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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darlene Ouimet

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

Related Posts ~ Overcoming that Nasty Self Blame in Dysfunctional Relationships

the path to emotional healing

It makes sense if you think about it, that a child victim of any kind of abuse or a child, who has been devalued in any way, is likely to have a lower self esteem and self image. So if we go into adulthood with a lower sense of self, really believing that we are not as valuable as others, then it stands to reason that we will continue to accept the devaluing behavior that we have become accustomed to as children.

That is one of my most foundational messages of recovery from trauma and depressions and other mental health issues.

Realizing that our belief system is skewed in the first place, that we are not starting from a “fair” place when we are supposed to become mature independent adults, is an important truth to realize if we are to make a new beginning.

One of the most important discoveries that I have made is that so many of my problems as an adult had their foundation in the fact that I had been invalidated and discounted for so much of my life.  Because I had been invalidated (and also defined) by other people from such a young age, it stands to reason that I believed validation would come from others.  In other words, I thought that validation would come from somewhere else or from someone else because invalidation came from somewhere else. (Not from me)

A close relative of this problem is that we constantly hear statements indicating that we “should” be able to move on, and that our “issues” are the problem when in fact the ABUSE we suffered was really the problem that CAUSED the issues. There is a huge difference between these two things.

The key was actually in self validation.  I was angry at myself because I could not seem to make my life work.  I had trouble coping, I was messed up.  I had to realize that it wasn’t my fault. 

The pathway to freedom for me began when I validated myself. This was a process that can be looked at in stages.

A)   I was mistreated. Abused, Devalued.

B)   My belief system developed in an unhealthy way and it was therefore formed full of lies.

C)   I had to identify those lies

D)   I realized that I was not to blame for those lies or for the mistreatment.

E)   I had no choice in accepting the childhood abuse because I was a child.

F)    I also had to realize that I had carried my childhood acceptance of abuse with me into adulthood.

G)   I came to understand that I HAD to develop coping methods (what others often called my issues) as a child in order to survive.

H)   In realizing those lies and then validating myself I was able to understand why I needed all those coping methods.

I had been trying to skip the step of realizing that there were reasons for the way that I was and for why I had trouble and needed coping methods. I believed that I was a failure.

So the key was to go back and figure out where I was invalidated, AND what I came to believe about myself because of it and validate

A)   first the abuse,

B)   that it was wrong and I didn’t “deserve” it

C)   that it was not my fault

D)   that I was in fact valuable and worthy

This enabled me to make a beginning when it came to validating myself. It is important to validate ourselves because as I said earlier, we have not been validated by others in the ways that we needed to be validated and we have to stop thinking that others are going to finally give us the “stamp of approval” that we long to have.

We need to approve of ourselves, but we can’t because we never learned how and because we are stuck with never having been helped with dealing with the abuse, mistreatment or the way that were not valued in the first place. We have also been told all our lives (usually not in direct words) that we are the ones at fault because we can’t move on. I am referring to statements such as “are you still going on about that??” or “when are you going to move on?” or “that happened years ago”.  SO WHAT? When something didn’t get dealt with properly, it didn’t get dealt with properly! It has nothing to do with how much time went by, but we accept those statements as the truth.  Somehow we believe that the defect is ours. That we “should” be able to move on and very often we don’t even know that our depressions or other mental health struggles had to do with abuse, emotional disregard, and the way way we were not valued in the first place!

The abuse has been so downplayed that often we can’t even validate it ourselves!  For many, when they finally do tell, they are heaped with more guilt and shame or blamed for it in the first place. Some mothers will take the focus off the event and change the focus to HER feelings instead. Statements such as “how do you think I feel?” or “I can’t listen to this” are designed to throw us off and to once again make us think of someone else’s feelings before our own. They are invalidating statements. 

As with every other process, there is always more than one major issue that is in the way. We have been so accustomed to being the one to try harder that many of us myself included, got lost in a sea of making excuses for the people who devalued us in the first place ~ which makes it even easier to stay stuck in self blame. ***YES the people that discounted me had huge issues of their own, but SO WHAT? That didn’t change what happened to me. I am not suggesting that we have to stay in a place of placing blame on others; I am just saying that I had to stay there long enough to be able to validate myself.

