freedom ~ my grown son T.

I was not always who I am today. I was not strong. I was not independent. I was not an individual. I was not often happy. I was not a voice in the darkness and although I always had a desire to advocate for others, I was not effective.

I had to become effective in my own life before I was effective in the lives of others.

I was a victim. Some would rather I say that I was a survivor but in truth when I started this process I was still a victim. I was still a victim because I was still oppressed. I was still under the law of other people. I was still compliant and obedient. I was still defined by those other people and my true identity was suppressed.

I was lost, withdrawn and depressed. I was owned by many and disrespected by most.  I had three kids and when my oldest, who was 12 at the time started to treat me like I was ‘crazy’ and started using my depression as proof that I was crazy ~  just like his father (my husband) did, I knew that I had reached the end of what I could cope with. I was giving up on the fight for my life. The only decision that I had to make was how I was going to end it. I had to decide if I was going to escape, or if I was going to fight to find the solution one last time.

At first I had decided to leave my family. I thought that my husband and my three kids would be better off without me because I believed that I was the problem. I believed it deep down in my heart and soul because that was the message that I had always been given, all of my life and I never thought not to accept that message anymore.  The truth had been distorted for me since the beginning. I didn’t even question the truth as I knew it.  I believed the problem was “me” and I really believed that if I left my family, their lives would be so much easier; so much better.  I decided out of love for them that I should quietly go. But something nagged at me and today I know it was a glimmer of “the truth”.  It was NOT best for anyone if I were to just go.

I realized that for a very long time I learned to do what others wanted because I had been so totally convinced that what they wanted for me was ‘right’ because I had been so manipulated all my life. This was part of taking my life back from my oppressors. I started to look at what might be right for me. I started to think about what I might want and what was ‘best’ for me. I learned that most times “best” is best for everyone and not just best for me; it always comes down to the motive. What had happened to me most of my life was never best for me; it was just what someone else selfishly wanted.

As I started to look at HOW I had come to believe that the problem was me, I began to realize that I had been controlled and manipulated all my life by people who asked me to “try harder”. Trying harder was a default mode for me. As long as I believed I was the one that had to “try harder” I accepted that success in relationship and whether or not I was loved was all up to me.   

I write about “Emerging from Broken” from real experience. I lived functioning at a fraction of the level that I function at today. I survived living under the oppression and suppression of others. I survived by believing that if I did what “they” want and if I am who “they” want me to be, I would be loved. I was so brainwashed in victim mentality (that if I did what they wanted they would love me) that I could not see a solution other than leaving the world that I lived in.

I found a way to leave the world that I lived in by facing the damage that had been caused to me. I didn’t have to “go” anywhere. I literally stepped out of it by seeing how dysfunctional and harmful that it had been and still was.  I learned to validate my pain and declare that I had a right to my feelings, I had a right to my voice, I had been wronged and it WAS NOT my fault.   I finally owned my truth and discarded the lies that I had been encouraged to believe my entire life by realizing exactly what those lies were and how those lies were all designed by others who wanted to keep and maintain control over me. I learned to take care of myself emotionally.  I learned to love myself. And through all of this, I found myself. I found the original me and I embraced myself. I welcomed myself into a whole new world and a whole new existence.

I stayed with my husband and my children and we rebuilt our lives. I took the lead even though it was a fight for the first two years. No one in our home wanted anything to change but I wanted healing and I was willing to risk everything in order to obtain it. In my victim mentality I had actually taught my husband and kids to disregard my needs and even my opinions by disregarding them myself. They didn’t trust that I could model “emotional health”.

My husband had to do his own healing work and he did; I finally embraced the truth that it takes two to have a relationship and I was finally able to communicate that to him. I was no longer willing to carry the burden of relationship all by myself. We repaired the damage that had been done to us all of our lives and that we had in turn passed on by accepting and living in those false definitions of love. When our individual healing work was underway, we worked really hard to repair the damage and dysfunction in our marriage relationship and then in the relationships that we had with our three children.

Years have passed since I made the decision to face the pain and take my life back from the people who stole it from me. I live, really live each day now. Our three children have flourished living in the truth and without the oppression of the lies that we all used to live buried under.

Welcome to Emerging from Broken; the greatest and most rewarding adventure of my life. I look forward to meeting you on the journey from surviving to thriving.  

