Archive for low self esteem
WHO AM I? Will I like Me?
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I remember the day that realized that I was no longer attached to my former identity. My former identity is the identity that was given to me by my family and almost every significant relationship I ever had since a very young age with the exception of a few special girlfriends and maybe a couple of adults along the way. It was how I had come to think of myself, how much guilt and shame that I carried for things that had happened to me and the way that I believed I was not loveable, that I was not good enough and that something about me was just “wrong”. That identity no longer resonated with me. I knew that I was no longer who they said I was. My identity crisis was over, I thought. I was certain that the little voice in my head would go away now. That little voice that whispered every time I accomplished anything; “who the hell do you think YOU are?? Everyone knows you are nothing, everyone knows that you are an imposter and anyone who doesn’t will soon find out”. I was certain that voice would shut up now and that I would never have an imposter issue again! (Unfortunately this was not the end of that issue, but let’s save that for another blog post later on)
I remember that the exact moment I realized that I was no longer who they said I was; that I was no longer defined by them. I felt euphoric and immediately empty. I felt like I had reached a goal, but something was missing. I felt amazing and terrified. I felt free and blank all at the same time. Full of real fear I questioned my therapist; “well if none of that is who I am, then who am I?” It felt scary, dangerous, foreign, lonely and somehow clean, all at the same time.
Prior to this day, in my mind’s eye regarding the process of recovery from all my depressions and dissociative identity etc, I had visions of huge construction equipment digging up buildings, rotten foundations and roots that were miles deep. At first clearing this wreckage ~ what my life had become ~ seemed overwhelming. I didn’t think I could do it, there was so much debris to deal with and the mess went so deep. Sometimes I even pictured huge floodlights so the work could also be done in the dark, as though there was no rest from it. It seemed to go on and on, the things I found in the digging were sometimes shocking, sometimes frightening, and sometimes so enlightening it was like finding diamonds! Most of the time the shocking and frightening stuff eventually was so enlightening that it was like finding treasure too. I found the truth! It was exhausting but somehow I kept going.
Now, on this new day in my mind’s eye I pictured a huge area of land that has been cleared of all trees, structures, garbage, weeds and rubble The land was all smoothed and prepared and the huge construction equipment had been taken away. This new foundation was ready and waiting for me to rebuild on it. I felt shaky at first, as though like a baby, my legs were still wobbly. I was curious about who I would find on this new leg of the journey to discover the real me. Would I recognize myself, and even more frightening, would I like myself? There was still that little voice inside, asking “what if they were right about me”? What if the people that had defined me all my life were right about me after all”? What if I can’t do me? What if no one likes the real me? What am I going to find out next?
Feeling blank has many fears.
The following months were in many ways no less complicated than the prior months in therapy, they were just different. I had to learn how to live in my new belief system, and sometimes it was uncomfortable. I tried new things, and almost everything I did felt like I was doing it for the first time, because I had changed all those old beliefs and I was not the same person anymore. Sometimes I wanted to run back to the old life! At least it was familiar and even comfortable there. At least I knew how to function there.
As I got to know myself, my happiness increased. I felt free, alive, brilliant, strong, dynamic and reborn. I began to feel comfortable; like I was really alright, and in fact I was “right with myself”. I felt like I finally knew what it means to feel like I was who I was meant to be. I was able to impact others in ways that I never did before. I started to feel purposeful and fulfilled. Today I continue to become more and more comfortable in my own skin, more alive, more able to live life fully and to flourish and thrive. I become more “ME” with each passing day and I love who I am!
Please share your own stories, feelings, fears and victories as we travel this road and celebrate our discoveries.