I had to believe that I was worthy and valid before I could stop expecting someone else to tell me that I was.

Please share your own experience, struggles or victories with me and the other readers.

Exposing Truth, one snapshot at a time;

Darlene Ouimet

Inspired by comments from posts; “How do I recover from emotional and other abuse?”

 “that” Makes me Angry

Darlene ~ Please join me for the celebration!

 Tomorrow, December 01^st 2010 ~ this blog ”Emerging from Broken”; my baby is one year old. Emerging from Broken was born out of my life long pursuit of freedom and recovery from multiple depressions starting in childhood and dissociated identity disorder which resulted from the trauma of abuse. I was fortunate enough to find a therapist who believed in working on emotional healing and recovery from the root of the problem. The transformation and emotional healing was so profound ~ so liberating, that I quickly developed a passion to share the message of wholeness with others who struggle with mental health issues, dissociative issues, post traumatic stress disorder and bi polar disorder, but to name a few.  I started to speak in mental health seminars about my recovery process. I went back to school and obtained certification in life coaching, eventually specializing in “new life story” coaching and I became a mental health advocate.

 I pursued work in the mental health field. While speaking in mental health seminars and working as the director of client relations for a counselling company, I noticed that when I spoke about certain subjects, people’s eyes would light up as though they comprehended something amazing for the first time. I realized that there were some hidden truths that others, like me, had not ever realized. I started to comprehend that not very many people understood the truth about the foundations of depression, mental health struggle and abuse because no one was talking about it. I knew that this was the truth that set me free. After a few years of speaking, I developed a passion to share my message with an even larger audience.

Emerging from Broken was the platform that I chose with which to do just that.

 It has been an exciting year! Emerging from Broken has gone from zero to having over 7000 readers a month. According to Alexa, Emerging from Broken ranks in the top quarter of a million for all websites worldwide! EFB has an interactive page on facebook which has over 1200 members. But to me the most amazing and wonderful part is the comments.  Emerging from Broken has generated thousands of comments now averaging 1000 comments every 8 weeks. People are sharing their lives here. People are having breakthroughs here!  My goal to have my message of freedom and wholeness after depression and abuse, delivered to a larger audience is being achieved!

This week I am celebrating the first year anniversary of Emerging from Broken. I am celebrating freedom from depressions, wholeness and living life to the fullest. I am celebrating that there is a solution and full recovery from abuse and trauma is possible! I invite you to celebrate with me.

 Tomorrow, I am flying to Mexico with my daughter where we are spending two whole weeks vacationing in Puerto Vallarta. I am excited to be publishing a special series about anger and to have some special guest bloggers joining me this next two weeks. The blog will run as always and I will check in frequently.

 In honour of EFB being one year old, I am excited to welcome the first guest blog post from Carla Dippel, who co-authored EFB for the first 6 months of its life. While I am away I will be checking in here frequently.

 Thank you all for being here. Thanks to everyone who has ever shared my blog posts on Facebook; to everyone who has ever shared using the share button or the “like” button; to everyone who passes this blog along through twitter. Thanks to each one who had shared it with a friend who is not online and to everyone who comments and keeps the conversation going! Thank you for sharing your heartaches and your breakthroughs your wins and your devastation; all of it makes such a huge difference to the other readers. I would also like to extend a big thank you to every guest blogger who has ever posted and to all the readers. I am so blessed by each one of you. Together we can overcome. Together we are so much stronger. Together we can take back our lives and live in freedom.

 Please help me to celebrate this one year birthday and milestone by leaving a comment. Please feel free to share how Emerging from Broken has impacted your life, a special memory or breakthrough, or just say hello!   I look forward to hearing from you!

 Freedom is on the other side of broken!

With love, gratitude and appreciation;

Darlene Ouimet 

Please join us on  Facebook ~ Emerging from Broken page

It took me a long time to pick up the threads and accept the true truth about my dysfunctional mother daughter relationship with my mother. This post is another snap shot.