This article has been an emotional one for me to write. Tears sprang to my eyes several times; my determination to face the pain, acknowledge the damage, heal and take my life back surprised even me. I did not know that I had this amount of strength and persistence when I started this journey but today that is how I know that you can do it too.

As always, please share your thoughts.

There is freedom on the other side of broken,

Darlene Ouimet

Peace through Truth by Theodora MacLeod

I am an advocate for truth. I am an advocate for the truth that leads to freedom, wholeness and healing. I am an advocate for the truth that leads to healthy self esteem, the true definition of love and equal value for adults and children, bosses and employees, teachers and students because in the eyes of the truth, we are ALL people with equal value. Although we may have more authority in some situations, we do not suddenly reach a certain age or status which gives us more value than someone else has.

I will no longer do what “they” have decided is best for me to do or what “they” think I should do. I will do what I believe is right and best for me. When others tell me what to do or what I am doing wrong according to them, my ability to make decisions for myself is insulted and that kind of put down is devaluing.

I am not going to be who others say I am or who others want me to be. I am who I really am. No one else can define me. When I am defined by others I feel judged and unappreciated and it stifles my ability to be who I AM.  

Taking my life back means that I am in charge of it now. I am the captain of my own ship. My happiness does not depend on someone else’s happiness anymore.  In learning what was best for me and living in that definition, I empower all those around me to live their best life as well. I am no longer that puppet allowing everyone to pull my strings and I don’t wish to pull anyone else’s strings.

I was always in a situation where people communicated that it was BEST for ME when I did what they wanted. That communicates the message that I have no gift or purpose outside of serving them and it discounts my life and my purpose. Everyone has a gift to offer. Everyone has equal value in this world. By communicating to me that I didn’t know what was best for me but that they knew better, my individuality was stifled and my self esteem was thwarted.  

 I do not live by the false definition of love; the false definition of love exists to serve the unhealthy (and unloving) motives of others. When I was taught that love was compliance and obedience I thought my best contribution to others was my compliance and obedience and that I was to serve them no matter what motive they had.  I don’t agree with that definition of love anymore. It is dysfunctional and it is wrong. That is not love and I don’t live within that box anymore.

I do not give up my life anymore. I was lost because abuse defined me. By the actions of others I was told that I was not worth protecting. I was taught that I was not as valuable. I was taught that “the real me” was not good enough and that I had to try harder. I had to find “ME” and I had to validate and empower myself.

I am not silent and will not silence my own voice anymore. I found my voice and I broke the silence. I don’t respect the reasons for keeping the silence anymore. The reasons for keeping the silence are wrong. They are damaging to me. They are rooted in defending abuse.  

Healthy relationship is mutual; Mutual respect and equal value for all people in the relationship.

Respect means treating me as an individual with my own thoughts and my own opinions and I will follow that same definition of respect. The truth is that we are ALL individuals. If we don’t agree on something, that does not mean I don’t love or respect.  I had to look at where my fears in relationship came from in order to understand the way other people reacted to me.  I had been taught that compliance was respect. Obedience was love. If I didn’t like what an adult (or even someone else) was doing, too bad.  I believed that I was “loved and accepted” when I agreed. SO, when someone didn’t agree with me, I thought the relationship was in danger. My definition of relationship was all wrong.  And because of my nature, I was the one who back downed in compliance and obedience first because I thought it proved my love.  BUT that is not what love is. I had to get this straight before I could move forward with the life of freedom and wholeness that I had begun to believe was possible. I realized that other people were reacting out of their own false belief systems. They had their own false definitions of love and respect.   

I had to stop trying to figure out how to make everyone else happy and concentrate on the truth about why I was so unhappy.  I had to find my own value and define myself through the grid of truth before I could stop jumping through the hoops of controlling and manipulative people.

Freedom and wholeness cost me a big price and disregarding the things that were so hard to learn for the sake of keeping a dysfunctional relationship would be like throwing away all my hard work. Working on a relationship with someone who disagrees with my value, is counterproductive.  Working on functioning within dysfunctional parameters is the exact relationship system I worked so hard to escape.

Please share your thoughts and examples of dysfunctional relationship through either the false definition of love or the new grid of looking at the truth.

There is freedom on the other side of broken;      

Darlene Ouimet

See the freedom and wholeness category for related posts

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”

run

Official Notice to the oppressors, abusers and perpetrators of emotional and psychological abuse;   ~ you were wrong about me. You ARE wrong about me.  I don’t need YOU to make me better. I am better than you know. I am stronger than you ever dreamed. I don’t need you to make me anything.  I am better without you. Watch me fly and wave good bye to you from my position of freedom high above the clouds.