Darlene Ouimet
click here to read the post on my struggle with my identity
Depression and Recovery from Mental Health Struggles
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I have talked a lot about taking a look at the truth in order to realize how I arrived with repeated depression, broken, exhausted and ready to throw my life away in my early forties. I had to look at what happened to me through new lenses. I had to realize that I was innocent of blame for the mess in my childhood that resulted in my adult life still being a mess. There is a gap between childhood and adulthood that I discovered is a very common place where many of us get stuck. We reach a certain age in our early twenties and we are told that we are adults and we are responsible for our lives. Stop blaming others, get over it and get on with it. But no one helped me sort it out when I was a kid. I had been treated like I was less important than the adults in my life. SO how was I supposed to suddenly know my value, get over “it” and get on with it? As a child I had this sense of having been abandoned ~ my feelings didn’t matter, I was not taken care of and I did not grow up “properly” as a result. No one helped me with this mess, a mess that I was innocent of creating, BUT nevertheless, it was still my mess. It was finally clear that no one was going to rescue me. It was clear that my family was not going to suddenly wake up and love me. No one was going to suddenly realize my value. It was up to me.
I did not realize that I was a victim. I didn’t like that word and didn’t really understand it. I thought it meant that I was a whiner. I thought a victim was someone who complained all the time about the world and it’s people and about what a tough hand of cards they had been dealt. I wasn’t a whiner. I grew up in a world where depression has a stigma. Deep down no matter how much I heard that depression was common, that many struggled, yada yada yada, there was a stigma surrounding it and I believed it was a weakness. I didn’t want to admit that I was on anti depressants; I would have been seen as weak, lacking in faith, and like everything else in my life, I must be doing something wrong. I tried positive thinking, affirmation, bible study, self help books and seminars. They all worked for a while, but nothing had a lasting effect. I was exhausted. The depressions that I had dealt with since I was ten years old were getting worse and more frequent. I was losing the fight. I felt like I was being held under water, struggling to breathe, fighting to have a voice and a place in this world. And I was losing.
It was time to step back and take a look at my life. I put all the puzzle pieces on the table. The mess was overwhelming. I didn’t think I could face it, I didn’t think that I could sort it out. There was so much confusion, so many mixed messages, so much that I had accepted the blame for and I was so tired. I had to go back to beginning and realize where my emotional growth was stunted. I had to face one thing at a time and break that one thing down. There was abuse that resulted in destructive coping methods. I had been focusing on the destructive coping methods, even questioning WHY I had depression as though that too was my fault and beating myself up for the way that I dealt with everything. I saw myself as a failure because I looked at my life through the expectations of the very people who held me under that water. I had to make my beginning and at first it was only a decision to try. I started with one thing and was willing to look at one abusive situation in my childhood. My therapist chose my first memory of an abusive trauma to take a look at first. I laid it out on the table piece by piece and looked at it the way it happened, bit by bit. I revealed every thought I had that I remembered including the baggage of self blame. I had not even been conscious that I had self blame. I dumped all the thoughts about how I could have prevented it, how I must have done something to cause it onto the table as I focused on this one event. I talked about the adults’ expressions, the eye movement, the secrecy, all of which helped me understand that I was innocent. I recognized the beginning of my dissociative identity disorder. I felt the horror of what had happened to me and for the first time I realized that it happened “TO ME”. I faced the pain of child abuse, and came to understand that I had been wronged.
One event at a time, one small snapshot of truth, one little breakthrough, one new way of looking at it, one little realization and then another.
This was the beginning of Emerging from Broken ~ I invite you to contribute to this post in any way that you wish.
Darlene Ouimet
Low Self Esteem, Shame, Depression and the First Step
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Debbie V. wrote a comment today on my last post (Survivors of Abuse) that just hit me in such a way that I thought I would respond with a new post about this topic.
Debbie said “I am working on what you are speaking of. I know right where it began, I can even remember the feelings I had as a child….embarrassed and ashamed “who did I think I was anyway”??? And how the adults felt looked like “job well done” when I’d been taken down a notch…..what crap. I am grateful you asked me to relate experiences I had as a child to my own daughter…as in ~ what would I DO if someone did to her what was done to me or how would I process that. It makes things VERY clear to me now. I can’t BELIEVE anyone could do to children what seems to be done over and over and over again.”