When I was 16 years old the Doctor recommend that I take the birth control pill as a result of some medical problem that I was having with my menstrual cycle. (After I had been sexually assaulted by my mother’s boyfriend when I was 14, I got my period every three weeks for a year and then I skipped if for a year. Trauma often messes with a girl that way.) I had a lot of complications surrounding that whole thing, so the pill was a known way to try and regulate the cycle.

 I had trouble remembering to take them and so I kept them in the kitchen where I would see them.  Since in my mind they were about a medical problem I honestly didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t keep them in the kitchen of our own home. But my mother had other ideas about it. 

My mother accused me of sending out “sexual messages” to her boyfriends.

Lots of men stayed the night throughout my teenage years and often my mother’s current boyfriend would be at the kitchen table when I came downstairs in the morning.  I always took my pill first thing in the morning.  My mother accused me of “flaunting it” in front of her boyfriends. I remember being embarrassed and confused by her accusations. She didn’t sit me down and explain that maybe I should take the pill privately, that it might give the wrong idea if I had my birth control pills in the kitchen like a normal mother might do. Instead she accused me of purposely taking them in front of HER men. She said I was flaunting that I was on the pill. And although I am angry about this today, I had NO idea what the heck she was getting at back then. 

I don’t know how old I was when I realized that my mother was accusing me of telling her boyfriends or hinting to them that I was safe from getting pregnant if they wanted to sleep with me too. It seems obvious enough when I write it out today, but honestly, as a 16 and 17 year old girl, I had no idea that was what she was insinuating. The thought of being attracted to one of her asshole boyfriends and the realization that she thought I really was attracted to them, makes me sick when I think about it now. 

I put this whole puzzle together when I realized that she really did blame me for the time that her boyfriend came in my room when I was 14. Realizing that not only did she believe that I had attracted and even enticed one of her boyfriends to come into my bedroom, she thought I would do it again. She accused me of giving signals to her other boyfriends.  Even writing this I still feel stunned that the mother daughter relationship that I had with my mother was THAT dysfunctional. And I am equally stunned at how long it took me to figure this out! I had all these memories of being devalued by my mother, but I separated them into single incidents, and never looked at them as one whole picture.

 The realization of these things together triggered all kinds of jumbled emotions and feelings in me.

~I felt and sometimes still feel angry, a red hot embarrassed anger; that my own mother would think about me in this way ~ that my own mother still thinks of me that way.

~I feel sick to my stomach that she thought I would “want” one of her disgusting bed mates.

~It made me feel dirty that she really believed that I honestly went after her boyfriends.

~And the bottom line emotion – the one that I avoided feeling and avoided admitting even to myself, was a deep excruciating black and hopeless hurt. It was the pain of a confused and bewildered teenage child, who was molested and sexually assaulted in the night in her sleep, and then blamed for it by her own mother and then for the next few years, was accused of trying to steal her mother’s boyfriends again. I can’t even find the words to express this horrific and degrading truth about how she regarded me.

I could not comprehend this reality for many years even when I began to realize the truth. This was my “MOTHER” who thought this way about me and in reality I was only a child ~ HER CHILD. I couldn’t get my head around it and I understand today how I separated all the incidents and indications as a way of coping with being regarded in this extremely devaluing way and as a way of not facing it. I can see how dissociative identity disorder really worked for me here. It was a way of keeping the memories separate from each other. One single incident is easy to brush off as “well my mother wasn’t perfect, she is only human after all” but all of them together has a different conclusion. A conclusion about our mother daughter relationship that I couldn’t face before.

I kept hoping that my mother would realize that she made a mistake about me, and that she would see me for who I really was and that she would love me but that didn’t happen. I kept trying harder to please her, and I kept each story disconnected from the other stories as a way of surviving the knowledge that my own mother didn’t care about me. 

Please share your thoughts and feelings or whatever else you would like to say;

Connecting all the threads;                                                             

Darlene Ouimet

P.S. Writing this post made me angry but it also set me free a little bit more. I connected a few new “dots” and realized a few more things about my dissociative identity disorder and my mental recovery. I hope that you can take this story and apply it to a situation in your own life, because so many of us don’t have issues like this with our mothers although we have situations like this that lead to an unhealthy survival mode.

