that we would likely come to regret it.
I could not stop blaming myself until I understood the whole progression from childhood and how my belief system formed and how I came to place such little value on myself.
In therapy I started to reveal my history and talk about the things that had happened to me; things that that I had taken the blame for and believed that I had brought on myself. Since a big part of my coping method was dissociating, I spoke about my past as though it wasn’t me anyway, however somewhere deep down I knew that these things were about me and I started to have to connect to myself. This was very painful but it enabled me to almost look at myself through new eyes. Not the disconnected eyes of the alter personalities, but as though I was hearing my story for the first time, realizing that if it were not MY story, I would have been really horrified by it. So why wasn’t I horrified by it when it was my story?
My therapist really helped me to see that when a child is devalued and squished down to a level of non importance due to lack of attention, the wrong kind of attention or abuse, then that child will automatically place that little value on himself or herself. I was defined with little value as a child, therefore where was I going to learn my value as I grew up if not in the wrong places, wrong situations, which once again lead to wrong beliefs? (So the value that I placed on myself was actually not the true value!) This is learned behavior, as well as a coping method. How could a child blame the adults? We don’t have the frame of reference for that when we are young. So it is then very easy to grow up believing that we get what we deserve, and remember, we have been groomed to grow up believing that we deserve to be treated less valuable and even to believe that we are bad.
Because I came to understand that there is a direct connection to our childhoods and how we act in adulthood I was able to re wire my childhood beliefs. I realized why I had not been old enough to know better when I was an adult because my emotional growth had been seriously stunted. I had been defined by the actions of others.
I had to dig deep into that whole system, set the lies straight for myself, and then redefine myself this time with the truth. I had to own my value; my original value. It is a process, but it is amazing!
What say you? I would love your comments and feedback about this concept.
In Truth and Recovery!
Darlene Ouimet
The Beginning ~ Emerging from Broken
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I have been writing some pretty in depth posts about how the belief system gets messed up and altered and how the lies that we owned as the truth have shaped our belief system and imprisoned us in falseness. And I have been getting emails and questions about the “overcoming part”. There are many parts to the overcoming part which is commonly known as “the process”. In the coming weeks I hope to shed a bit more light on this.
Each part of the process has its own difficulty and each part has its breakthroughs and celebrations. The point is to pursue wholeness at each stage; to keep going forward. To keep pressing on because a little bit of freedom is just over that next wall and a little bit more freedom is over the wall after that. A little bit of freedom, a little bit more wholeness, and so on and so on. That is the process of emerging from broken.
Most of my adult life I’ve been what I refer to as a “truth seeker” or “a seeker”, which to me is the same thing. I studied many religions. I studied inspirational speakers and teachers and their work. I studied Greek and Hebrew word origins for 8 years in precept bible studies and did a lot of homework every day. I felt guilty that I didn’t feel purposeful, that I didn’t feel like I was okay or that I fit in and belonged. I practiced gratitude, and felt guilty that I deep down I was unhappy; I practiced positive thinking, I prayed every day but I never felt really right. I remember asking a therapist that I was seeing for one of my major depressions, “when am I going to just get over this stuff, (the past) I have been trying to get over it for 20 years.” He said that the abuse was part of who I was. That I might never get over it.
He might as well have shot me right there. I took his answer to mean that there was no hope that I would ever be free of the past that secretly drug me down into the depths of despair on a regular basis. My past messed with my self esteem, my self worth and my productivity as a person. It had become who I was, I was someone who had been abused. I was someone who had used alcohol and illegal drugs to cope with life. I was someone who struggled with depression and dissociative behaviours. I was someone who identified with being “unfit” and “invalid”. I was “used”, dirty, and shame filled. I was really tired. These things defined me.
I wanted to be defined differently but could not seem to ever get past the past. I wanted to be “washed clean” and all that great stuff that I heard when I went to churches, but it didn’t seem to happen for me. I could not have tried harder. For well over 20 years I was preached at, prayed over went to self help programs, seminars, conferences, well you name it, I tried it. The dirty feeling didn’t go away for very long; it always came back.
I felt like I had to hide all these feelings because everyone else said that they were “saved” or free or healed but never said exactly what that meant and I thought I must be doing something wrong, or that I was just plain ungrateful. No matter how often I picked myself up, my past seemed to be there, and I was getting really tired. But one day, on perhaps the darkest day before the dawn, I met someone who gave me hope. I met a therapist who had a different way of looking at things then other therapists I had been to. I was told that I could get over my past, I just had to learn how. I had to face it, dig down deep into my past and expose the lies that I had accepted as truth, and replace them with real truth. And so it began.
Stay tuned I will continue….. Darlene 
Where Does Self Worth Come From?
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I received the following question from a reader;
“Darlene, I wish I would wake up one morning with this deep sense of my own self worth. How did that happen for you? Was it something you had to think about enough before you felt it, or did you just feel it right away? This is where I’m struggling. I still so easily cave in to someone else’s opinion of me. And I see that valuing myself is at the heart of my entire future of healing and thriving.”
Dear Reader;
This was a long process for me; in fact this might be the definition of the 2nd process. ( I have come to see my process in two parts: the first part where I got the help I needed for my mental health issues and became a whole person and the second part where I learned how to live in that wholeness)
I certainly didn’t wake up one morning feeling a sense of my worth and identity and resolving never to be defined by anyone else ever again! As I have written before, after digging deeply into the root causes of my dissociative identity disorder and chronic depression, I began sorting out the truth from the false about myself with the help of my therapist. This was what I call part one of my recovery.