It isn’t always easy for survivors of abuse to hear the stories of abuse suffered by others, but it far easier to react to the stories of others then it is to feel our own feelings about our own stories. I sought out people that suffered worse abuse then I did, so that I could reinforce the fantasy that it wasn’t really that bad. Who told me it wasn’t really that bad though? THEY DID; it was the ones that abused me and the ones that didn’t have the guts to protect me that convinced me that it wasn’t really that bad. I believed deep down inside of me that for some reason something was just wrong with me and that I deserved what happened to me. This is how they get us to keep the lies and maintain the secrets. Do not bring shame on this family by exposing the truth. So many of us remain in denial about the way we were treated, not protected, not valued, because it is so painful to accept the truth about our lives. But that truth is the truth that will set you free.
What Debbie is referring to in her comment is that in a attempt to make her react to her own terrible story of abuse as a young child, which included being grabbed by the hair and beaten, and having her skin twisted so hard that it came off, I asked her to imagine her reaction if her own young daughter came to her with that same story. How would you process it if someone you loved came to YOU and told your story as though it happened to them. Would you shush them? Would you make light of it? Would you say that they were exaggerating, lying, or trying to get attention? Would you say that they must have done something to deserve it? Somehow I don’t think you would. I think you would be outraged. I think you would weep tears of anger and frustration for them and for the innocence that was taken from them. I think you would want to do whatever you could to reassure them that it could not have possibly been their fault, that it could not have been deserved and that it was the abuser was wrong to treat someone that way.
We don’t allow ourselves to feel the pain of the treatment we received when we are sure that the pain of accepting that being devalued to that degree would be worse than any other pain. We want to stay in denial that our own family could not possibly have neglected to protect us, or worse yet, our own parents could not possibly have used and degraded us in that way. I think my biggest fear was that if I faced the whole truth about my past that I would find out it was true… I really was not loveable or worthy of love. Blaming it on myself was safer then accepting that I was nothing.
And it is very painful to go back and face the events of the past. We were children; innocent children who were told that we deserved to be beaten; we were told (not always in words) that we didn’t deserve protection, that we didn’t deserve love and that we needed to be disciplined because we were bad, unruly and wrong. We felt defective. In psychological abuse, or emotional abuse we were told not to feel, we were told that we were stupid, in the way, whiney or silly and it was clear in our fragile minds that we were not valued for who we really are but only for what we could do to make someone else look good. In sexual abuse we were told that we needed to be taught the ways of the world, we were told that it was love, or that we were special and if we told on our abuser we lived in fear for our lives or the lives of our siblings, parents or pets. We lived in fear. We were told that we were lying or that it was no big deal, or that we must be insane to make up such a story. Some of us were brought in front of a church so that everyone could pray for us, further reinforcing our belief that the problem was within our own selves. This is not love.
And so we grow up thinking that it was our fault, that we are the crazy ones. And when we struggle with mental health issues, low self esteem, and all manner of depression, then they point at us and declare “there is the proof. We always knew that it was you, you have always been the problem!” By that time, we are in such a fog and so used to living in the spin that it doesn’t take much for us to believe once again that they are right. We take medication; we often land in institutions, all the while never realizing where it all started.
I am encouraging you to take a step outside yourself, tell yourself your story as though you were hearing it from someone you love, and see how that makes you feel. It is okay to be angry. That anger is justifiable; blame and anger are important stepping stones to freedom and the pain is temporary when you face the whole truth. Hear your own story and realize that you deserve to know the truth. You are enough, you are loveable and you are worth it.
Thank you for reading my rant today. I encourage you to post your comments about how this post affected you; how does it make you feel? Did I get too blunt? Push too hard or was it exactly what you needed to hear?
All my love, Darlene Ouimet
Valued for my Ability to Work Hard ~ By Jimmy B.