“Sometimes our teachers teach us more than they themselves have learned” Darlene Ouimet

You smiled at me, nodding and tilting your head as though you really understood what I was telling you. You made it easy for me to talk about my pain.  I felt heard. I felt like finally someone understood.  No one had ever really understood me. Certainly no one had ever validated my pain. And since validation was what I needed, it was so easy for you to use that knowledge against me. You validated me yes, but in the end it was only so that you could get what YOU wanted. You were a predator but I was so starved for acknowledgement that I didn’t recognize you as one.

All the while you smiled and listened attentively you were thinking about how you could capture me for your own and take me for your own possession. But I didn’t see it.

I kept telling myself that you would never take advantage of me. I must be misunderstanding the tiny red flags coming up for me; I always misunderstood… all my life I had been told that I misunderstood. I thought that I must be misunderstanding again.

And we talked about my “trust issues”.

I was high with the new feelings of being heard, being validated and being seen. I did not consider that I was being groomed again. Everyone in my past had wanted something from me. Everyone took advantage of me. With men it was often something to do with sex or sexuality.  And this time the warning signs about sex were not present, so I missed the other signs. No one ever wanted me for my brain. No one saw my potential before, in fact, I was used to being treated like I was stupid and incapable. I was so excited to be valued for my brain that I didn’t realize that your motive was just different than what I was used to. Your motive was just as selfish however.   

You wanted me for what I could do for you. 

You threw me crumbs off your table as though I was lucky to have them.  I begged for those crumbs and I believed that I was SO LUCKY to have them until I realized that I am capable of providing the entire meal and that I don’t need you or your pathetic crumbs.

I am not interested in the kind of “love” you have in mind. I know this feeling that I have been tricked this way before. The tactics are familiar, only the details and outcomes have changed.   

I thought you were different. I thought you SHOULD have been different. You were a respected “professional”. You were a “Christian.” You were all the things that I thought meant ‘safe’.

You thought I was ‘nothing’ and you regarded me as such. You thought that I was insignificant compared to you. Well look at me now.

You tried to steal my gifts by telling me that I didn’t have them. You tried to convince me that without you I would not survive. How was I to know that you were manipulating me? How would I have known that you were thinking about what I could do for you, while I thought you were thinking about me; planning how you could take my gifts and make them yours while you took the credit and left me in the darkness.

You are like all the others. Just like all the others. 

You regarded me as though I was stupid; as though I would never catch on. Just like all the others. You are just as pathetic as you taught me THEY were. You are a pathetic blur along with all of the other abusers and oppressors in my past now.  

I thought I needed you but I was wrong.

You can’t have my mind. You can’t have my body. You can’t have me. Don’t touch me again with your poison. The truth has destroyed my respect for you. The truth has set me free.

All my life when men were convincing me that they were trying to “love me”, and make me feel good, they were really only trying to suit themselves. They were preparing the ground for their own pleasure and their own harvest. It was never about me or my feelings. It was all a grooming process. Even in some of the work projects that I did, this exact same grooming process took place. I was less than a prostitute since I never got paid. My contribution was dismissed as unimportant and as though I would never expect to be given any credit in the first place. Without acknowledgement, I now realize that your gratitude was glaringly insincere.  

 I thought it was love, to serve in this way. I thought you were love. And in truth, you were the same as every other predator. Misusing your power to empower yourself; using me to glorify you.  Never seeing ME as an individual with as much value as you saw in yourself.

And you believed all along that I wanted to serve you; you believed that I wanted to be your puppet. You acted like you were doing ME a favor because you regard yourself so highly and me so lowly. I am sure you thought ~ who wouldn’t want to have the privilege of sitting at your feet? And I believed it. I thought I was so lucky that you picked me.  You picked me. I was actually grateful.

As though the fact that you picked me defined me as “worthy”.  I have made that same mistake many times and with many other people in the past, but I see the truth more clearly now.

You are not more important than me. You are just like all the rest. I reeled with the shock of that truth.  You are just like the ones that you warned me about. 

You didn’t see ME, you only saw what I could do for you.

You did not value ME but only valued what I could do for you.

You are no different than any other predator.

