What “Freedom Rocks” Means to Me by Lauralee Hunter Rivet

Freedom ROCKS ~ Lauralee

Nobody grows up wishing their life would be hell; we expect it to be normal. Well, mine wasn’t. Let’s just say I went to hell and back MANY times. My life was never normal; I grew up around drugs, alcohol and had an incestuous father who molested me. I remember wanting to die, and yes I did try to die but I guess God didn’t want me yet. I hated God at times for putting me in this situation, I blamed him. But that was wrong, because no matter how bad your life is and I can attest to this 100%, you CAN get out of it. There is ALWAYS a way. I never turned to drugs and alcohol, I got off the merry go round and so can you.

I thought of the throwing the rock idea one day after my brother died on October 30th, 2011. The “family” called me, hours later of course, to tell me about my brother. I met with my mother and sister first; after 10 years without any contact with them it was hard. I cried, went to the funeral home, paid for the funeral and then I was in “mother” role again like I had been all my young adult life. I took care of my mother, slept there with her, moved her to a new apartment and took care of her for a month. Then the drama started. My sister who likes to call me princess, I think she has a lot of jealousy towards me, (she is the eldest and I am the youngest one in my family) would talk about my mother and my mother would talk about her and I felt like I had just gone to a gun fight armed with a knife. I was back to the same crap as before. I couldn’t do it anymore; I was done with being talked about and used.

Finally I said to my “mother”; “if you knew I was dying would you come to my house this year for Christmas or would you go to my sister’s?”  She said “well obviously to yours” then I said “well call your daughter and tell her you’ll be at my place”

Her response was silence at first, then the big excuses. And that is when I knew I had spent 10 years, waiting, wanting, hoping and wishing my mother could just love me and validate certain things. Thank God this all happened; not my brother dying of course but the rest and it may sound crazy but it made me FINALLY realize that it`s just NEVER going to happen. I no longer waste time hoping and wishing for that. I don’t need negative toxic people in my life.

So I thought about how I could get rid of certain people in my life and out of my mind. The first thing that came to mind was the thought of tying a key to a rock and then throwing it in the river, lake, ocean or whatever body of water is close signifying closing the door and throwing away the key. Then I thought about pollution, so I dropped the key idea and am going to write on the rock (I may need the Berlin wall haha) the names of all the toxic people that I no longer want in my life and mind.

On the weekend of Freedom ROCKS (May 12th and 13^th  2012) I am going to take my rock, say a little prayer, think about why I am doing this and then release the rock and all of my emotions towards those people and be free of them. Now this may sound crazy to some people but for me it’s a way of releasing that bond and getting rid of the negativity of certain people.

After I throw my freedom rock into the water, I going to stand back and take a deep breath and let myself feel the weight of the world fall off of my shoulders. I am not sure what type of emotions I will feel; I will keep all of you posted of course but I am sure that the emotions will be strong. I look forward to the day this happens. I am taking my daughters and husband with me to watch and experience this with me. This “throwing of the rock” is very important for me; some may say “well it`s not going to change anything in your life” but they are wrong, for in my mind, and the mind is pretty strong, it will change my life. All those toxic people will be at the bottom of the river for me, where they can never hurt me again.

As I said, I promise to keep you posted here on Emerging from Broken to let you know how it felt and went for me.

Throwing the “freedom rock’ can and will have a million different meanings for other people;  as long as it brings you comfort and releases some anger, resentment, bitterness or hurt then it did its job for you.

I wish all of you nothing but peace, happiness and love in your lives, and remember ~ YOU CAN.

A very wise lady here on Emerging from Broken gave me an AHA moment during one of the low points in my life; She told me a story about the crab in the bucket; The crab is trying to crawl out, to get up and away but the other crabs are just pulling it back down because they don’t want anyone to escape to the freedom they themselves would love to have. All the crabs clamoring to get some freedom, each one pulling the other one down as they try to rise higher themselves.

I realized that the crabs were my family. I managed with perseverance to get myself out of that bucket and run as fast as my little legs would take me. I am the little crab that could, the little crab that did and the little crab that would. Thank you once again for that visualization Darlene, you are the best.