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Note from Darlene: My last post was about The Progression of Mental Health and how I (falsely) learned from a young age that my value was sexual. My husband, Jimmy B. started to comment (because I had asked him to in the comment section) and he ended up writing a wonderful comment on how he came to understand his value. He writes about how he was conditioned by his upbringing as a farm boy in Rural Alberta Canada. I decided to publish his comment as a post all on its own because it is such a great illustration of how we come to understand our value; not our true value but the value assigned to us by others. ~ Darlene Ouimet
Valued for my Ability to Work Hard ~ By Jimmy B.
It started as early as age three or four. I loved to eat and still love to eat but that is another coping method for a whole other blog post. I loved pie; any kind of pie. I always wanted a big slice like the adults got but my mom said when I could work as hard as the men I could have a bigger slice; a man size slice. I learned to work hard; real hard. By the time I was ten I could work as hard as any man and by the time I was twelve, I could out work two men. This was rewarded sometimes with pie and other goodies. This was also one of the first ways my Dad got me under his thumb. I was told how big and strong I was. I was praised for how hard I could work. I was told how valuable I was because I could work so hard. I liked the approval.
Because I tried so hard, I was also told I was needy and that I needed more attention than my siblings. I was reminded that I constantly wanted recognition for my accomplishments and I was a pain in the ass. “Just go out and do something” was a common phrase I heard.
This was quite a conundrum. Along with all these phrases and put downs and work came requests from neighbours and extended family. ”Hey Jimmy, want to come and make a little cash his weekend” or “come and give me a hand for an hour” were common offers. This usually made my Dad make me work harder so he didn’t lose me to someone else. I liked the praise but as a kid I also wanted my parent’s approval.
All this work got in the way of my school work, which suffered, therefore I was told I was stupid and I would never be able to run my own business or work for myself. Another thing that suffered was my exhaustion tolerance. When I got tired I was told I was lazy. I thought I was lazy because I was always tired and when puberty hit man I had to push myself to prove I was good enough, worthy enough and valuable enough to be loved.
This way of working and thinking caught up with me and caused most of my problems in the rest of my life. My relationships suffered. My health suffered.
I did not know what was right or wrong because my Parents kept me in a spin all the time depending what their motives were. I felt I was never good enough and I was a big disappointment to them. My dad always had a better way for me to do things; HIS WAY. All my abusers had their own ways of how I should be doing things. My way was never right. Of course abusers tell you these things. They change rules and lie and make up things to keep you oppressed and keep you in the spin so you can’t see really how pathetic they are. Stay in the spin so you can’t see their down falls and short comings. They keep us oppressed, mentally, sexually and physically, so we can never see that we are valuable because they are afraid that maybe we are better than they are; maybe we are better business men and women then they will ever dream about being. Maybe we can work harder and we are smarter than them. They have to keep us thinking down and depressed, they have to squish us down so that we really don’t see who they really are; vile, pathetic, controlling, sick, stupid, lonely people.
In summary I want to add that I was an honour student; I bought a million dollar business when I was 19 and became very successful, but due to the conditioning of my father, and my whole family, I never acknowledged my own success; it was never enough and I became a workaholic. I was driven to prove myself, but since I had never been recognized prior to adulthood, I never felt like anything was enough until I found help and like Darlene always says; got to the bottom of the lies, exposed them, got rid of them and replaced them with the truth.
Jimmy B.
Breaking the Cycle of Automatic Self Blame
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“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being” Hafiz
Have you ever noticed that when you are driving a vehicle, some of the things you do are automatic? I don’t really think about using my turn indicator when I am about to turn a corner; it is so automatic that I often find myself indicating when I come to the corner in my own laneway. When the brake lights come light up on the car in front of me, it is automatic for me to touch my breaks too.
When you are making the bed, or doing the dishes do you think about what you are doing, or are you thinking about something else? These types of mundane everyday tasks become habitual and automatic.
It is the same with the way that we think about ourselves. It was habitual for me to think that I was not as valuable as others; it was so deeply inside of me that I was not at all conscious of how I viewed myself or how deep my belief was. My mother often told me that I was selfish and I believed her. When I went to a 12 step program, it was very easy for me to agree that the root of my problem was selfishness and self centeredness, but it was not positive for me to believe that because my view of myself was wrong to begin with. Because my belief systems and my view of self were so skewed, even self help books and programs were not helpful for me in the ways they were meant to be and very often had a negative effect on me. I did not realize this until I stepped back and decided to take a deep look at the beginning and where the confusion started.