WARNING: The comments on this post regarding sexual abuse are extremely graphic ~ some may find them triggering.  ~ Darlene

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

When someone says that they are sick of being treated like a child, what comes to your mind? One of the commenter’s on my blog post Mother Daughter Relationship Lies said that she was sick of being treated like a child, and caused me to think about the meaning behind that statement. Such a familiar expression. What is being treated like a child like? What do we adults mean when we say that? Is it how a parent wipes your chin when you are eating a soft ice cream cone? Is it holding your hand when you cross the street? Is it being told to brush your teeth and get ready for bed? It would be pretty weird if our parents did that stuff when we were adults. So when an adult says that he is sick of being treated like a child, I get a whole different idea about what this statement means.

I have teen agers. My youngest teen doesn’t like it when I suggest things off the menu to her. She likes to read it for herself and make her own choice. My older teen says that I am treating her like a child when she feels like I am not giving her enough choice or freedom. My oldest teenager (who is legally and adult in Canada) doesn’t use this expression.

In my experience, when adults use this expression it means that a parent is treating an adult in similar ways to the way that both my daughters express this dislike above.  Using voice infliction and innuendo, parents can make adult children feel like we are not capable or too stupid to make our own decisions ~ still having the mind of a child.

Consider some of the following statements; these are meant to make you wonder about your thoughts and decisions. They are meant to make you question yourself.

~ You are not really going to do that, are you?

~ You don’t really believe that, do you?

~ You aren’t really thinking that are you?

~ You are not really going to wear that, are you?

~What were you thinking when you bought that?

~What were you thinking when you said that?

What were you thinking when you DID that?

The unspoken message is “are you nuts” or “you must be stupid”.

These questions are not designed to get you to think about what you did or said, they are meant to make you feel stupid. They are meant to make you question yourself. When we were children we depended on our parents to help us decide, to make good choices. This is what I think some of us mean when we say they are sick of being treated like a child.

My mother in law had a different way of trying to get me to do things her way. She would say “Well, you will most likely be ready to buy that next year. Well you will most likely breastfeed (my son) for six months. She seemed to have an issue with how long I was intending to nurse, and finally I told her that I would MOST LIKELY NURSE HIM until he or I was ready to stop. But I was really conflicted about it, and her words echoed in my head for years because I just didn’t understand her motive for trying to make me stop and I didn’t realize that she was constantly insinuating that I couldn’t decide, like I wasn’t capable of deciding what would be best.

Other questions are designed to control but even these still indicate a suggestion that you couldn’t possibly know what is best. Here are a few:

~ You aren’t going to eat that are you?” (I am talking about when someone thinks they are helping you with your diet, or insinuating that you need to lose weight.)

~You aren’t going to go there are you?

~ You aren’t really interested in HIM or HER are you?

~ Why would you want to do that?

~ Why would you want to go there?

If our adult / child relationships were conducted like this when we were children, we become accustomed to this kind of innuendo and control. It becomes part of how we do relationship. It is so familiar that we don’t really think about it. We don’t realize how devaluing it is. It has become part of our belief system, our false definition of relationship, respect and love.

When we fight this without really understanding what we are fighting, is it any wonder why we end up struggling with depression and other mental health issues?

Please feel free to contribute to this post with comments or share how this post impacted you.

Breaking out of familiar;

Darlene Ouimet

I received this message and question from a reader;

“Dear Darlene,

I love your blog, emerging from broken. I read it every day and I think it is the most ROCKING website going.

Okay, so you talk a lot about wholeness in your posts and it’s in your blog subtitle too. I think I have an idea of what wholeness is, but you seem to have this really rich, deep understanding of what it is. So I am really curious to hear you explain it in your own words. What is wholeness? What does it mean to you to be whole? Does it mean you don’t struggle anymore? Does it mean you have soaring self-esteem? Does it mean you’re never depressed and always happy? I am at the tail end of my own therapy, and peering into the world that waits for me. But sometimes I still have those little doubts that I’m ready, that I’m whole in the same way that you are.

Sincerely, 99% Sure I’m whole too”

Dearest Fellow Seeker

Thank you for your enthusiastic encouragement!