Next I learned to listen to the little voice in my head that caused me to doubt myself all the time.
In one of the self help programs that I used to be in, I had been taught to ignore the nagging self doubts and little messages of fear in my head. In my process of permanent recovery, I learned to listen to that voice and even respond to it. This was very frightening in the beginning because I was afraid that the voice was actually true!
First of all, I identified whose voice it really was. When I first started to learn how to do this, the voice I would identify would not be my own, but would be my mothers, or brothers, or an ex boyfriend. I would ask the voice what else it had to say to me, and I would keep listening to it until it had nothing else to say. The deeper that I went with this process, the more illogical and childlike the things that would come to my mind (the voice) would sound.
This process made me realize where my low self esteem and limiting beliefs came from in the first place, and also made me realize that most of my fears and beliefs were no longer valid. The more that I repeated this process, the more I realized that I was the one in my own way and that underneath those other voices, was my own voice telling me that I was not really valuable, or loveable or capable etc.
I realized soon enough that this was the core of my survival system and that I had used it since I was very young. My inner world was so rooted in self protection that deep down I was afraid to define myself as worthy, capable, confident, beautiful, and smart- all those true words about me- in case my new life of wholeness was going to be dangerous! Those voices and beliefs were a form of protection, but they were also counterproductive to my new life of freedom and they were holding me back in the past where I was unhappy, and broken.
This is a hard question to answer in one post, but I am sure I will be expanding on it in the future. I thank you for asking and welcome anyone that wishes to remain anonymous to either use a fake name or nick name in the comments section, or use the contact page and your questions will be answered this way.
~Wishing you the best of mental health!
~Darlene Ouimet
Accomplishments~Emerging from Broken is off to a Great Start!
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Happy New Year!
~On January 1st, this blog was officially one month old and I am really pleased with the progress we have made. Here are a few highlights this past couple days.
~Google is picking up our posts the same day we write them, which means that we are getting searched frequently by the search engines.
~We got listed! Have you seen the blog Third of a lifetime, by Sarah Olson? She has a new Dissociation Blog Showcase and Emerging from Broken made the list!
Sarah has compiled a great resource here if you are looking for reading material or information about Dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder or Multiple Personality Disorder. There are some great mental health blogs listed whose focus is on other mental health issues too, so be sure to check it out.
~For those of you that have websites and blogs, have you ever checked your ranking with Alexa? Alexa is a website that ranks websites in order of popularity. For instance Google is number one, Facebook is number two and You Tube is number three and the list goes on.
There are over 5 billion websites on the internet and Alexa ranks them in order of importance. I have no idea how this works, but I am excited to tell you that this blog, Emerging from Broken, is ranked at 4,304,599 in just one month.
Thanks to all our readers and to those of you who have used social media to share our blog and tweet our posts! Without all of you, these accomplishments would not have happened!
I am excited about 2010. I am passionate about living in wholeness, equality and truth. I am excited about the message that complete recovery from mental health issues and living life to the fullest is possible. I am looking forward to meeting you on the journey!
Wishing you all great mental health in 2010
~Darlene Ouimet
Christmas Gratitude, Turkey Soup and Great Mental Health
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Each year that I continue to pursue living in truth and wholeness, Christmas just gets better. This year I am filled with awe and gratitude for how wonderful our family Christmas time was. When I went through my process of emerging from broken, my family got dragged into it too. There were a few tough years; many things had to change. As a broken mother, I had some hurt children to help heal after I healed, but I have made this my priority and I am committed to the process. This Christmas, everything was exceptionally marvellous and we celebrated with all the people that we love and the people that love us back. No obligation, no false definition of love, no bull. I could not have dreamed a better 3 days then the ones that we just had.
As it seems to be with celebrations, I ate too much rich food, so today I decided to make turkey soup and serve a lighter supper of homemade soup and fresh baked buns. I love to boil the leftover turkey bones in a big pot of water and chopped onion, simmering them for hours, into a deep rich broth. It takes time to make great turkey soup. There is a process involved. If I try to rush it, or get impatient, my soup will end up mediocre and not fantastic. I find a fantastic soup more satisfying, and always worth the extra effort that I put into it. Later on I will strain the bones and boiled onions out and I will add fresh onions, chopped veggies, leftover gravy and barley and continue the process of creating something special for our evening meal.
As I stirred the broth and thought about the process of cooking from scratch, it struck me how similar my personal recovery process has been. I set some goals, and made myself a priority. I didn’t rush it; I was willing to put the time and effort in. With expert guidance from my gifted therapist, I searched for the truth and the other components that I needed to get me started solidly on the road to freedom and wholeness. I discarded the lies that I had believed my whole life; that my feelings were wrong, that I was crazy, that my expectations were too high. I discovered my value and owned it. I learned to love myself, and that same love is where my love for others grew from. I kept going forward, confident that I would get a fantastic result one day if I stayed in pursuit of my desire. And the day came when I knew that I would not struggle with chronic depression and dissociated identity disorder anymore. I knew that my efforts had paid off and I am a fantastic result.
Wishing everyone a wonderful Christmas Season! May all your dreams come true.
Love Darlene
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