Getting back to the beginning was kind of like navigating a deep dark cave with long winding tunnels and scary obstacles. Carrying a flashlight that only worked some of the time made it even more frightening. I was afraid that I would get lost in the dark and that I would end up hurting even more. I was afraid that I would get stuck there and be forever in the painful part of the process. I was so afraid of the repressed memories; I was almost positive that I would remember something that I could not deal with. I was afraid that I would discover that it was my fault after all; that I deserved what had happened to me, that I had indeed brought it on myself and even asked for it. I was afraid because I thought the lies were the truth and the truths were lies.
In my mind’s eye, there lived a little girl who was about two years old. She lived alone in an attic; it was very cold and dark with only one broken window letting in a bit of light. She was filthy dirty, wearing a sleeveless and tattered little dress, which barely covered her bottom. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears, her hair a tangled mass and she was cold. She was unable to speak, and she clung to a broken dirty dolly. I had no idea why I had this image of this little girl in my mind, but eventually I knew that she was me and that was the self image that I had deep inside of me. No one cared; no one even knew she was there. No one was coming to rescue her and she knew it. That hope had died years ago. When I realize that she was me, I had to rescue myself.
The key is to keep going. Keep navigating that cave. Find your beginning and go from there. Have the courage to keep striving towards the goal, believing that freedom is on the other side. Keep going. On the days that you doubt with every fibre of your being that you can have this too, come visit me here for little bit of encouragement. As always, I welcome your feedback and comments.
Darlene Ouimet
The Recovery Journey ~ Common Bonds
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These past few years I have realized a commonality between almost all of us who struggle with any or all issues, whether those issues have to do with the causes ~ such as physical, sexual, or emotional abuse or if they have to do with conditions ~ meaning symptoms or diagnosis such as depression of any kind, dissociative identity disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, bi polar, borderline personality disorder or mild or serious low self esteem. I am not discounting or stressing the importance of any one type of struggle here because I’ve realized this common bond we all seem to share. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I am talking about the belief system that develops in our lives when we have been abused, neglected or devalued. That belief system seems to have something to do with the resulting problems that interfere with the individual having a life filled with joy and freedom.
I started this blog to write about the healing journey and the difficulties with it; a place to talk about our common bond and to stay away from emphasizing the differences or highlighting the diagnosis. I had been diagnosed with a few different things, and the diagnosis was not what helped me to recover. I found a way out of the brokenness that I lived in for so long and want to share my journey because I realized that the road so many of us travel on the journey to freedom is similar. It is noteworthy to mention that we also have a lot of commonality in the places that we get stuck.
I talk a lot about how I got broken in the first place; Other people got to decide what I was worth or not worth, what I could be used for or what I was good for and even what I was good at. With sexual and physical abuse, someone took control of my body and did things to me that I did not want done to me and I had no choice, although I was told and even convinced that I did have a choice. With neglect or with a parent who never noticed or took interest, I learned that I was not valuable, not important enough to be cared for. I was groomed and trained in guilt and shame, convinced that all of this was my fault; I was influenced and I convinced myself that I could do better or try harder and then it would stop. As I grew older, those childhood beliefs became even more skewed because now I am told that I have a choice about how I view it, and that I should just accept it and get over it or not talk about it because it was a long time ago, and because I still have the deep rooted belief that I was not really loveable due to something I might have done or something that was missing in me and I became even more distressed. I was so sure for so long that it was my fault that I struggled. On top of all that, as an adult there were a lot more voices and influences telling me what was wrong with me, what I was doing wrong and what was in my way. These are the well meaning people, books and leaders that told me I didn’t have enough faith; that I needed to be more grateful, that the past belongs in the past, that I needed to forgive and forget….. Well I’m sure you get the picture.