Lauralee Hunter Rivet

As always, please feel free to leave your comments for Lauralee or about what Freedom ROCKS could mean to you.  For more information about Freedom ROCKS and how you can participate see the Freedom ROCKS “about page” here. Stay tuned for more posts and info in the next week or so ~ Darlene

Related Posts “My Mother doesn’t love me and the Process of Grieving”

The greatest Adventrue is Healing

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

Navajo Proverb: You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

In the March Article “The Unheard Invisible Child; Being Seen and Finding my Voice” here in Emerging from Broken, a commenter asked a very popular question.  Here is the query;

“Now that I’ve found my voice, I have this strong desire to voice my anger towards my family. To tell them that they are wrong with how they have mistreated me. However, I don’t want to put myself in a position to be hurt again. Based on past experience, they will not hear me and will deny the truth & blame me for misinterpreting them. It’s been that way since childhood.

I’m an adult now and I deserve equal respect but like you said I have to “give up being heard from the people that silenced me in the first place”… I want to assert myself directly to my mom for something hurtful she recently told me, but what will this accomplish?… I will not be heard. Asserting myself and not being heard is insulting! However, if I don’t assert myself, isn’t that sending them the message that they can say whatever they want to me with no regard for my feelings? Please clarify…”   

Here are my thoughts expanded from my original reply;

I constantly hurt myself by accepting devaluing treatment from other people. I didn’t realize that it had become normal and acceptable to me. For instance take the phrase in the query; “I’m an adult now, and I deserve equal respect.” The false belief in that statement is when we become adults we deserve equal respect but the truth is that we always did deserve equal respect, even as children. Respect and authority are not the same thing. Adults have more authority over children, but in the true definition of love ~ respect and equal value have nothing to do with age or social status. 

When I finally accepted that the fact that they never heard me before was a pretty good indication that they were not going to hear me now, I decided to stick up for me; not so that they MIGHT hear me but because I needed to validate myself. It wasn’t so much about asserting myself. It was more about empowering myself. For the first time in my life I knew that I had a choice in the relationship with them. That brought a new clarity; I realized they had a choice too; they could try to hear me or they would reject me again. They could choose relationship with me which includes mutual respect or no relationship with me which is rejection.

Deep down I was afraid of rejection because I thought rejection would serve as proof of my biggest fear; that they didn’t really care and that I really was “nothing”, just like their actions were pointing to all along.  Accepting abusive and disrespectful treatment without question helped me avoid the actual truth about their actions.  But the truth set me free. The fear was never as bad as the reality.

On this journey to emotional healing and recovery the boundary is drawn in the heart. (which means that when I got it, they got it) When my family and friends knew that I was no longer going to bow down to them, many of them withdrew. They didn’t want me to change; they didn’t want me to regard myself as equally valuable. I realized that in their view there was really no relationship in the first place unless I was beneath them. That truth stung but it also clarified things for me and it spoke clearly; their actions and attitudes highlighted their disregard for me as equally valuable to themselves.

I was unwilling to live defined as beneath anyone anymore.

Not speaking up for me was sending the message that they could treat me how ever they wanted and I decided that those days were over. I made my new self empowering decision and I decided to take a chance on the outcome of standing up for myself so that I could live in freedom from the bondage they had me in. Taking a chance did not depend on them finally hearing me but I did have to decide to accept the outcome either way.

So much of my recovery and overcoming the past has been about looking at things differently. I knew my mother would not value anything I had to say in standing up for myself so I didn’t speak for her to hear me. When I said that I had to give up being heard by the people that silenced me in the first place I meant that I had to believe that being heard by them was the answer. I had to look at what I wanted to accomplish in a new way. I spoke so I would hear me. I had been focused for so many years on the end goal being for “them” to hear me. I think I started to get a glimmer of understanding that even if they heard me, the damage would not be fixed without doing some personal healing work. When I changed my focus on the end goal to healing and emotional recovery for myself, instead of “being heard by them” I was able to speak after all those years on MY behalf.

Not being heard IS insulting. And by looking at the truth of the whole situation I finally had the self respect to understand that I don’t have to accept that treatment anymore.

