Archive for freedom
Restless, Irritable and Discontent
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Living in the struggle, trying to overcome depression and abuse I had a lot of questions like “what is the point? What am I doing here? There must be more to life then this so what is it? What is the meaning of life? And there was that ever present feeling of having to “survive” so that I can…… WHAT?….. So that I can do “what” with my life? Raise another generation? WHY? What is the point, what is the purpose? What was I born for?
In the beginning of recovery all I knew was that I wanted something better for my life, I wanted to feel more alive, be more engaged and to know there was some reason for being. I knew that I wanted more out of life way before I found the answer to my longings which were so deep.
I thought I was chasing a rainbow; that recovery, freedom from depression and personal wholeness were not really possible. I thought I was ungrateful and selfish; always wanting something more but I didn’t think about where those doubts and those negative thoughts came from. I didn’t question if they were right or wrong. I didn’t think that maybe those thoughts about wanting something better or wanting something more out of life came from my inner being, my spirit or maybe even from God himself. I didn’t consider that maybe it was my longing for real life or that I really was missing “real life” and that life was meant to be fulfilling. Instead I thought that maybe those thoughts came from my ingratitude towards God.
I thought that I should KNOW by now what “life” is all about and to admit that I did not know would be like admitting failure. When I wasn’t feeling foolish that I didn’t know, I thought that the greatest joy should be about being in service to others, making a difference, being selfless, and showing love to all others but the problem was that I was not doing any of that for myself and had never actually been taught to take emotional care of myself.
Not having a proper foundation for emotional self care means that it is really hard to provide that for someone else. You know the old saying “you can’t give away something you don’t have”.
So ~ the world’s universally known recipe for a happy and fulfilling life, which is something about serving others~ didn’t work for me. So I was stuck. I would not only to serve others, I would try to live for others, and I would fall. Sometimes the ‘falling’ looked like a serious depression. I would give up and give in and go to bed and pull the covers over my head. I would plead with God; “Why can’t I just be happy? What is wrong with me, why can’t I just be normal?” And then I would answer my questions with a stream of mean and unsupportive answers “because you are ungrateful, it is never enough for you, you are selfish, you are self centered and there must be something really wrong with you that you keep on ending up here hiding under the covers”. (metaphorically speaking)
One of the first things that I had to learn was that I did not love myself and that I kept hoping that I would find someone to love me ~ to prove to me that I was lovable or worthy of being loved. In retrospect I realize today that that I believed if I could find someone to love me then I could love me. This is a left over from not being valued as a child and a belief that I carried with me into my adulthood. I thought someone else could provide my worth and provide my worth because it was defined for me as a child. I had to learn to define my worth and value for myself.
It was a shock and a relief to accept the truth that
a) I could learn to love myself
b) People did love me, and it didn’t change anything.
c) No one could ever love me enough to prove to me that I was lovable.
Self esteem had to come from me and for me; recovery began when I decided that there was more to life then the depression I constantly struggled with and there was more than always trying harder, and I was determined that I was going to find out what that “more to life” was….. and I did find out.
Living in the Truth means knowing that I am worthy, loveable and equally valuable!
Darlene Ouimet
I welcome everyone to share a piece of your journey, victory or struggle; please comment.
Dysfunctional Family ~ First a Child Then a Parent
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- Freedom just Beyond
Jimmy’s post “valued for my ability to work hard” was a big hit and so many could relate to being valued by the work they produced and by the results of their performance. This post is about the siblings who are often NOT recognized or valued for accomplishments.
As a child growing up I had a brother who was valued for his accomplishments. I always thought that he was the most important child in our home. He excelled at the sports he played and with the teams he was on and he got really high marks in school. My brother got all my fathers attention which left me feeling unimportant. My father seemed to love my brother for reasons that I could not seem to compete with. I was jealous of the attention that my brother got and my father never seemed interested in the things that I was good at other then when I cooked or made him a snack.