I spent years practicing positive thinking, telling myself that I loved myself, telling myself that “God don’t make junk”; never speaking of the past, never acknowledging depression, resentment or anger. I practiced gratitude, prayed for people that were my enemies, went to extremes with my physical health and joined self help programs. For 8 years I studied Greek and Hebrew word origins so I could study the original meaning of the bible, I confessed all my sins, and practiced accountability. I submitted to my husband, which in my case meant that I gave up my identity and individuality and became a servant to my family. If I had any dreams I gave them up in favor of his dreams. My struggle only increased.
I learned to cover my real feelings up. I smiled to the world and dissociated much of the time and I beat myself up whenever I was discouraged or ungrateful. I was unhappy and I felt guilty about it because I could not see past all the things I was told and believed that I brought on myself. Consequently I never got over it until I really took a good look at all of it. I took a look at the whole picture. There was no way that I could just get over it or put it behind me, especially with all the mixed up beliefs in there.
There was something missing between the events of my childhood and the “getting over it” and “letting it go” part. The bridge was broken and the keys were on the bridge. There was no real acceptance, no real freedom, no real forgiveness and no real life, until I got the bridge repaired and found those keys. I am grateful every day that I did.
Stay Tuned for part 2 ~ “Mental Health Recovery ~ Ten Necessary Changes“
As always I love to have your comments!
Darlene Ouimet
Unhealthy Parenting ~ The Foundation is Passed on to Me
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- Darlene and Bodie
In my recovery it has been important for me to realize how my parents did not have a sense of their own value and therefore did not know how to help me to see my own value. I think that when we are adult children and we struggle with self esteem, we have some funky and skewed systems in place, causing us to believe that the road to wholeness and freedom is on a path that it isn’t on at all. It can get really confusing if at the heart of it we believe that someone else can restore our value, or that we can be the source of defining value for another. If you have not read my last post “The Beginning of Broken ~ Family Foundations”, please read it first as it gives more context for this post.
Somewhere along the way my mother thought that her children would restore her value. I think this is what so often happens. Parents try to get their value restored through their children. Children can’t accomplish that; nobody can restore value for another person. But I really wanted my mother to be okay, and thought that if only I could love her enough, that she would love me too and I tried harder and harder but I failed her. Her disappointment became blame which seeped out unto me and became a part of the way that I viewed myself.
When my oldest son was 12 he began to roll his eyes at me, speaking to me and looking at me like I was a little crazy. Since I had struggled with depression for many years, deep down I thought maybe I was crazy. My greatest joy and most important work in life up till then had been raising these 3 kids but I had this feeling that I was failing. Pretty much my only goal in life had been not to do what my mother did to me, but it was all going wrong and I was seriously considering giving up. I thought the kids might be better off without me, and that my husband might be able to do a better job on his own. I sought help as a last resort.
I was very sure that I could do things better with my own kids. I had a few ideas about where my parents failed me, but I didn’t often consider that my self esteem got stunted because their self esteem was stunted. When my parents didn’t succeed in showing me my value, and although I worked hard in many different ways to find my value, I failed, mostly because I looked for evidence of value in the wrong places. I didn’t have anywhere to start from. The foundation was never laid, so I looked for my worth in my work, through other people, through my talents and things like that.
When I had my own children, deep down I thought that I would do better with raising them and that in succeeding in doing better, in successfully raising my own kids, that THEY would be the proof of my value. I thought successful parenting would “define” me and prove that I was a valuable person. I started to have increasing mental health breakdowns as I realized that I was not having the success that I dreamed of, nor was my value being established. I had to throw all my old ideas out the window and learn a new way of looking at things in order to heal from the illnesses that I struggled with. I had to think outside the confines of the box that was passed down to me in order to find freedom and wholeness on this side of broken.
What are your thoughts on these ideas? As always I welcome your comments, as your views only enhance the effectiveness of my purpose.