In the case of my mom I only got to say about three things on my own behalf and because I was still full of fear I kept it pretty mild but it was enough. It was validating. I took a stand. I said I was done with being treated the way she treated me. She asked if we could just forget about all of it and just start over. I said no. She said that in the past we had always been able to sort out our difficulties. I replied that actually in the past I always conceded. I always gave in to her and let her be right. I always backed down but now I told her that those days were over. I told her that I wanted to have a “real relationship” where each of us had mutual respect and equal value.  Much to my surprise, she listened to me. She even suggested that we might try therapy together.  I let myself get excited. I felt a new hope.

At the end of the call she told me to think about what we had talked about and let her know what I decided… My heart kind of sunk.  I had already let her know what I had decided. This was the same old “power play” where she put the ball back in my court and made it all up to me to carry the responsibility for the outcome of the whole mother daughter relationship between us.  I quickly recovered from my shock and reminded her that I had just finished telling her what I had decided and that this time it was up to her to consider if she wanted to work on our relationship WITH ME. A real relationship takes two.

That was the last conversation that I had with my mother. But that is okay. I have grown and flourished since that day. The truth set me free. In the years that followed I have seen the truth about our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship and I have grown stronger in my understanding. My mom had a choice. She chose denial. She chose not to give up her power. She chose to let me go. Perhaps she chose “being right” over being with me, I don’t know, but I have found the sunlight in my own life. I have blossomed into who I was meant to be and I am fulfilled. I have no regrets about standing up for my equal value because now I trust myself with myself. I have no more depression or oppression. I don’t jump when the phone rings. I overcame dissociative identity and multiple personality disorder. I have more confidence and self esteem than I ever thought possible.

Realizing that my own family would rather not bother with me if they had to listen to me or respect me was really hurtful. But the truth that I had to realize is that they had been hurting me for years. The pain was not new; I had been trying to cope with it for over 40 years.  My entire life I had been told that I had misunderstood them. They denied all accountability for any problems in our relationship and insisted that the problem was me.  The difference now is that I stopped believing it.

Please share your thoughts.  Please feel free to use any name you wish in the comment form if privacy is a concern. Only the name you use will be visible to other readers.

There is freedom on the other side!

Darlene Ouimet

Related posts: To Confront or Not to Confront; That is the Question

Facebook Parenting for the troubled teen ~ how kids are devalued

Adult victims of Child Abuse still need to be Heard

Conflicting feelings of Rejection when the abuser withdraws

It was her turn to be right; her turn to have impact and her turn to be heard. 

Abusers believe in the system and very often victims believe in the system too. The sick dysfunctional family system seems to have “worked for their parents” so why wouldn’t it work for them? It was the best that my (dysfunctional) mother had to hope for, but only because she didn’t believe there might be something better.  She accepted the reality of the cycle of abuse, psychological abuse and dysfunctional family as “normal” and functional exactly as it was presented to her and the cycle of generational abuse continued. 

She communicated to me that it was my job to restore her life and her self esteem; her mother had delivered the same message to her. I wanted to “save her” because I believed that if I could prove that I “loved her” then she would love me.  This cycle of generational abuse stopped with me when I no longer accepted the role of victim but I also had to stand up to the myth that I could be the savior or hero to these dysfunctional and abusive people in my family.

My mother’s actions and behavior indicated that she thought being my mother gave her certain “parental rights”; the right to disrespect me and the right to disregard me; the right to push me around and be unconcerned with my feelings. And this was not only about psychological abuse, but about all types of abuse. My value was not equal to hers. Since so much of the world operates from this belief that children don’t have rights in the ways that adults do and since this was also the way she was raised, she didn’t question her “right” to devalue me and regard me as less important than her.  She learned this from her own abusive childhood. Everyone had rights over her when she was a child too.

My mother, who was a victim to almost everyone in her life, needed a victim too.  Out of her victim mentality, she believed having a victim of her own would “prove” her worth. She believed (just like her mother believed) that if someone was compliant and obedient to her, she could feel better about herself.  If someone jumped every time she asked, that would be “proof” of their love for her. She believed that compliance and obedience was proof of love. The more I “jumped” the more I must love her. The more I “put up with and accepted” (sometimes mistakenly called “respect”) the more “proof of her value” she would have.