All my life I have heard all sorts of comments about how every child feels that they are the one who has life the hardest. My suspicion is that how our value is defined for us, is what makes us all feel that way.
There is another layer of confusion with this whole concept for those of us who were NOT valued for achievements or lived in the shadow of another child’s accomplishments.
I was trying to measure up to my parents expectations AND I was also trying to be more like my brother to win the approval that I thought he got. (In reality my brother was likely feeling under similar pressure to what Jimmy described in his guest post for us.) I realized more about this child value belief system by watching and listening to my own children as our family emerged from living in an abusive and dysfunctional family system within our own home.
Everyone had great expectations for our first born child who happened to be a boy. When he showed signs of being a great athlete, everyone pushed him. Much to the delight of Daddy, Grandma and Grandpa, he showed interest in farm work before he could even walk. We pushed him in both those areas, but we called it encouragement. My husband also pressured my son to do farm work in a similar way to how he himself was raised but he only had one example of parenting, and it wasn’t a good one.
As our children got older, my mental health was getting worse and worse. When I finally fell apart and I felt that I couldn’t go on anymore, I decided that I was either going to leave my family or I was going to die so I sought help one last time. In the beginning I wanted help only for my mental health issues. I was sure that everything was my fault and that I just could not BE good enough or do it right and I didn’t recognize any of the dysfunction in our family. I believed that I had done much better than my own parents had done but still it wasn’t enough and I was extremely unhappy. In learning what my belief system was and how it had formed full of lies and pressure and other people’s expectations, many other issues were brought to light. It was apparent that my husband and I needed to make some changes in our relationship too. I had been in a position of “background” and not “partner” and was beginning to realize that I wanted to have equal value as a person, as a co owner of our farm and as a partner in marriage. As my husband and I both began to learn how to have a functioning relationship in the true definition of love, eventually the truth about how our children felt about the expectations that we had of them, their own perceived value, what each of them felt about us and each other and what was “fair and not fair” started to come out.
My son felt that the system was extremely unfair to him, that the girls got off easy and didn’t have to perform a certain way in sports; they were not expected to do the farm chores (exactly right) either. He felt that all the pressure was on him and that he took all the heat especially from his father. Our eldest daughter, then a young teenager, confessed that she felt she never measured up to her brother, and that he was the only one that was cared about by her father. She said that everything was about her brother and he got all the attention and only his activities and accomplishments mattered. Everything that he felt pressured by, she felt he was praised, loved and valued for. And what she felt was neglect and disinterest towards her, our son felt that she was more loved and valued then he was because she didn’t have to perform and didn’t have the responsibility or pressure that he had. What he saw as being picked on, she saw as being loved and what she felt was neglect he saw as more accepted.
So at the risk of sounding repetitive; both of our daughters believed that their brother had more value than they did because in their view he was getting all the interest. Even though they heard all the pressure that he was under, they viewed it as attention, and they recognized his value (the value placed on him verbally) for his sports ability and farm work ability. Society sometimes calls this “sibling rivalry” but you can see there is a valid basis to it. None of our children felt valued or acknowledged for who they were. All 3 of them felt pressured to live up to what we wanted them to be.
My son was resentful because under the guise of encouragement, he was being praised as a form of pressure to perform, achieve and produce. It was so bad that our son had serious performance anxiety to the point that he got sick before tests in school. We didn’t realize this was our fault and we thought that it was just his personality.
In truth, each of our children was right. Our daughters were not being recognized in the same way that our son was recognized and even depended on especially with the farm. They felt neglected, unloved and that they were not as valued because of it. Our son was right too, he was being pushed and getting a lot of negative attention and he was over burdened with chores and the pressure to perform at hockey.
This family dysfunction was exactly how my husband and I were raised, and it had become our definition of love and value. Therefore according to the definition of love and value that my husband and I had been taught we had taught our own children the same definitions of love and value. We were passing this false information on to them and in doing so, forming in them a belief system not based on the truth about love, value or equality. You can see how the cycle continues if we don’t stop it. As we all learn about truth, love, value and equal value, our family continues to recover.