When I first read this question I wondered how the heck I was going to answer it, but then I decided to answer a small aspect of it. I am sure that other aspects will be covered in later posts.

I wanted to address your question asking me if I am never depressed and always happy.  I rarely feel “depressed” in the way that I used to feel, but sometimes I feel down. Not every day is a perfect day and life isn’t always easy.  I wouldn’t say that I am always happy, in the way that we think of as happy (although most of my friends would say that I am a pretty happy person).

What I would say is that I always have a sense of peace. I have an acceptance that I didn’t have before. I accept life in the way that it arrives each day. I know that I know how to DO life now.  I don’t just “cope” anymore. I don’t disconnect or dissociate in order to deal with life. I don’t run to bed and pull the covers up over my head in the middle of the day if things get rough. I live. I face what is going on, I deal with it to the best of my ability, and I live.

Nothing changed overnight. It was a process of change and acceptance and getting used to the new way of living, and I continue to thrive and grow.  I learned to trust myself by living in wholeness. There weren’t any shortcuts. In my process, I learned to embrace who I am, and stopped looking for approval from others. It stopped mattering to me what others thought. This is true even with my family and my husband. ~I don’t let them define me by whether or not they approve of me. (My son, at the age of 15, didn’t approve of me returning to work even though my work outside the home was only 2 days per week. His definition of love was that I stayed home and cooked all his favorite meals and focused my energy on him. He needed to learn a new definition of love, and it took me a while to help him with that.)

~ It doesn’t really matter what other people think. I don’t try to apply someone else’s idea of whole to my life. I wanted to be whole like ME, not whole like someone else.  I don’t let anyone else define me either. No one gets to decide my worth.

In closing there is one other thing that I would like add that for me defines my wholeness. My life has purpose and I have a passion for my purpose. I wake up every morning excited to get into the day, sometimes way before I planned to get up!  This feeling of excitement is consistent and following my passion and purpose is fulfilling and rewarding.

That is a very small glimpse of what wholeness is to me, but I hope that it gives you some idea. I would love to have other peoples comments on what wholeness means to them.

Bright Happy Squishes,

Darlene Ouimet

I received the following question from a reader;

“Darlene, I wish I would wake up one morning with this deep sense of my own self worth. How did that happen for you? Was it something you had to think about enough before you felt it, or did you just feel it right away? This is where I’m struggling. I still so easily cave in to someone else’s opinion of me. And I see that valuing myself is at the heart of my entire future of healing and thriving.”

Dear Reader;

This was a long process for me; in fact this might be the definition of the 2^nd process. ( I have come to see my process in two parts: the first part where I got the help I needed for my mental health issues and became a whole person and the second part where I learned how to live in that wholeness)

I certainly didn’t wake up one morning feeling a sense of my worth and identity and resolving never to be defined by anyone else ever again! As I have written before, after digging deeply into the root causes of my dissociative identity disorder and chronic depression, I began sorting out the truth from the false about myself with the help of my therapist. This was what I call part one of my recovery.

Next I learned to listen to the little voice in my head that caused me to doubt myself all the time.

In one of the self help programs that I used to be in, I had been taught to ignore the nagging self doubts and little messages of fear in my head. In my process of permanent recovery, I learned to listen to that voice and even respond to it. This was very frightening in the beginning because I was afraid that the voice was actually true!

First of all, I identified whose voice it really was. When I first started to learn how to do this, the voice I would identify would not be my own, but would be my mothers, or brothers, or an ex boyfriend. I would ask the voice what else it had to say to me, and I would keep listening to it until it had nothing else to say. The deeper that I went with this process, the more illogical and childlike the things that would come to my mind (the voice) would sound.

This process made me realize where my low self esteem and limiting beliefs came from in the first place, and also made me realize that most of my fears and beliefs were no longer valid. The more that I repeated this process, the more I realized that I was the one in my own way and that underneath those other voices, was my own voice telling me that I was not really valuable, or loveable or capable etc.