This is the depth of the false definition of love. Victim mentality and the message that my mother got in her life taught her that “the one with the most power wins” and she never “won” or felt her own worth until she could push someone else around.  In a dysfunctional family system, winning is about overpowering. Winning is about forcing someone to comply and making them jump to requests and wishes without question and without concern for personal values or boundaries.  And winning is mistaken for love. If I comply in that world it “proves” my love. In that world, “love” is compliance and obedience and putting yourself last.  In this dysfunctional family system, “love” is living in service to someone who doesn’t love you back in the way they believe love works.

 AND because this is not actually love, the victim can never comply enough. It is never good enough. The psychological abuser or controller needs MORE. They needed more and more proof of love. The empty hole inside of them is never filled so they ask for more respect, more compliance and more “proof”.  Sometimes the requests get more and more bizarre as the controlling person pushes the victim farther and farther for more “proof” that they are the most loved and important person in your world. I was expected to morph and change and never show any of my individual thoughts or personality because independence is the opposite of dependence.

But these controllers and psychological abusers (this applies to all types of abuse and abusers) don’t prove or even show their love for the victim at all because they are exempt from their own “rules of love”.

Victims and survivors of this dysfunctional family system grow up going one of two ways OR as in the case of my mother, going both ways;

a)      they believe that they can BE loved by being compliant and proving love to some people, and they believe that being loved is compliance and obedience from others.  My mother made me jump through her hoops just as she jumped through everyone else’s hoops. (This is exactly like a pecking order system; think about who your oppressors, owners or captors are willing to serve.)

b)      Others hang on to the belief that compliance and service is love, and they give in to their own children’s every whim falsely believing that doing that will ensure their kids love them. (which is a type of neglect)  But because that also isn’t love, that doesn’t work either.

All abusers come from abuse. All abuse has its roots in victim mentality and abusers abuse out of that victim mentality. The cycle is repeated because it is the accepted definition of love and many devalued children like my mother, learn to wait until they are adults so they can feel “loved” through expecting and forcing someone else’s compliance and obedience.

In the dysfunctional relationship model that I learned from them, I was expected to save them (by proving my love over and over, thereby validating them) and I believed that I was failing to do that. I believed that it was my role in their lives to do it so I believed it was my failure that I could not.  And I believed it was my job to do it because that is what I was taught.   

I had to let go of those false beliefs.  

I learned to let go of my belief that I could actually help them by loving them “the way they wanted me to.”

One of the major freedom keys in my recovery was realizing that the definitions of love and relationship that were taught to me (by example) were wrong.  The key was to realize that relationship conducted that way is dysfunctional and is never going to work. As long as I tried to function within that sick dysfunctional system, I could not heal. And because I could not heal, there were parts of the cycle of abuse still being passed on. I had to face the fear of standing up to it. If the truth was going to set me free then I had to find the truth.

And I did; that is what this entire website, “Emerging from Broken”, is all about.

Please share your thoughts on the cycle of abuse or on whatever this post inspires you to share.

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet

More related posts (also see links via colour bold words within posts)

~ “Emotional Healing does NOT depend on…”

Dysfunctioal Family Law

for more on “the cycle of abuse” see the wiki

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)

the freedom and wholeness in loving me

A couple of weeks ago I was really sick with a terrible virus which lasted for 8 days.  Just before I came down with it, I had dental surgery and it took me 3 days to recover from that and it felt like I had been sick “forever”.  Have you seen the commercial for cough medicine when the guy is sick in bed and starts calling his wife?  He moans “Pam….. Pam….. can you call my mom?”  In response, she throws a bottle of NyQuil at him.  In the next shot he is shown sleeping like a 200 pound baby. It’s really quite comical and it got me thinking about that expression “I want my Mommy”… That expression (often used in jest) is a popular one for adults who are sick or in pain.  Mommy’s are “supposed to be” or typically believed to be a source of comfort.  That was not the case for me. Sometimes I don’t have the words to express my frustration with being sick.  I wonder if it because I can’t say “I want my Mommy” and even the thought of that sentence just bothers me.

For many years now that phrase “I want my mommy” has been on the tip of my tongue many times, but I never could say it because it was so false.  Even thinking “I want my mommy” just because of the popularity of the expression, feels like a lie to me. Wanting “my mommy” was not going to help me any; I already knew that!  I want “a mommy” or “I wish I HAD a mommy” may have been closer to the truth, but I didn’t know how to express those thoughts.

Sometimes I feel like I got totally ripped off in the “having a mommy” department.  