I look forward to your comments,
Darlene Ouimet
Sailing with Desire and Discovering the Roots of Happiness
Posted by: | CommentsIn “Cutting Ropes and Sailing Free” I described the roots of my recent depression and the process I was going through to break free. I wouldn’t have had the strength to cut ropes unless I let myself feel what it was I truly desired.
I was born with sails. The ropes that I attached to other ships happened out of necessity, out of a need to stay safe, to stay afloat, to not be abandoned. The belief systems I inherited from my parents, from the church I grew up in, from other survivors notched so many conflicting beliefs into those ropes stretched out to one ship and another. I believed I shouldn’t shine too bright. I believed I had to be happy or successful so other people wouldn’t be disappointed in me. I believed my ship was inferior to others. I believed I needed others to make decisions for me because I couldn’t make my own (good enough). I believed it was selfish to set sail and go after what it was I really wanted…
As I got older, another coping method formed. I chose certain ships to follow. I knew that I wanted to sail and leave the harbor. But I didn’t know how to do it on my own. So I set my sights on one ship than another, trying to live my life just the same as them. I even did this with characters in books I read, people on TV, in movies, as well as the real people in my life. The open seas were too terrifying to sail all on my own. I believed if I could step in the exact steps of others, I could get a piece of the same fulfillment that they had. If I couldn’t feast for myself, I would settle for crumbs from their feast… But, this isn’t how it works for us. The fulfillment I enjoyed was superficial and the crumbs only bore frustration.
I have that unique lantern burning deep within me that holds all the stuff I need to sail my own ship. My desire dwells here. My Mom recently contributed her very honest story of how she wanted to “get into my skin” when I was younger and live my life for me better than she thought I was living it myself. Her belief system about happiness was skewed. In a way, she truthfully saw my capabilities and my gifts and she wanted me to take full advantage of them. But her plan of helping me become truly happy was coming at the process from the wrong angle. The roots of the process of happiness start with validating that burning lantern deep within us. It doesn’t begin with the appearance of our ship, how it is better than other people’s, how fast it is or how pretty. It doesn’t begin with having perfect destinations in place to sail to in a certain time-line (church, accomplishments, early marriage and plenty of children…) The belief system my Mom was trapped in neglected that burning lantern. My Mom bought me dolls to play with, taught me home-maker duties. When I was little, I loved to pretend that I was a business woman coming home from a busy day at work. I pretended I was serving coffee up and down our driveway, pouring water from a watering pot! I loved playing store, counting the money, adding things up on the adding machine. These things that I loved to do spontaneously were coming from that unique burning lantern deep within. These things reflected my true desires. Even deeper beneath these activities was the fundamental desire to love and be loved for who I uniquely was.
After a lifetime of not trusting these desires or paying attention to them, it felt very difficult at first to see them and believe in them. It’s like trying to see the vibrant life and colorful rocks at the bottom of a murky, muddy lagoon. It takes time. But learning to pay attention, to focus my eyes differently, to keep asking myself “what is it you truly desire?” is the process that has connected me to that burning lantern and fuels my own amazing journey. It was the process that gave me confidence to pursue counseling in the first place. In that process is the key to my true happiness. Harnessing its power frees me to furl those sails and gives me the courage and hope to cut away the ropes that I no longer need.
We have what it takes to sail our unique journeys!
