Archive for mother daughter relationship
Mother Daughter Relationship ~ My Poor Mom
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- Cold Hearted Love
This comment came in from Cyndi on my last post (click to view Standing up to Dysfunctional Family Relationship ~ Part two) and it prompted me to write today’s post ~ another little snapshot of how messed up I was in the mother daughter relationship that I had with my mother.
Cyndi wrote: “I went about telling the truth in a different way. My mother grew up with a volatile abusive father just like mine. In my initial efforts to face my childhood and change the way I dealt with her, I mistakenly believed that if I could just talk to her calmly she would explain herself, apologize for her shortcomings and we’d ride happily off into the sunset. HA! Instead she denied everything, said I exaggerated, focused on only the bad things, blatantly called me a liar and said my childhood was much better than hers…I was lucky” Cyndi
My mother was really good at making me feel sorry for her and it was a very hard trap to crawl out of. My mother did have a way worse life then I did; we heard the stories all of our lives; her father was a bigamist and her mother found out when she was pregnant with her 6th child and that resulted in the marriage being annulled. The 6 children were split between both parents. My mother lived with her father for a time. He put locks on the cupboards (restricted food) and hired a housekeeper (a live in girlfriend). My mother never tasted chocolate until she was 17. She begged for orange peels at school. Her father took the money she made running errands for the neighbor lady. She had to go to work so she was only went to school until grade 8. There was worse abuse too. When she was able to live with her mother again, there were scary men. Then there was a drunken step father added to her burden. You get the picture ~ and the list goes on. It is absolutely true that my mother had a very tough childhood and it was true that it was worse than mine. I never even thought about whether or not it was true. Her mother, my grandmother was mean and nasty and still had the drunk for a husband. I didn’t need proof. My mother had a terrible mother daughter relationship with her own mother. The last time she saw her father she was 15. So I felt sorry for her. It didn’t take much for me to believe that I was a very ungrateful child. I felt so guilty because I was so unhappy. If you heard my mother’s story, you would feel very bad for her, I am serious. In so many ways her life WAS way worse than mine. “I was so lucky…”
BUT what does that have to do with anything? What does that have to do with ME? Is that an excuse for her behavior? Should I discount my own feelings and struggles because hers were worse? Should I be happy that my life was not as bad as hers and therefore be grateful for what DIDN’T happen to me?Well I sure thought so.
Believing this would be like accepting and agreeing that if one kid was beaten bloody and another kid was beaten bloody and a few bones were broken, and the one kid says to the other kid “well at least none of your bones were broken, “you were so lucky”. WHAT? NO WAY. Abuse is abuse.
I didn’t think I had a right to be depressed. I didn’t think that my life had been as bad as hers. I thought that the abuse that I suffered was my own fault, in fact that belief was so deep in my belief system that when I finally dealt with the sexual abuse that I endured at the hands of a babysitter at the age of around two ~ I told the therapist that I knew I should have been able to STOP IT. I was two! And that belief ~ that I brought things on myself or should have been able to stop them, permeated through every event, big or small for everything that I felt bad about, from then on.
This is all part of the brainwashing that goes along with being less important than someone else. This is how the control is established. They weave some loyalty stuff into it, and add some guilt and tell you how ungrateful you are… and say things like “after all I’ve done for you” and… well you know the outcome.
This kind of communication in a mother daughter relationship is really manipulative on the part of the ADULT. AND this began when my mother was the adult and I was the child in the relationship and when I was an adult I was still regarding my mother through the eyes of HER child, the way that she trained me to think about her.
So yes, my Mother had a terrible time, and I feel deeply sorry for her and I wish more than anything that she could be free too but that isn’t up to me, it is up to her and I am adamant that I will not be pushed around and devalued or treated like I am less than equal in the meanwhile. If we are going to have a mother daughter relationship, it is going to be a functional one based on the true definition of love.
I found that looking at these situations through a different grid ~ a more truthful grid ~ is the beginning of freedom. Please contribute in whatever way you wish.