I remember being sick as a kid.  My mother did the “care part” pretty good. She just didn’t do the nurturing part.  I wasn’t going to die on her watch but today I realize that when people express “I want my Mommy”, they are craving the comfort and the love part of the mommy/child relationship which I didn’t have.  My mother was clinical.  She was efficient. But my mother was not warm and nurturing.

A huge part of my healing has been to face what was missing in my childhood and beyond and realize that it was (and still is) okay for me to acknowledge that that there were things missing in the relationship that I had with my parents. That is just the truth about my life.  The truth is that because some of those important things were missing in my growing up years there was damage done to me. There were consequences to my emotional growth and it is okay to acknowledge that too.

Validating that I got ripped off in my childhood and acknowledging to myself that I was not taken care of as a child in so many ways that really mattered, set me free to get on with the work ahead of me in recovery. Looking back, I realized that the way I fought NOT to accept the truth about my childhood that was a really big problem for me as an adult.  It was in the way of my emotional healing. Once I began to establish what had been missing as far as nurturing and comfort, I was able to start doing those things for myself.  I pictured myself as a child feeling scared or alone or being sick and I would comfort myself.  I told myself that it was okay for me to feel those feelings of loneliness and abandonment and that from now on I would take care of my needs.  By realizing that my pain had never been validated by my parents, I was able to stop wishing for that to happen. When I stopped wishing that “someone else” would validate me and my pain, I was finally free to validate myself and my own pain.

I also became aware of those voices that told me that if I was sick, I was useless. I acknowledged the thoughts that I had that told me I was faking or exaggerating and that I was just being lazy and I told those voices on my own behalf, that they were wrong. I did for me what I longed for my mommy to do for me. I filled in the missing gaps and I was able to move forward with my present day life.   

I became my own parent and I went back to those memories that I had stuffed so far down that I thought they were gone, and I did for me what should have been done for me back then.  I soothed and validated myself.  I call this re-parenting.

When I first started to do this type of self care it was uncomfortable and even emotionally painful.  I had to ask myself WHY this was so uncomfortable for me. I became aware that I didn’t actually like myself all that much and that if I was really honest, I didn’t WANT to nurture me.  I had to realize that those feelings came from the way that I had been regarded as “unworthy” when I was a kid and that I had just accepted someone else’s disregard and disrespect towards me as the truth about me.  I had to be conscious and intentional about self validation and self nurturing in the healing process.  It did not come easy. It was something new that I had to learn how to do.  Self validating and self nurturing felt conceited and uncomfortable to me; it felt foreign and even wrong.

 I learned how to validate, love and nurture myself by practice and persistence. For the first two years or three years of what I call “cementing my new belief system” I wrote 10 minutes every morning on gratitude and self worth. I practiced learning to love myself and taking care of myself by being aware of the self defeating voices and overcoming and correcting them. I was intentional about self talk and self nurturing. I pictured myself hugging and taking care of a little version of myself. I pictured myself loving me.

Today, being responsible for me is much easier. My family took care of me when I was sick a couple of weeks ago, but the validation, self love, permission to BE sick and healthy self talk, I can do for myself now.

Please feel free to share your feelings, thoughts and feedback. You are welcome to use a screen name if you wish not to be known by your real name.

Exposing truth; one snapshot at a time,

Darlene Ouimet

Visit Emerging from Broken on Facebook (the EFB facebook page is NOT connected to this blog in anyway other then the updates that I post there; your comments here, will not show up there.)

Related posts ~ Victim Mentality in Relation to Keeping Family Secrets

Rebuilding my relationship with me ~ Recovering from Dysfunctional

We are conditioned not to talk about family secrets. I was taught in so many ways that ‘some things are not talked about’ and I was so afraid of the consequences of bringing shame on my family that I ignored the solution to overcoming the mental health issues that I had. Rejection from my family when I was a little child would have meant death. I believed as an adult that it STILL meant death.  I had to overcome that fear.

Even when the family members are dead, the victims of dysfunctional family situations are very often STILL just as afraid to reveal the family secrets, which is very telling about just how deep this fear goes when it comes to the belief system.