~Love, Carla
Cutting Ropes and Sailing Free
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been working my way through a depression over the last few weeks. Maybe “underneath” is a better word… Sometimes the journey to freedom feels easy and the truth is crystal clear. Risks don’t feel so risky. There is a strong pull forward. It somehow feels simple to make decisions based on what I know is true. Over the last few weeks I’ve felt a pull downward, a pull to just stop where I am and hibernate for awhile. Some relationships in my life have become more distant and I have felt so afraid. I think the fear of being alone, of being rejected, is one of the most powerful fears we face in our lives. I found myself listening to old voices (much clearer this time around) that said, “See, you just can’t do this. You don’t have what it takes. If people abandon you, you will die. If you are rejected, you really MUST be messed up. You can’t survive on your own…”
I’ve learned this fear comes to revisit me in varying degrees along the journey of healing (I used to believe that if I had dealt with it once, I shouldn’t have to face it ever again.) I know this depression has some very real reasons behind it. In becoming whole, some things must fall away and others will grow stronger. In my survival, I was a ship that had attached myself to many many other ships around me. One rope here, another there, spread out like a giant spider web. These ropes felt like my lifelines. I sent out distress calls and survived by interpreting the feedback I got from the other ships. As I become whole, those ropes gradually get cut or fall away. Some just shrivel up and die. Others have to get snipped more intentionally. And I don’t mean that these ropes are only connected to “people”. Some of them were attached to old belief systems that kept me stuck. Some were religious, some were cultural “norms”, some were family belief systems. But one by one, I have freed myself… I became free to focus on my own ship and start listening to what it was all about, where it wanted to go.
Some people love freedom when they first taste it. For myself, freedom has not been an easy experience (yet!) Living so long with my ropes tied to other ships, I had so little sense of my own direction, of where my own sails wanted to take me. Cutting those ropes has sometimes felt absolutely terrifying. How will I know where to go? How will I know that I’m going the right way? What if I cut these ropes and sail off to sea all by myself? Will I ever be close to others again? How can I be close to others if we aren’t tied together?… My depression was a way of coping with these fears. If I could just turn the voices down, or just fall back into the old belief that all of my pain really is my own fault, maybe this would feel easier… Maybe I could go back to coasting alongside someone else… or just hole up in the harbor again, or maybe find some isolated island to call my permanent home…
Deep within my own ship is a lantern, burning with the truth about who I am, with the life and the unique journey that is mine to take. Throughout this depression, I have felt its presence. As loud as those old voices and fears have been, my own presence has been loud too. I know that it is there. But I have felt such angst, running back up to the main deck, peering at the ships I used to be tied to, fearing my “aloneness”, fearing that the lantern with my own light isn’t bright enough to trust, isn’t good enough (now I ask, good enough for who?) It’s the most life squishing lie of all time.
My soul won’t give up. As tempted as I have felt over the last few weeks, the light inside wants to win. To keep walking forward into what feels terrifying is what my whole self wants so much more than to fade away back to the place that feels deceptively safe and familiar (it’s not the same back there anyways). I have always wanted the open sea. Facing old fears is part of learning to sail well, and I am on my way.
Pain in the Process of Recovery
Posted by: | Comments“And a woman spoke, saying, ‘Tell us of Pain.’ And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain….” ~ Kahlil Gibran
"Glass Art" by Robert Kraft
We are learning to struggle well. Our desire speaks to us of a new place, a place we have belonged all along but for so long believed we didn’t… Wholeness. A place of validity, entirety, freedom, fulfillment, excitement, promise, purpose.
People and events told us we didn’t belong in this place, we didn’t deserve to go there, we weren’t good enough for it, we had to work harder to earn the right to be there. We got broken. And then we got tangled up in trying so hard to make ourselves “righter”, make ourselves more worthy so we could get there. We got sidetracked on our way in all kinds of other places that promised peace but only delivered disappointment and anxiety. We doubted ourselves. We questioned if we should keep trying to get there…But continually burning deep deep down inside, we knew that we belonged there; we wanted to belong there… Even if at first all we heard was a whisper, a longing, a puzzled feeling, the “click” of a moment when we realized, “hey, this and this and this that I’ve believed all along about myself doesn’t really make sense…”
A dawning starts to happen. And the light draws us toward it. The warmth we feel says, “Yes, this is the right direction. You do belong here. You are stepping in the right tracks.”