Life is so much better with the truth,
Darlene Ouimet
Parent Child Relationship What a Confusing Mess
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I wrote a blog post a few days ago called “Parent Child Relationships ~ When Loyalty costs too much, about parent child relationships and when my parents split up, that triggered a few new things in me. I intended to write about how my mother leaned on me when I was 12 years old, because my Dad left us and my intention was to focus mostly on her actions and how they affected me and how dysfunctional our mother daughter relationship was. BUT I found myself getting really angry at my father. In some ways I feel like I never really had a father and I’ve known for a long time that whatever smidge of a father daughter relationship we had, it wasn’t much. Writing that post however was emotionally draining and I knew that I needed to process the feelings and anger that was coming up for me. Memories and feelings were coming at me from all different directions and so as I have learned to do, I sorted them out and separated them from each other in order to get a better understanding.
Here is how it played out;
~I was angry at my mother (in that instance) because she made me feel responsible for the outcome of her. But the anger at her self centeredness and selfish behavior came up too. I have always felt guilty for feeling that way.
~I was also angry at my father for moving her and us so far away from everyone that could have supported my mother. I had not really thought about his part in it to this degree before. With the anger came many other memories and flashes of memories that I had never thought about in this depth before either. Sometimes I tend to think I only have to look at the “REALLY” bad stuff in order to move on but this is not true.
Mixed in with both of those realizations was the deep down suspicion that I might have been able to save their marriage… that maybe if only I had been a better kid ~ and all that type of stuff. I felt like I had failed my mother somehow, and my father never noticed me anyway, which I thought must have been MY defect. I thought that if I had been “different” or “good enough” he would have noticed me for sure.
Right away I reminded myself that the defect in our father daughter relationship was HIS. He didn’t try. His lack of interest in me had to do with him as a father. Not with me as a daughter.
Next thing I did was get the “my fault stuff” out of the way by looking at the truth about the marriage breakup itself and assure myself that I have nothing to feel guilty about. I asked myself these kinds of questions:
~What was MY part in the event? ~ Well actually it had nothing to do with me (other then my pain of my parents splitting up and getting a divorce) and this was a truth that I never considered before. I had NO failure or responsibility in it at all.
~What could I have done differently? This is a question that I heard in 12 step programs since I was 18 years old. I took it out of context though and used it to hurt myself, reprimand myself, and reaffirm the belief that I always had a choice and the outcome was always something to do with me. In this case, there WAS nothing I could have done differently. I could not say to my mother when I was at the age of 12 ~ “MOM, do not make me responsible for your life. I will not support you in this way, you need professional help.” I didn’t understand any of that back then; I didn’t even have any context to put it into. But in the mind of a child, I thought there must have been something that I could have done, and I somehow failed to figure it out. I believed that this was my downfall, my defect ~ that I could not figure out how to fix things or stop things that really I had NO control over, but when you are made to feel like you are always responsible for the outcome of everything, and if that outcome is a beating or sexual abuse or being ignored, your ideas of what you can “do differently”~ get warped. I carried that old belief with me into my adulthood. I had to start taking this information into consideration and I had to become aware of it, in order to change my belief system.
It’s like there is this missing space between childhood and adulthood that needs to be looked at. And this works to the controller or abusers advantage too. We don’t fight them when we are kids, and as soon as we are in our twenties, (sometimes younger) they start preaching at us that we are adults now and our outcomes are our choices. Our messes are ours. It is SO dang hard to sort out!
In this case there were several things that I needed to look at separately; the anger and disappointment in my mother, the anger and disappointment in my father and what I believed to be my failure. In looking separately at the mother daughter relationship stuff and the father daughter relationship stuff and separating it all out from my failure stuff, I was able to get a clearer picture of all three and where my belief system worked against me. This helped me to get a clearer picture of the whole truth, the real truth and it also exposed the false truth that I had accepted all those years since I was 12.
I hope that I have been at least semi clear in illustrating how confusing this whole thing is to unravel. This has been just one snapshot of how I take something apart in order to see the truth, and how many other things get in the way of doing that. Please share your thoughts.
Exposing Truth, one snapshot at a time.