People told me that they didn’t have a choice about keeping the secrets even when they became adults. I agreed with them because not taking my choice about telling enabled me to have an excuse to not have to do the work that it took to take my life back. I had to look more closely at what it meant for me to believe that I didn’t have a choice. I had to see that it wasn’t that I DIDN’T have a choice as much as it was just that I didn’t KNOW I had a choice.

This belief that I could not, must not tell was rooted in victim mentality and I had to keep in mind that this “victim mentality” is how I survived a childhood of abuse and emotional neglect. Victim mentality was my friend when I was a kid. It saved me. It was hard to understand that victim mentality was not my friend anymore. My mind warned me constantly NOT to see things differently, believing with all my heart that the only way to survive this life was to operate in that same child mindset that kept me “safe” from further harm.  Telling would have made things so much worse and I could not accept that telling (at least someone) was part of the answer now.

Victim mentality taught me to FEAR the consequences of honoring my choice to reveal those secrets. Victim mentality tells me that I am safer to keep the secrets and protect the perpetrator.  Victim mentality taught me to protect the person who covered up for the perpetrator, believing that I am less deserving than the perpetrator, BECAUSE that is what I was taught about myself through the actions of those who were in charge of me.  

When I first started this website I would have a fear related adrenalin rush when I clicked the publish button on certain articles especially if they revealed anything about toxic and dysfunctional family relationships. That was my childhood fear of going public with my past. It was not fear for what others would then know about me but fear of what the consequences would be if I “told” on the abusers and those that didn’t protect me or if I revealed the family secrets. I didn’t understand that fear based adrenalin rush then as well as I do now. I had to reassure myself that the consequences for talking would not kill me that I was no longer that helpless child anymore. I had to remind myself that hundreds of times.

Another huge fear that I had was that deep down I was sure that if I could love my mother the way she needed me to love her, then everything would be fine. Telling the family secrets was like giving up on the last thread of hope because I knew that if I told the truth about what had gone on in my life, I would burn my last bridge and ruin my only chance that my mother and possibly even my whole family would love me. “Telling” represented the death of that hope.  

I had to be willing to face the possibility of that rejection.

Today I see this so differently. Why was I willing to protect the people who never protected me? They taught me to believe that I didn’t have enough worth to have equal value to the perpetrators, the neglectors, the abusers, the withholders, the teachers and all the other adult gods in my childhood.  

I no longer care if the truth hurts someone else’s feelings. When I decided to heal and move forward with MY life, I had to stop taking care of other people’s feelings and finally validate MY feelings. When I finally put my own healing first, I began to see the dysfunction more clearly. I finally saw that I was contributing to the sick dysfunctional cycle by going along with it.

As I took those baby steps in the beginning and started to look at the dysfunctional family conditions that I had been raised with, I started to realize that in many ways I had in fact always been rejected. Not being heard is a rejection.  I had not been protected is a rejection. Not being valued and not having my human rights validated is a rejection.

When I began to see things through new eyes, I started to get a glimmer of hope that perhaps I could be good enough for me, and that if I could achieve that status, then others opinions including my own families’ opinions, would no longer matter. I began to realize that I had been agreeing with their rejection of me because I didn’t know anything else.  As I grew stronger I began to stop rejecting myself.

Perhaps the truth hurts, but does that mean that we should stifle the truth? I don’t think so anymore. It was important for me to look at who I was protecting and the truth about why I thought that they were more important than I was.

Please share your thoughts or feedback. I look forward to the discussion here.

Darlene Ouimet

NOTE: I did not reveal anything publically when it came to family secrets until I had several years of healing and I am not suggesting that you reveal your family secrets before you are ready. It would not have helped me to push myself too quickly and very few people choose to write as publically as I do. Please feel free to use a screen name. Only the name you use in the comment form will be seen by others.

Related Posts ~ Overcoming that Nasty Self Blame in Dysfunctional Relationships

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”

I was 13 years old the first time I woke up hearing my mother having sex. My parents had been split up for a few months; I had never heard my parents having sex. By the sounds of it, I thought that the man my mother had in her bedroom with her was trying to kill her. And he could have been! How would anyone know? None of us knew him.

I felt frozen in my bed, terrified about what I was hearing and not knowing what to do about it.  Should I get a large object and go in there and club him over the head? Should I call the police? My frozen immobility and indecisiveness was making me feel guilty and then suddenly, those horrifying sounds stopped.  I heard normal murmuring sounds of conversation.  I must have gone back to sleep then.  Eventually, I figured out that what was going on in her bedroom was not murder or physical violence.