The tracks are not always easy. Some feel very painful.
Pain feels like something is wrong, and if something feels wrong our old belief system tells us that we are wrong. We try to avoid the pain because of this misconception, one we have suffered under for so long. We avoid the pain because we are afraid that it will tell us that we really are mistakes after all… But now we see the misconception for what it is. We connect with the new truth about ourselves that is gaining life deep down inside. We see the lies woven into the misconception that fuels our fear and we decide that we don’t want to agree with those lies anymore.
Pain invites us to look deeper, to look through. It is not telling us that we are wrong, just that something is wrong. It draws our hands to feel around us, to feel at what confines us. It draws us to open more windows, to let in more light here, then more light there, so we can see more clearly, bit by bit. It says to us with matter-of-fact assurance, “I can’t leave until you really pay attention to me.” It wasn’t our brokenness that was the problem; the real problem was what caused the brokenness. And what caused the brokenness was not of our making.
We work to understand this. We peel back the layers of our past, we uncover the lies that were whispered or shouted to us. We learn the truth. We realize that all the work we have done to earn our worthiness, the crawling and striving we have done towards feigned acceptance, was not required of us. It was work done for other people’s benefit, not our own. We feel the pain of being deceived, of being discounted, being taken advantage of. We feel the pain of disbelief, of sorrow and grief. And sometimes after we have gotten to this new place of wholeness, we feel the pain of learning. We feel uncomfortable because it is so new. We sometimes still slip into those redeemable ruts. And we are invited into one journey after another of rebirth.
Our pain is a corridor. A place of deep movement towards where we truly belong. It is the breaking with the past, the hope of new growth and new life, the acceptance of reality all rolled into one. It is part of the process that helps us to keep moving forward.
Courage and love to you on your journey…
~Carla~
A Post of Gratitude
Posted by: | CommentsLight and truth are much the same. When we turn on a light in our homes, we can see the
way things are. We can see the furniture, the evidence of what has happened while we were away, the pieces of beauty we have arranged, the faces of the people we love and what they are telling us. Truth is the same. When it speaks we can see the way things are more plainly. We can see things we didn’t know were there before, we can see things that are missing, we can see things that we have always felt or always wanted but didn’t believe were real or worthy… In speaking the truth and hearing the truth, our outsides start to flow with our insides. A buzz starts to happen. Freedom starts to happen.
Empowerment encourages us in the telling of our truth, our stories. It sees the light we are sharing and says, “Keep that coming! There is value in your light!” It knows that because our value is not in question, what is shared is not threatening. It says, I want you to share your light because the light is what heals. As I shared my posts about how my Dad’s belief system impacted me, I was pretty floored by your comments, how you connected with my truth, shared your own stories, and also how you empowered me through your encouragement. Thank you again to each one of you~ you have contributed so much.
Patricia Singleton has a deep understanding of the opposite of a healthy, empowering family system and offered some amazing insight on the nature of dysfunctional family systems in her comments . She writes on her own blog, The Spiritual Journey of a Lightworker and shares courageously about her story of recovery and how she thrives in her life today. I encourage you to visit her most recent post entitled “Dysfunctional Family Systems” where she shares some great resources and offers in-depth descriptions of what it feels like to be a part of a family system that survives in the opposite direction of empowerment, the kind of system that shuts people down instead of validating their light. Patricia is a true lightworker, bringing her truth to the world and empowering others to do the same. Thank you Patricia for sharing your truth and encouragement!
Truth telling can cause two things to happen: either people are drawn to it, decide to embrace it and work towards understanding and healing or we are entrapped by fear, want to run away and keep the truth hidden; even though the truth is the greatest path to freedom, it can be very scary at first. I am so grateful that my family is chosing to embrace the truth. I am so proud of my Mom, my Dad and my brother. New realizations and conversations are happening and I believe our family is headed towards a new layer of depth in our relationships with each other. I love you each very much. I am grateful for the light and its healing work. I truly believe that we find what we are seeking for and that we have the ability to become all that we were meant to be. And I am truly grateful to be on this path with each one of you!