Darlene Ouimet
Note: I had these same deep down beliefs about the sexual abuse, emotional abuse and parental neglect; that I should have been able to figure out something to STOP them. Up until about 6 years ago, I never believed that I had “no choice”. As an adult I was taught and accepted that I was accountable for the events and the results in my life. I applied that teaching to my childhood and to the past without realizing it and it automatically reinforced the belief that I had since childhood that it was my fault, that I had a choice and that I was responsible. Several years ago I realized all my adult struggles resulted from the child hood events that molded my belief system and that I HAD to figure out the missing pieces of the puzzle in order to recover!
Parent Child Relationship When Loyalty Costs too Much
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When it comes to parent child relationships I often feel as though I struggle to explain or communicate the difference between how I felt about the past when it was in the past, how I felt about it when I was in the healing stages of it and how I feel about it now. This comes up a lot on the blog and on the facebook page for Emerging from Broken so I thought I would write about it.
This blog gets hundreds of views every day. The comments don’t reflect that though, and I get these private emails from people who don’t want to write publically, especially about parent stuff. By some of the questions that I get asked, I understand why this is; most of us have really big loyalty issues when it comes to our parents and our parent child relationships. This has to do with several things; our belief systems, our upbringing and the way that society frowns on anyone revealing family secrets ~ even if the whole family could recover from the pain of the past if they were revealed ~ some things are just taboo.
I sometimes wonder how different my life would be today if my mother were willing to pursue wholeness and freedom herself? How different would it be if she were willing to work on our mother daughter relationship stuff with me? But sadly this isn’t the case.
I know one thing for sure, it would not change the past. What happened, really happened and it was dysfunctional, devaluing and abusive much of the time. So my decision was to get on with the present and future and to do that I ended up having to deal with the past. (Again) But this time I went deeper then I had gone before. I ventured into previously uncharted waters. The truth about my parents and just how dysfunctional the parent child relationships were.
When I talk about anger and blame towards my abusers as well as my parents ~ anger and blame were a necessary part of my healing. I had to look at the truth ~ almost from a neutral point of view if I were ever going to heal from it. I can only say this in retrospect as I didn’t realize that this would be a key before I did it.
I was so wrapped up in should and should not’s and because I believed expressions like “if you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future you are peeing on today” I was stuck. So I had to look at what my life story was as though I was looking at it through someone else’s eyes. Some of the events of my life were shocking and yet I didn’t think so. I felt guilty for feeling even a glimmer of hurt or anger towards my parents, especially my mother because I felt so sorry for her. It was almost easier to just accept the blame for our difficult mother daughter relationship.
If someone else told me the exact same things had happened to them (that had happened to me) I was horrified. I could feel justifiable anger, outrage, shock, disgust, sadness, sympathy compassion and love, but I could not feel these things for myself about my own life or about the things that had happened to ME. I can’t stress enough how convinced that I am that taking a look at my life story through different eyes was one of the biggest keys to the eventual restoration of my emotional health and overall mental health. This was also one of the biggest keys to overcoming depression. Seeing things from a neutral view point, was a huge key to my overcoming dissociative identity disorder and the integration of all my “alter personalities” and a major key to my wholeness and freedom.
As a child, I surrendered all my power over to my parents, teachers, and elders. When those people treated me with less value then I deserved or abused and controlled me in ways that were not acceptable, I complied and surrendered even more of my will. I had no choice as a child. It wasn’t a decision I made, it was survival and it was necessary. But this became my way of life and when we live under dysfunctional control, we become accustomed to living under dysfunctional control. This becomes a habit that is familiar and even comfortable. I grew into an adult in this familiar comfortable fog and I continued to give control to the abusers or controllers. Often when we are adults this control and abuse is psychological and emotional when it comes to our parents but none the less is in not really love. It is not a healthy, functional, love based parent child relationship.
But there I was in it anyway and in order to survive and cope I convinced myself that it wasn’t really wrong. “My poor mother didn’t know any better.” (true but so what?) Until I had nowhere else to turn and I was an emotional mess and I realized through getting some help to navigate through the false and the true, I suddenly realized that if I remained “loyal” to my parents, and if I didn’t want to look at this stuff that had happened to me at their hands through the lens of truth in order to place the burden back on them and realize that this was not my fault, then I was actually giving them control over MY recovery and my will to recover, in order to protect them. (as we have learned to do our whole lives)
This isn’t about loyalty. I was fighting for my life, and I had to get really honest. I had to accept the past the way that it was ~ the plain honest way that it was without the loyalty and excuses that I consistently made for them all my life. What I am trying to express in this blog is about emerging OUT of victim mentality and into wholeness and freedom and real relationship.