Bright Blessings,
Darlene Ouimet
The Beginning of Broken ~ Family Foundations
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- born innocent and with all our value
~At the heart of my message there is a sincere desire to somehow explain how the broken begins and where the healing starts. ~Darlene Ouimet
Once upon a time in the 1930’s there was a small sweet and innocent little blue eyed blond child who was born into a quickly growing family. Even before she was born, there were some obvious family dynamics. Her mother had lost her own mother at a young age and had become like a wife to her own father and the little girl’s father was often not around and liked to visit other women. And those weren’t the only problems.
This delicate young girl grew up never knowing that she was loved. She had no way of learning that she was a wonderful addition to the family. Her mother had not known she was loved either, and I’d imagine that the grandmother before that had the same story. Maybe her mother didn’t know how to show love since she had no example of it? The little girl had no sense of her own worth. No one had introduced her to her value. No one knew how to love. But she was cute, tiny, and innocent. Maybe that was her value? When the marriage between her mother and father ended, her beautiful mother was pursued by men. The little girl wondered if being pursued by men meant the same as ‘valued’, or if being beautiful was the source of value. The little girl had some problems with these new men in her mother’s life. They drank too much alcohol and were creepy and tried to touch her. She was often afraid. She may have wondered if being sexually attractive had something to do with being valuable.
This young girl worked very hard for very little attention and the attention she did get was often from strangers, neighbours and teachers. She was constantly criticized, never validated, never loved and not fed properly. She had to quit school very young because the family needed her to make money. One day her father disappeared and she never saw him again. I wonder what that did to her self esteem.
As she grew up and into her teens, the boys became interested in this sweet young blond haired and blue eyed beauty and of course that made her feel good, special, maybe even loved and valued. There were nasty men who were also interested in her, and that made her feel dirty, guilty and full of shame.
When she was 21 she married a handsome young man. She thought maybe her life would begin now. Maybe he would be the one that would rescue her. But very soon it wasn’t enough, something was still missing. She did not find her value as his wife; he did not fill her restless hunger for value or love. He was more interested in his work. Oh if only she had a child to love her. Then she would have value. She would be needed, loved and depended upon by another human being. Then maybe her life would have meaning. If just one person could love her, she was sure that would mean that she was lovable and she could begin to love herself.
The children came one by one. But children are a lot of work, and sometimes she was prone to depression and feeling that children are too much work and that the children should understand how tired their mother is, how much she has to do for them, how hard this is for her, and they should recognize her value. Children are so ungrateful. Children can be noisy, messy and cause accidents. They seemed to need a lot of attention, and she herself had always longed for a little attention. But she didn’t get it. She demanded her children obey her. She demanded them to respect her, but she didn’t teach them mutuality. She didn’t lead by example. She had an idea about how they should act towards her to prove their love, but she didn’t live by that same definition of love, just as she was never taught love. As in her own life growing up, relationship was barely present, and relationship was a one way street.
She began to have difficulty coping with life, and she needed to take medication in order to get through a day. She didn’t realize that she was repeating the same cycle with her own children that she had lived in as a child. She told her children stories of her difficult childhood, and as they grew up, they felt sorry for her, and tried to help her and assure her of her value, but because of the messages that she had accepted all her life, she could not accept value from an outside source and much to the distress of the children, their efforts failed. When the children grew into adults themselves, she still tried to make them restore her value.
Her children developed very low self esteem and self worth issues. Some of them started to use drugs, some of them got into trouble with the law. They all modeled self destructive behaviour. They went on to have their own issues, having little self worth, failed relationships, depressions, marriages and children all the while trying to find a sense of value in themselves; the same sense of value that their mother had never found; the same sense of self worth that their grandmother had never found. And I have only mentioned half of the family tree.
As I went through the process of emerging from broken, the single biggest key was in finding and restoring my own value. ~ Darlene Ouimet
I’m having a Blog Party! Glad You Could Come!