But you were wrong about me. You ARE wrong about me.  I don’t need YOU to make me better. I am better than you know. I am stronger than you ever dreamed. I don’t need you to make me anything.  I am better without you. Watch me fly and wave good bye from my position of freedom high above the clouds.

Please share your thoughts. Think carefully about the people who fit this post in your own life. Originally this was a letter to one specific person, but as I wrote it, I realized it was to a former pastor, and to a priest, a few therapists, a few “friends” and a doctor that I had once. When I was editing it I realized that it applied to a much greater list of people in my past then I had first intended.

Exposing Truth;

Darlene Ouimet

Related Posts ~ Taught to think or taught Not to think

Psychological Abuse ~ if you don’t like it Leave

Psychological Abuse and Dysfunctional Parenting

Sometimes facing the pain seemed so overwhelming that I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to face what I had to face in order to get on with my life. I didn’t want to feel anything. I had survived by shutting down my feelings and by shutting down my needs. I didn’t want to feel or be aware; it was much too frightening.

This was the spin; the vicious cycle.

But I must have wanted to live. There was a tiny spark in me that didn’t go out. There was a tiny flame that belonged to me and a determined little flame it was. That spark was determined to live. The “how to go about doing that” was the problem. I wanted to be free but there were certain chains that had to be broken. Certain things held me back and because those chains formed when I was so young, I didn’t realize they were even there. They were familiar; they were part of me. I thought they helped me, and even thought they were “saving me”. I was afraid to break them and emerge into the sunlight. That was the spin that I was caught in.  I had lived in “survivor mode” for so long that it was all I knew. 

Survivor mode is the shut down place; not feeling, not needing, not facing the truth.  Survivor mode is the only way to get through any kind of childhood trauma. But as an adult it was in my way.  It became one of the road blocks to freedom.

Victim mentality believes that being compliant will keep me safe. Being compliant means never facing or talking about childhood trauma. Being compliant means never standing up to the abusers, oppressors, or to anyone who triggers those feelings or fears that are born out of survivor mode. Victim Mentality is a learned behavior also from childhood and being compliant was the only hope of being safe as a child; the problem is that I never grew into an adult with value when I was stuck in that way of thinking. Living in victim mentality, I perceived everyone as being more important than I was and therefore was compliant to almost everyone.

At the root of depression and low self esteem and wrapped all around my victim mentality and survivor mode was my difficulty with self love. I had not been taught my value. In fact, I had been taught to doubt my value. I had been taught that I had no real value. When I was told I had value, it was usually attached to some form of control or manipulation which carried the message that my value was only in what I could do for someone else. I had to learn to value myself. That might sound easy but in reality, self love has been one of the hardest things to learn. Even today, every struggle that I have has an element of struggle with self love at the root of it.

These three things; understanding survivor mode, understanding victim mentality, and realizing that I did not know I had value and therefore had not learned to love myself, held the keys to freedom.

I learned everything in this process of recovery and achieved all forward motion by looking backwards. I had to examine the results of being devalued and understand how I had come to live in victim mentality. I had to take a look at how I survived, so that I could see that I survivor mode, although necessary back then, was no longer necessary anymore. In order to learn my own value, I had to take a look at why I didn’t know my value. I had to take a look at how my self esteem got “broken” and went missing in the first place. It was there that I realized where all the depressions and dissociative identity originated. It was there that I began to see how to replace the missing links in my childhood so that I could overcome depression, low self esteem and dissociative identity disorder.  

It was there that I found so much HOPE that there really was freedom on the other side of broken.

And that was when I realized that my fear of the pain of facing that stuff was also in my way. Perhaps the pain would not be as bad as the pain that I finally realized I was already living in? I had to take that chance. Of course it paid off and I was right. The pain in the process, which is more acute but never permanent was never as bad as the constant although more subtle pain I had always been submerged in.

Facing those details was what set me on the path to overcoming low self esteem, overcoming all the abuse and the resulting depressions and dissociative identity disorder and most of all, overcoming the false belief system that defined my life and had determined my course up till that point.

Please share your thoughts. Please feel free to use any name you wish; It is important to me that you feel safe here.

Another Snapshot of Truth on the Journey to Freedom

Darlene Ouimet                    

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All donations to this work are gratefully appreciated and very much needed. Please consider the donate button on the right sidebar or contact me through the contact form. ~ Darlene

For Related posts Click the Bold Links in Blue

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.

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

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

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.

"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~