In love and in truth,
Darlene Ouimet
Foundation of a Dysfunctional Mother Daughter Relationship
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Today I’m highlighting a snapshot of where the dysfunctional mother daughter relationship began between my mother and I. The emotional abuse and dysfunction began before this event, but this was the point of no return.
Just a couple of months shy of my 13th birthday, my parents separated. That in and of itself isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a kid, but as in everything else in life it all depends on how it is handled. Kids need a little help handling that kind of a thing and neither of my parents was very helpful. For my mother it was all about her. For my father it was all about him.
My father had just been transferred and we had to move from Montreal Quebec to Mississauga Ontario and away from all the friends we had. My mother didn’t have any support. Even long distance phone calls back then were an expense that we couldn’t afford. I am not sure why my Dad picked that time to leave, but that is the way it was. My mother had a serious breakdown and since my mother was susceptible to having mental health breakdowns and serious depressions, it wasn’t surprising.
I was the only girl in the family. I am not sure what my brothers went through. I don’t remember if I ever talked about it with them or not. As for me though, my mother leaned on me. I became her confidant her support and her friend. It might not have been so bad if she had not been suicidal.
We lived in a newly developed neighbourhood in a beautiful new house. It was so new that many of the homes were not finished being built and there was no grass in yet. We were living in a construction site and there were huge holes, wooden ramps and plank sidewalks. The ground was uneven everywhere. My mother would go walking in the dark of night and because everything was so new, there were no streetlights yet. I pictured her weeping and stumbling around the neighbourhood alone in the dark. I pictured her that way because she told me that wandered around in the dark and she was hoping she would fall in one of those construction site holes and die. I felt so sorry for her. I wanted to help her; I wanted to be the friend she needed to support her through that time in her life. I believed that the whole burden of whether she lived or died was on my shoulders. I was only 12 years old.
This one incident impacted me and the rest of my life in such a huge way. What 12 year old would refuse this burden? How was I supposed to deal with this? What choice did I really have? Looking back my father was not exactly the kind of dad that I believed would have taken care of me if my mother died, I mean if you think about it, he was the one who moved her away from all her friends just a few months before he left her and I don’t recall even one time when he talked to me about how difficult this was or even asked me how I was doing. Why didn’t he see how distraught she was, and why didn’t he realize that I was staggering under the burden of her dilemma and thinking that it was up to me if she made it or not? What would have become of me if my mother did commit suicide especially if my father didn’t care? And finally, why did my mother forget that I was only 12.
This incident laid the foundation for the rest of the dysfunctional mother daughter relationship my mother and I had to play out. I suppose that this laid the foundation for the nonexistent father daughter relationship I had with my father too. Things might have been tough before, but now they were disastrous.
If you are interested in more history regarding my mother daughter relationship stuff, please visit the mother daughter category button under the header graphic. This story is an example of emotional abuse by both my parents. Stay tuned; I will continue.
Please feel free to share your viewpoints or your experiences. As always I truly appreciate your comments.
Darlene Ouimet
False Love and Relationship Lies that Control
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“If we repeat a lie over and over we will eventually accept the lie as truth. Furthermore we will believe it to be the truth” Napoleon Hill
Think about this quote from a different angle; if we are told over and over again that we have false memories, that we were or are too needy, that we are wrong, difficult, an instigator or trouble maker or even if we are repeatedly told we are crazy, what impact does that have on our self image? What about our mental health and self esteem? If we are told that our expectations were or are too high or that we deserved what ever happened to us such as beatings or punishment or public humiliation. I was told that I couldn’t take a joke that I was too sensitive and this was their excuse for their behaviour, which makes it still my fault or weakness ~ oh the list goes on. Do you think that this could be at the roots of depression, anxiety or stress disorder?