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I do this work because I have a passion for planting the seeds of hope and spreading encouragement for healing and recovery where there has been a history of depression, feelings of unworthiness, psychological abuse, child abuse, sexual abuse, low self esteem, addictions, eating disorders and all the other types of struggles that so many of us seem to deal with in the course of a lifetime. I do it because I love to see the lights go on when someone has a break through. I like to hear the chains breaking. I like to watch people get their wings back. I love to be a small part of that process.
I am dedicated to the pursuit of wholeness and freedom and to revealing and sharing the truth that I have picked up along the way; I will share it with every other person brave enough to journey. This is what I do, this is part of who I am.
Recovery and overcoming is not easy. There are times when it is like fighting all alone with invisible demons who never retreat. There are times when I questioned whether or not it was worth it; times when I wanted to stop the world and get the heck off. There were times I wondered what kept me going.
I appreciate my persistence today. It paid off. I am grateful for my drive, my passion, my courage; I am free. I am grateful that I found myself and recovered my identity and that I discovered my purpose. I am appreciative of my therapist who encouraged me and guided me through the process and I have no words to thank my friend Teresa who stood by me and fought with me, laughed with me and cried with me; almost daily.
And now I am grateful for you, the people who actually like to hear what I have to say about all this!
Darlene Ouimet
P.S. In just three short days since we launched the fan page on facebook, we have had 105 people join us! I think that this is a pretty exciting number and worthy of celebration… so I’m doing the happy dance.
Exposing the Belief System ~ Coming out of the fog
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Continued from my previous post, “The Beginning~Emerging from Broken“
Once I began to realize the beliefs that were at the core of my belief system, I was able to start to understand that they were not actual truth. Once I realized this, I was able to take a look at why they were not true, (or at least not true anymore) and then I was able to start the replacement process. Replacing the lies with the actual truth is a fairly long process, because in my case there were so many lies I believed about myself and each new thing I encountered on the other side of the fog, was something that I had to look at through my new lens of truth.
Take this blog for instance. I had another blog several years ago. I wrote about the same message that I write about in this blog but I did not do anything to publicise it. I didn’t post my links on Facebook. I didn’t use key words or tag the posts so that I might be found by search engines. I was afraid that someone would actually read it! I put the URL in my email signature and I deleted it before I sent each email. I had little confidence in myself, and I certainly was afraid to own my message. This is a common problem for those of us who have a faulty belief system; our self esteem and confidence is compromised as we are told in so many ways that we or our feelings are wrong, and in many ways told that we don’t really know ourselves.
I was also afraid that my parents would read the blog and get mad at me. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings but deep down my fear was more about the fear of losing them. It was as though I had to pick between my truth and having them in my life. Somehow I believed that I could not live without them if they rejected me. I think that belief comes from childhood where it is in fact true and we carry that false truth with us well into adulthood. Another reason that I was afraid my Mother would read the blog was because she had threatened to take legal action if I wrote a book. (Why she thought that my book would be about her in the first place is an interesting observation in itself, although that is another story for another day.) Deep down I was afraid that my new truth was somehow wrong and on a slight level still believed that the way I was treated and devalued as a child was my own fault, that I was indeed still valueless and that I was a high maintenance and emotionally unstable person. All these things kept me from sharing that other blog with anyone except for a few close friends.
I could not own my message because I still believed that I was not really as valuable as I thought I might be. My old belief system was still operating in that department. I was sure that others would think me vain if I were to write with such conviction. I was sure that they would sneer at me and say “who does she think she is, with that crazy message? It’s ridiculous.” Although on a conscious level I knew that my message of wholeness and freedom was valid, important and exactly what people wanted to hear, on a subconscious level, where my belief system operated, I thought it wasn’t valid. Below the surface of my mind there was a war going on!
I kept pursuing wholeness and freedom from the false truths in my belief system and I kept working on replacing the lies in my mind with the truth. When I started speaking in mental health seminars, and realized the impact that I was having on the people in those seminars, it helped me to accept that there were a lot of people who really liked my message and welcomed hearing it. Eventually I was able to unveil the war going on inside of me, and start to set it straight.
Fight the fog! Love Darlene
