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

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

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

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

Seeing through New Eyes

This article is based on a page from the unauthorized biography “Oprah a biography by Kitty Kelley”

When I grabbed this book of the shelf at Costco, I didn’t realize that it was an unauthorized biography about Oprah Winfrey. I thought that it was the real story. I thought that Oprah had agreed to the publication. I quickly realized that I had picked up something that might be full of lies and conclusions that had no right to be drawn; but since I bought it, I decided to read it anyway. 

One of the most popular subjects here on Emerging from Broken is the subject of dysfunctional and toxic relationships between mothers and daughters.  I think that as humans we are born craving love, community and acceptance from our mothers and when it appears that our mothers hate us, disapprove of us, judge us or generally never seem to love and accept us… it is a mystery that we are attracted to solving.  I want my mother to LOVE me.  I want a relationship with my mother. But I got tired of how the entire burden of that desire was left up to me with zero accountability on the part of my mother.

I came across a part in Kitty Kelley’s book about Oprah Winfrey that bugged me a great deal. I realize that this is an unauthorized biography, but the example that I found about dysfunctional and toxic mother daughter relationship was so good, that I just could not resist writing about it for Emerging from Broken. It shows the way that society

“YOU’RE NOTHING BUT TROUBLE! YOU DESERVE EVERYTHING YOU GET” by Fi Macleod

This statement was used many times during my childhood. As a result I developed deep self-blame. I bore responsibility for things which were actually nothing to do with me. The self-blame is combined with deep shame and guilt. The self-blame came through a combination of verbal and non-verbal messages from my abusers and messages from the abuse itself.

 “You’re nothing but trouble, you deserve everything that happens”

“You deserve it because you’re a girl, we didn’t want a girl”

“You deserve it because you’re evil”

“You deserve it because the bible tells us you deserve it”

“You deserve it because….”

 “You deserve it just because we say you deserve it”

I never knew when they’d decide I “deserved” a beating, or I “deserved” to be thrown across the room or I “deserved” to be starved or I “deserved” locked in my room or I “deserved” whatever they chose. It was very oppressive. I asked myself many times “what it is about me that is

The Healing Power of Righteous Anger by Pam Witzemann

Righteous anger is the anger that Jesus used to clear the temple. It is the force behind the Civil Rights Movement and can be a powerful force for healing when employed by those who are victims of abuse.

As a child, I was emotionally and medically neglected. I was also emotionally and psychologically abused. This came by the hand of my parents. As a teenager, I was sexually abused and exploited by men. I spent most of my life thinking that I was the one at fault and my anger (which was enormous) was turned inward. I was angry with myself for all of the things that I suffered as a child and it led me into self-destructive habits and even, attempted suicide by age 18. I was angry enough to kill and I attempted to kill the one I viewed as my enemy, Me. At the time, I couldn’t even acknowledge what I felt as anger. I saw all anger as being wrong and I denied my own angry feelings. I, like many people, was taught that all anger was inappropriate and I hid my angry emotional responses by stuffing my anger and being mad at myself for being angry. By the age of 12, I was very depressed and I believe, my stuffed and misdirected anger (which was rage, a mindless and destructive anger) was

How I learned to Self Abuse by Pam Witzemann

I was a self-abusive person. I wasn’t born as a self-abuser. I was taught to abuse myself by the way I was devalued as a child and the behavior that was modeled for me.

As a child, I was medically, emotionally, and spiritually neglected. I was psychologically and emotionally abused. I was given alcohol as medicine on a regular basis from the age of six months and also allowed sips of beer and other adult drinks. On holidays, I was allowed to drink hard eggnog and wine. As a toddler, I was allowed to eat only candy and drink coffee with the adults. I use the term toddler as an age descriptive term but I was never actually a toddler. I was what is now called a schoocher. Because I was born premature, my brain didn’t know where my arms were and I used my legs instead. I sat on my bottom and scooted. I tried to walk at about one year but fell like an egg, unable to catch myself, and didn’t begin walking until I was three. I never had any medical help with this disability. I don’t know if there was any help available but I do know that my parents never investigated any further than

Learning self love

“The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost” Anonymous

I came across this quote the other day and it caused a multitude of flashbacks to rush through my brain all at once. At first glance I thought “yes” this is true, but very quickly my mind was filled with all my old fears; I learned to FEAR losing love and at the same time realizing that this was not the way that I was loved at all. It was communicated to me that it didn’t matter if I was lost or if I was never to be seen again and I lived with the fear that I might find that out to be the truth.

As I got older and sought love from outside my dysfunctional family, I believed that it was how much the object of my desire proved his need for me, his longing for me, his fear of losing me, that PROVED his love for me. This was how I had been taught love. And most of my boyfriends  sought to possess me more than to love me.

“This notion, that parents must never be blamed no matter what they have done, has caused untold damage.” Alice Miller ~ Banished Knowledge

The other night I was watching the show “Hoarders” on television. The eldest daughter came home from University and brought her boyfriend along for a visit.  Even before they entered the house, she started reminding him not to “say anything.” Inside the house was a shocking mess. Her mother was a hoarder. The “hoard” in some places was up to the ceiling. There were slim pathways everywhere so they could make their way through the house. Before the daughter and her boyfriend arrived, the mother told the camera crew that her daughter was “happy” as long as she could sleep in her bed; that the stuff piled all over her bedroom didn’t bother her.  Again, the “stuff” was piled up to the ceiling in her room too.

There were bugs everywhere. There were mice and rodent droppings everywhere.  The boyfriend was pretty disturbed about it but she kept warning him not to say anything.  She reminded him, pleaded with him and she told him outright not to say anything.

The biggest concern that she had was to protect her mother. Her mother had a problem that was affecting the whole family, but the mothers feelings had to be