I didn’t think about this before I “emerged from broken” because I was too busy trying harder, trying to be what they wanted and trying to get approval and love, that I didn’t realize that **I** was not really the biggest problem at all.
When I talk about living in the truth, and standing up to abusive behaviour, there was an order to it. First of all I had to realize what the lies were. Was I really crazy? Was what I was upset about really an unreasonable thing to be upset about? Was I needy? Were my expectations really too high? Did I really have false memories; did I make up or even exaggerate the abuse and the way that my feelings were discounted or the way that I was humiliated in front of others? Is respect a two way street? Was it right or fair that the burden of the relationship should have been completely on my shoulders? I didn’t think about the truth this way before. When I was able to really see that these were all the lies that I believed about myself by acknowledging specific situations and seeing them through a different grid of understanding, I was able to see their origin and begin to change my belief system about them. This is key.
It isn’t so much that I confronted the people who held me back and devalued me, as I just stopped accepting that kind of behaviour in my life. This took some time; the fog didn’t lift over night, it was like one layer at a time. I had to stand up to my husband first, because I lived with him. The first time I said anything to him I simply told him that I was going to continue my therapy for as long as it took (he didn’t approve) and that I was no longer willing to live the way we were living as though only his goals and wishes were important and as if my purpose was to make things easier for him. I was terrified to say it. I had an anxiety attack just saying that much. He ended up having to get his own help with his own belief system and realize his own truth in order for him to change only then could we work together to heal our broken relationship. This took time and the fog began to clear with the rest of my relationships.
A couple of YEARS later I started to set bigger boundaries. I stood up to my older brother once. I never got a second chance. I didn’t get very far in talking to my mother about my abuse or my difficulties with our mother daughter relationship because she slammed the door on it. That is the chance that I took though and I never realized how much healing and freedom was on the other side of even that. The truth in what my mother did by not wanting to continue the talk was that I finally knew that she really didn’t really care enough. It was her, not me. In our last conversation, she told me that she would see a therapist with me, but she never called again. I was finally ready to face the fact that she didn’t really care. In a way this gave me permission to be so public about it.
The truth set me free to be who I am and to live in a way that impacts others for their own truth and freedom.
Darlene Ouimet
Dysfunctional Relationship; My Parents Treat Me Like a Child
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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
Mother Daughter Relationship Lies
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- Aware of the Danger
It is devastating to realize how little regard parents can have for their own child when that child is you. It is deeply wounding; I was filled with self doubt about why they felt this way. They planted that doubt; they made me question my value all along. This is a difficult cycle to understand and even more difficult to escape because the roots go so deep.
One of the things that I realized in the process of recovery was that the fear of losing my parents love was still very real. Even as an adult, the thought of standing up to my mother about our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship filled me with dread and could cause my heartbeat to spike with an anxiety that I never understood. No one wants to be rejected by their own parents. What I didn’t realize is that I still had the fears from the view point of a child.
When I was a child I was pretty sure that if my parents rejected me that I would be left to die. I could not survive in the world without them. That’s not just a fear; that is a reality. I didn’t think about someone else taking care of me. I think this is why it was easy for me as a child to take the blame for things that went wrong. If it was my fault, I could try harder. If I blamed my parents, and they rejected me, then I had no hope. So I tried harder.
Many other problems can grow out of this mindset though. When we have been kept down this way, it is easy for other people to treat us the same way; like we are less important than they are because we accept that we are less important and this sort of opens the door to other maltreatment. This was something that I fought accepting for a very long time but when I began to understand this concept I began to realize how my life was like a big sticky mess that kept snowballing into a bigger sticky mess. Everyone seemed to disregard me and there were times I was shocked at how I was treated by people.
So it was time for the untangling and rebuilding process. The tricky part was that I had to learn to refuse to be treated like I was less than anyone else. The first step was believing that I was equally valuable by exposing all the lies I believed, and replacing them with truth and then I had to learn how to draw boundaries. Now that was scary but I came to realize that if I didn’t do it, I would stay right where I was and my new growth and my hope for excellent mental health would be stalled.