I realized soon enough that this was the core of my survival system and that I had used it since I was very young. My inner world was so rooted in self protection that deep down I was afraid to define myself as worthy, capable, confident, beautiful, and smart- all those true words about me- in case my new life of wholeness was going to be dangerous! Those voices and beliefs were a form of protection, but they were also counterproductive to my new life of freedom and they were holding me back in the past where I was unhappy, and broken.

This is a hard question to answer in one post, but I am sure I will be expanding on it in the future. I thank you for asking and welcome anyone that wishes to remain anonymous to either use a fake name or nick name in the comments section, or use the contact page and your questions will be answered this way.

~Wishing you the best of mental health!

~Darlene Ouimet

Dreams Tulum, Mexico

In the profession that I am in as a mental health advocate, I often hear the complaint that therapy is too expensive and not accessible to everyone. Therapy can cost hundreds of dollars per hour and many places in the world have no insurance coverage or health care supplement allotted for mental health issues.

I spent thousands of dollars for therapy. It was something that I made a commitment to do, and I didn’t care if I had to spend the rest of my life paying it off because I was so sick of being sick. For me it was just like the decision to go to University; if I wanted to live in wholeness and fullness, then I had to do what it takes to get there. I felt that I was making an investment in myself but more importantly, making an investment in my family.

Here is one of the ways I look at making the decision to pay for therapy or not to pay for therapy; a holiday for a family of 5 for two weeks costs between $12,000.00 and $18,000.00 depending what you do on the holiday. Several years ago our family went to Disney Land and the whole trip cost us $13,000.00 by the time we paid airfare and hotel, theme park admissions and restaurants, but here is the kicker. I came home exhausted because my coping methods had to kick into high gear in order for me to get through it. New things, new places, new people all caused me to go into emotional nightmare. Spending that much money and coming home exhausted and needing a holiday was a bit disappointing.

Last year we went to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic for our first all inclusive resort vacation, and it was really wonderful! I came home refreshed, I did not go into any “emotional spins” while away and the whole family, myself included, enjoyed every day of the 14 days we were away.  Now that I have learned to live without coping methods, I don’t feel as though I NEED a holiday but rather I go and enjoy a holiday! The whole experience of vacation was so much better in wholeness then it was before. It was certainly worth giving up a couple of vacations in order to have this freedom that I live in now, especially since the vacations are so much better now!

Tomorrow we head off to Dreams Tulum, an all inclusive resort in Tulum Mexico for a couple of weeks! I am really excited!

Wishing you all good mental health! ~ Darlene ]]> http://emergingfrombroken.com/investing-in-your-mental-health/feed/ 2 http://emergingfrombroken.com/accomplishmentsemerging-from-broken-is-off-to-a-great-start/ http://emergingfrombroken.com/accomplishmentsemerging-from-broken-is-off-to-a-great-start/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:10:24 +0000 Darlene Ouimet http://emergingfrombroken.com/?p=263

Happy New Year!

~On January 1^st, this blog was officially one month old and I am really pleased with the progress we have made. Here are a few highlights this past couple days.

~Google is picking up our posts the same day we write them, which means that we are getting searched frequently by the search engines.

~We got listed! Have you seen the blog Third of a lifetime, by Sarah Olson? She has a new Dissociation Blog Showcase and Emerging from Broken made the list!

Sarah has compiled a great resource here if you are looking for reading material or information about Dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder or Multiple Personality Disorder. There are some great mental health blogs listed whose focus is on other mental health issues too, so be sure to check it out.

~For those of you that have websites and blogs, have you ever checked your ranking with Alexa? Alexa is a website that ranks websites in order of popularity.  For instance Google is number one, Facebook is number two and You Tube is number three and the list goes on. 

There are over 5 billion websites on the internet and Alexa ranks them in order of importance.  I have no idea how this works, but I am excited to tell you that this blog, Emerging from Broken, is ranked at 4,304,599 in just one month.

Thanks to all our readers and to those of you who have used social media to share our blog and tweet our posts! Without all of you, these accomplishments would not have happened!

I am excited about 2010. I am passionate about living in wholeness, equality and truth. I am excited about the message that complete recovery from mental health issues and living life to the fullest is possible. I am looking forward to meeting you on the journey!

Wishing you all great mental health in 2010

~Darlene Ouimet