~Carla~
How a “Leeching” Belief System Creates Havoc
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Sun breaks through over a Canmore mountain
A belief system that says, “I am a nobody, I can’t do anything right, I’m just stupid” wreaks havoc in a few different ways. I believe we were born with an unconscious sense of our own value; deep down, in each of us, there “dwells a beauty”, a person who is loved and can love. But trying to function with a totally opposite belief system creates a swirling, anxious situation inside, as if two rivers are colliding head on into one another and the water is all confused. In my last three posts (1, 2, 3), I’ve been describing my Dad’s belief system and how it was passively handed down to me as a child. His belief system also created havoc in my family, just not the really obvious easy-to-see kind.
Someone with a “I’m a nobody” belief system still wants to be valued, because they are human. Because my Dad didn’t value himself he sought to find his value in other ways. One of these ways was to put a lot of responsibility on his family to do the work of his own failing self-esteem. He believed that he was loved if his wife cooked and cleaned and took good care of him. He believed he was loved if we didn’t say a mean word towards him or be upset with him in any way whatsoever. If he put himself down, we would disagree with him and try to tell him that the opposite was true. Because he didn’t communicate his thoughts and feelings, my Mom, brother and I were forced to try and read his mind. If he was in a bad mood we ALL could tell- we became so skilled at reading his subtle signs and passive communications at the expense of learning to communicate for ourselves. If we sensed he was upset, we would do the work to try and make things better. Though my Mom would try and encourage better communication, he was so extremely uncomfortable and uptight about trying that things would end up more anxious than before. He was the passive King in our home and we learned to treat him with kid gloves. In living this way, my brother and I learned that love was all these things. Love meant compensating for someone else’s poor self esteem. Love meant not making the other person upset. As children who did not know this was so backwards, it also meant sacrificing our own needs to be built up and paid attention to in order to build up our parent. So the cycle continued. My brother and I grew up with this huge sense of lacking and low self-esteem of our own. We naturally lived to please other people. And all the while, the pain was brewing deep inside.
The last five years have been a process of seeing these things as the truth of my story. In learning the truth that all these subtle “leeching” dynamics between a parent and his children can have just as much damage as more physical or obvious kinds of abuse, I was exposed to a whole new world. I learned that these things were not my fault. I learned that my depression and anxiety has definite reasons and weren’t just symptoms of a messed up person.
Of my two parents, my Dad’s belief system had the most impact on me. Deep down I believed I was a “nobody” as well and I relied on other people to tell me that this wasn’t true. This wreaked havoc in its own kind of way, testing relationships and causing me to miss out on great opportunities that I felt I just wasn’t worthy of. As an adult, the responsibility to live differently is now in my own hands. Now that I know that this belief system is not my real inheritance, not the one I was meant to have, I can choose to embrace a new one. I can choose which river to follow. Today I am working to change my belief system. Today I take on the primary responsibility of nourishing my own self-esteem. Today I am taking another step into freedom and living in the truth.
~Carla~
Freedom from “Nose to Tail” Surviving
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I went trail riding last summer as part of my vacation. I’m not an avid horse-rider, and though I have this admiring affection for them, I was still afraid. The guides assured me that these horses had ridden this trail a thousand times- they knew exactly what to do and where to go and there shouldn’t be any surprises. It was true. Though some parts of the trail were more open and gave a little bit of freedom, these horses fell into a predictable nose to tail pattern. We switch-backed down through a steep valley; they plodded along with steady, consistent rhythm. But what had intimidated me at the beginning of the trip was there all along; these were big creatures, strong and powerful. And even though they were controlled day by day with reins and the predictability of the trail path, they had all the potential to break free and take me for the gallop of my life.