Although I became aware of the way that I had been devalued by my mother and the damage it caused, for several years afterwards I continued talking to her and just ignored her jabs. I think I believed the new me would finally be good enough. I still wasn’t ready to deal with our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship but my life had already begun to change. I was speaking in mental health seminars about my recovery from Dissociative Identity Disorder and Chronic Depression and I was good at it. I was impacting people and inspiring hope that they too could overcome their mental health problems. I was impacting mental health professionals too.
I was invited to do the content edit on a book being written by a therapist about the destructive nature of power and control. I was SO excited to tell my Mom. She wasn’t impressed at all. She wanted to know why he asked me. She wondered (out loud) if I was having an affair with him. Something snapped in me. Ever since I was 6 she had communicated to me in various ways that the only thing that I was good for was sex or something to do with sex. That realization had been a big part of my therapy. Now, I was building a professional career and I had gone back to school. I was speaking regularly in seminars about recovery and my Mother, my own Mother, decided that if someone was noticing me, it couldn’t possibly be because I was smart or that I had a talent in that area; it had to be because I was having an affair and that any man who saw value in me really just wanted to have sex with me. I was so stunned that I didn’t say anything. I was silent and didn’t stand up to her. I knew that I didn’t deserve that kind of treatment and I thought long and hard about what to do about it. In my therapy process, I had taken a close look at my trust issues with others, but what about the trust issues that I had with myself? I knew that it was time for me to take action; to honour myself and step into my new belief; that I was worthy.
I was already aware of my fear of being rejected by her if I told her that she couldn’t treat me that way anymore but I also knew that if I didn’t tell her what my boundaries were, and stick to them, that nothing would change. The time had come.
Exposing truth one snapshot at a time,
Darlene Ouimet
Controlling Parents and the Questions Abusers Ask
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The post “Psychological, Physical and Sexual Abuse Why Questions” generated a lot of interest, so I decided to do a follow up post asking the questions that controlling and abusive people ask us. The response on the Emerging from Broken facebook page was huge.
These types of statements that controllers and abusers use are designed to keep us in a fog of confusion. Remember that this type of grooming begins when we are very young and becomes part of our definition of love. We are taught “if you love me you would not fight, argue or even disagree with me”. We may also be taught that compliance is respect and respect is a demand not a choice. The problem is that so often we end up respecting abusive behaviour and we are not sure what abusive behaviour is because it starts when we are so young.
The following ‘why questions’ abusers ask can be used to control and to cover up any type of abuse. They are used to guilt and shame us into looking back at ourselves and to question ourselves, instead of them. They are used to keep the victim in a spin ~ trying to figure out the truth and never quite putting a finger on exactly what the truth is. These questions are used to control. These types of questions are abusive. They don’t make sense but we so often don’t realize that because we have been groomed to accept these false definitions of love and respect since we were very young.
Here are some of the comments that came in on EFB Facebook, about typical questions and statements that are used to control, guilt and shame, force compliance, or cause to shut down.
~ “why don’t you just get on with your life and get over that? Why do you insist on destroying our family? Why can’t you let me forget that happened?
~ “Why don’t you spend time with me anymore? Why do you look so serious all the time?”
~ “Why can’t you forgive and forget? And I am told I SHOULD love them.”
~”After all I’ve done for you why are you treating me this way? Why can’t YOU just move on?”
~ Why don’t you like me? Don’t you remember all the fun we had when you were a kid? (along with an answer ~ “no, I don’t remember all the fun and even if there was some fun does that make up for all the other abuse?.. NO”)
~”Why don’t you respect him? He was a good provider. (Is that what a father is?) You are going to have to live with the way YOU are treating your Dad.”
~ “If you loved me you would… or If you loved me you would not….”
~”You SHOULD be grateful”
~” Why can’t you think of somebody other than yourself for a change?”
~ “Why can’t you grow up and start acting like your Mothers daughter?”
~ “You MAKE me do this to you. If you would do things right the first time I wouldn’t have to….”
~ “Why can’t you see this from my point of view?”
~ “Stop acting like a spoilt brat”
~ “What is WRONG with you?”