My toxic mother didn’t want to be a single mother. That was her answer to everything. It was even her justification for having very loud sex with men while three children slept in rooms very close by.

One of my brothers made comments about her night-time noise making sessions; she would respond “I never asked to be a single mother”.  I was left to assume the translation for that statement.  And I translated it according to my belief system.  My mother deserves to be happy. Men make her happy. I have no right to interfere with her happiness. I have no right to feel uncomfortable about hearing my mother doing this stuff.

I have no rights.

I translated her justifications into the belief that this situation was normal. I believed that I had no right to any judgements about my mother. I believed that I was wrong to feel scared, embarrassed and unsafe.  I believed that the uncomfortable feelings I felt when I came down to the kitchen in the morning to find those men sitting there at the table, were due to the fact that something was wrong with me. I thought I was different than other people because I thought I was having difficulty accepting a “normal divorced family” situation that I was unable to accept as “normal”. I thought it was just ME that couldn’t accept it as “normal.”  I thought I SHOULD be able to accept it. (As you can see, my definition of “normal” was dysfunctional and I was accustomed to accepting our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship.)

By the time I was seventeen I was calling myself prudish rather than accept that my narcissistic and self centered toxic mother was promiscuous. By the time I was 19 I suspected that I was “frigid” because I was not at all interested in sex the way that my mother was. I was always looking at the “what is wrong with me” part because my grid of understanding came from dysfunctional mother daughter relationship. My “normal” was not really normal at all. My toxic  mothers dysfunctional behaviour throughout my teen years messed me up a great deal and it took me a long time to realize that.

Understanding THIS truth has been one of the profound truths that set me free.

My promiscuous mother’s decision to have loud sexual relations with men was a decision made out of my mothers selfishness. Repeatedly stating that she “didn’t ask to be a single mother” was meant to justify her own bad behaviour while ensuring that her children didn’t blame her for anything. I didn’t know that and could not even suspect that back then.  I felt guilty and wrong that I was ashamed of my narcissistic mother so I turned it on myself.

When my toxic mother started taking me to the bars where she was picking up men, I didn’t know that was abnormal or dysfunctional mother behaviour either. Even though I knew that I was underage, and I had that adrenalin rush every time I ordered a drink for fear of being asked for I.D. I didn’t know that what my narcissistic mother was doing was wrong because she was my mother. She was the ultimate authority in my life. In my mind, my mother’s authority surpassed the authority of the law and I believed by then that my role in her life was to help her get through the terrible burden of being a single mother.  I felt the same way about her conduct in our home. It was my job, my responsibility to help her get through the terrible burden of having to be a single mother to me; I believed that I was the burden.

All of my mother’s promiscuous sexual behaviour and misbehaviour since I was about 6 years old had groomed me nicely to accept that my value was in sexuality, just like my mothers value was in sexuality. I was groomed to be ready to identify with sexuality as my value even though it scared me to death because of the abuse and trauma that I associated with it. This is one of the terrible conflicts these mixed messages cause that survivors of dysfunctional families face.

~And I wondered why I struggled with depressions continually.

~And I didn’t understand HOW I had become dissociated.

~And I constantly questioned why I had such low self esteem.

~And I beat myself up for my weaknesses with addictions and dysfunctional relationships with abusive men; when in reality I had been well groomed to accept dysfunction as “normal”. I had taught to reprimand myself when I had trouble accepting dysfunction as “normal”.

~I actually fought to accept that I was a failure in most areas of my life thinking the answer was in acceptance and surrender and never realizing that I was struggling to accept the wrong truth. 

These were examples of the type of damage that I had to face the truth about in order to overcome the ways that the results of that damage manifested in my life.

I HAD to understand that I was not the one that let me down.

The ideas presented in this article are not limited to the examples that I have given. This same “grooming process” producing other mixed messages can be applied to any dysfunctional behaviour displayed by a parent in order to see where you own belief system formed in a false normal way. I welcome you to share your thoughts on this subject.  

Exposing Truth; one snapshot at a time;                                          

Darlene Ouimet

For related posts click the coloured links in bold print