Nose to tail, nose to tail… plodding along the same path. What happens when a person’s full potential isn’t valued? What happens when a person is actually valued for being less than all that they are, or for doing things (or not doing things) that please only someone else? Value is placed on the wrong thing. In the powerful dynamic between a child and a parent, the child will automatically strive to be more of what their parents value. As a child, I knew I was valued for being good and right, so I strived to be that way. Or what if there is little interest shown at all? Maybe a parent is physically present, but shares no emotional interaction, doesn’t give of themselves or seek to know, really know, their child? The child assumes that she isn’t worth pursuing, her whole self isn’t worth pursuing. Or maybe, her whole self is “too much” to handle, too much to pursue, not worth the effort.
These were the deep conclusions I had drawn about myself that were at the root of my depression. Over time, what I was valued for was becoming far too cumbersome and burdensome to maintain. Like weights around my shoulders, pulling me down… All my effort to be right and good created endless shoulds and should nots and guilt guards and striving . What I was not valued for was still deep down inside, but so afraid to come out, unaccustomed to interacting with others, unsure of whether or not it would be accepted. I did not know that it was valuable, and I didn’t know how to value it myself.
This is the work I am doing. Chiselling out more understanding, more understanding, deeper and deeper. Uncovering these root beliefs truly is the door to freedom for everyone still plodding along nose to tail, nose to tail. We are each filled with unique and amazing potential and value beyond this trail.
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
When Bad Thoughts Wreck Good Feelings
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Have you ever had thoughts like these break into your conscious mind?
~Why can’t I do this right?
~Oh I knew I couldn’t do it;
~I will never get this right; I will never be able to do this,
~ Who do I think I am? Nobody likes me. I am useless.
~What makes me think that anyone wants to hear me speak, or read my writing?
~What makes me think I deserve freedom and recovery?
Where do you think those thoughts come from?
I used to honestly believe that those thoughts came from humility, that they were positive. I was not conceited, I was humble. I didn’t want to have “pride” because that could lead to something worse. I was taught that “pride goeth before a fall” and I was so fallen already that I didn’t think I could risk falling much farther down.
But where did they really come from?
They were these nagging questions that presented themselves whenever I tried something new, whenever I felt happy and thought maybe I could do something good with my life. They were the roadblocks that got in the way when I thought I could accomplish something cool. (as I mentioned in another post, I used to have a blog that I was afraid someone might read)
They came when I excitedly told my mother that I had an exhilarating new opportunity, and she responded with “why you? Why did they pick you”? I never thought that maybe something was wrong with her response; I just felt my heart sink and mentally agreed with her……. ya come to think of it….. why me?
Eventually those negative thoughts came to me whenever I felt happy or excited about pretty much anything. I didn’t know the difference between excitement and anxiety.
I was aware of those thoughts long before I emerged from my brokenness. I remember telling my therapist that I had an “imposter issue” and I remember explaining to him that I was sure that if anyone found out who I “really was” that I would be rejected, laughed at or dismissed. I felt invalid.
So who did I think “I really was”? As self aware as I have always been, I didn’t think about who I really was, I was just pretty sure that it wasn’t good. Maybe I was afraid of what or who I would see if I looked too closely. I had kind of a below the surface knowledge. But I can’t stress enough that since I was defined by abuse, opinion and false teaching, I was filled with guilt and shame and feelings of darkness and uselessness. At the same time, I got so angry with myself when I had these negative thoughts! (why can’t I feel better about myself? What the heck is wrong with me?) Round and round it went until I got deep into my truth and sorted this out.
Today I live in light and the truth has set me free. The sun shines on me and on my life. I do new and wonderful things all the time. My wings are strong and I am soaring; I have transcended that old belief system……. and now my life-song sings.
Come fly with me……. Darlene Ouimet
Speaking of new and wonderful things, Emerging from Broken now has a “fan page” on Facebook! We have a button to the right of this screen, and we would love to connect with you over there too.