~ “Why do you keep talking about this? Why do you blame me; your father did it. What the hell are you thinking, writing a book about it? Why are you so selfish? Do you think you are the only one that matters? What about ME?”
These questions are full of the twisted communications and insinuations hurled at people for the purpose of control. Love is not disempowering and it does not support lies. This system is very backwards and extremely devaluing. Most of these questions are what controlling PARENTS said to their own adult children. We are called selfish, because we want to expose the abuse? Because we want our lives back? We are reprimanded for wanting to have a voice, for wanting to have a chance, for telling the truth? It is more important for them to keep up appearances and to protect the abuser or the secret than it is to validate a child or adult child? Therefore we are the ones with the problem because we want to be heard? In this system there is no hope. When we do as they ask everyone stays sick. And the most difficult part to comprehend is that they would rather us comply, cover up and obey, then become the flourishing healthy adults that we were born to be. We are told we SHOULD love them but we are not taught love by them. Love has not been modeled for us. They do not love by their own definition of love; the same definition of love that we are expected to love them by.
When I went back into my past to examine the events that originally caused my depressions and dissociative identity disorder, it became apparent that there were a lot of lies involved. There was justification by the abusers, there was blame towards me, when I was an innocent victim, there was covering up, ignoring, and “that didn’t happen” and “shush let’s just forget all about it”. This is where the mental illness accelerated for me ~ with the twisting of the truth; the not being protected and the misplaced blame. The illness accelerated because one lie breeds another lie. And when this type of control works, the controllers keep upping the ante. They want more control, more compliance.
We grow up and we are often attracted to controllers and abusers… it’s familiar; it’s what we know. By the time I was in my late thirties the confusion and the fog was so thick that I couldn’t see the truth at all anymore; I easily bought the lies, I conformed to the requests, I complied and I tried harder. My mental health grew increasingly worse. I had no idea what love was. This is how my belief system got so messed up. And it was in sorting it out; realizing the false from the truth that I recovered.
Please feel free to contribute any of your own stories or the questions used on you.
Busting through the fog,
Darlene Ouimet
The Fear of Setting Personal Boundaries
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- The Ring
“Drawing boundaries is one of the hardest things that we do. We are so afraid of the consequences of standing up to a controller in our lives. I was afraid that if I stood up to my mom, I would never get the diamond dinner ring that she promised would be mine. I realize that this sounds really “off” to me today.” Darlene Ouimet
That was the comment that I posted on the facebook page for this blog yesterday and it generated a fantastic discussion, so here is the long version of it. I was so afraid of my Mother but if you had asked me why, I could not have come up with an answer but lets just say that our mother daughter relationship was one sided at the best of times.
I didn’t give much conscious thought to why I let people walk all over me. I had these fears that I didn’t totally understand about what would happen if I told my mother that I was sick of her pushing me around. She had this diamond dinner ring that she had made for herself after my parents divorced. It was made out of the diamonds from her weddings rings from my father. I loved it for its sentimental value, something left over from their marriage, and it was a beautiful ring too and my mother promised me that it would be mine one day.
When my mother re-married I hoped that she would give me the ring, but instead she kind of dangled it in front of me for the next 16 years or so. I didn’t think much about it, until one day when I was visiting her and we were sitting on her bed looking through her jewellery box. The ring was in there. She hadn’t worn it for years but she still didn’t want me to have it. I tried it on; it was such a pretty ring, and it fit me just right. After a few minutes, I put it back in the jewellery box, but my mother didn’t notice. She started frantically looking around. She looked at my pockets; I am guessing to see if I had snuck it into my pocket when she wasn’t looking. She looked all around the bed and floor and since I realized that she thought I had taken the ring, I just sat there stunned, not saying a word. Finally she looked at me and in a stormy voice she asked “Darlene, where is MY ring?” I told her it was in her jewellery box. Before she even looked in the box she demanded “WHERE?”
Something in me snapped that day. She knew I wanted that ring, and she used it against me, but now she was willing to think that I might steal it to get it! I was hurt but I was disgusted too. She had no reason to think that I might just take it. I have never done anything like that! I would have understood if she wanted to keep the ring for her own sentimental reason, but to taunt me with it, and then accuse me of stealing it was just too much. I vowed that I would never want that darn ring again.
So it was interesting when she gave it to me for my birthday a year or so later. Why did she decide to give me the ring then? I had finally decided that I didn’t want it. Could it be that the ring didn’t serve her purpose anymore and that the ring no longer had any power over me?
By then I was in therapy and well into what I call in my head “the real process of recovery”. I remember opening the gift box and thinking my first thought which was “OH MY GOSH she finally gave me THE RING”… and my second thought “well you just gave me the only “thing” I ever wanted… now what are you going to hang over my head?” At some level this thought proved that I knew her motives with regards to that ring.
I had some weird feelings when I got that ring and although I wore if for a few months, I have trouble wearing it anymore because it reminds me of how many years that I put up with people having control over me and how I took it. It reminds me of how my own mother treated me like I was inconsequential. It reminds me that her illusions of being a fantastic loving mother are more important to her then I am! In my new healthy mindset that sounds WRONG to me on so many levels.
I don’t think this was just about a ring. I think the ring was just a symbol of the real fear, which was that if I stood up to my mother, she would remove herself from my life and for most of my life I was pretty sure that I did not want to risk that consequence.
This is just one small example of the thoughts and the fear of abandonment that I harboured below the surface. I hope that you can relate in some way to this story and please feel free to share one of your own.
Exposing truth one snapshot at a time;
Darlene Ouimet
Mother Daughter Relationship ~ False Definition of Love
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“Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, “you own me.” Look at what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.” Hafiz
Reading all the posts from Carla and her Mom, Debbie, got me to thinking about my own Mother and all that has come and gone in our relationship. Sometimes I wish that she and I could mend this broken fence. Sometimes I miss my mother.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have this longing that I have labelled as “missing my mother” but it is a longing for something that has always been missing. It is a longing for love, a longing to have value in my mother’s life and a longing to feel like I mattered to her. That longing is a longing for something that has never really been there.
Sometimes I wonder where this longing came from if I never had it in the first place. Maybe my mother was an amazing mother when I was an infant; when I was a baby who was completely dependent on her. Maybe she was filled with love when she looked down at me, when I was so little, so fragile and perfect in my helplessness. I needed her then. Maybe she thought that my dependency on her was love. How was she loved and what did she think that love was? Did she think that this little baby would fill the void that was in her soul? And maybe when I was a little baby, with no verbal ability, no opinion separate from her, no will of my own, that was exactly how she wanted it and that was love. Well whatever it was then, somewhere along the line everything went terribly wrong.
My mom used to get mad at me and tell me that no matter how nasty her own mother was that they (her and her siblings) always loved her anyway. I realized that my mother was actually telling me that I did not love her “the right way”. I was expected to love her, because she was my mother. I remember even in my own brokenness, wondering why we feel that we have to love our parents just because they are our parents. My mother says that she did the best she could and after my parents split up when I was 12, she constantly stated that she never asked to be a single parent as though that was why she wasn’t a caring or loving parent.
And this isn’t just about my mother because I was expected to love other people who had no regard for me. Why “should” I love people who cause me pain, people who humiliate me and tell me by their actions that I am worthless? Why did I have to love people who only contributed to the pain in my life, people that never cared about me, never wanted to see me for who I was but only for what I could do for them? There was this deep down niggling doubt about the words “should” and why obligation was somehow connected to the word love, but I could not quite grasp the whole picture.
My mother taught me the wrong definition of the word love. I learned by her actions. I learned by her expectations. I learned that I was obligated ~ I was supposed to love her and that loving her meant doing what she wanted and never upsetting her. Love was about ME carrying the entire burden of the relationship. Love was keeping dirty little secrets. Love was accepting that I was not worthy of protection and not putting up a fuss about it because that would upset her. I could fight, I could express the unfairness of it all, but there was a price to pay for the fight and I was ignored. It was painfully clear to me that my feelings didn’t matter; only her feelings did. The problem was that by her definition of love, I was not loved and that is how I knew that I was not loved. My mother did not love me by HER own definition of the word.
I had a fantasy about having a certain type of mother. I worked very hard to earn her love and acceptance of me, believing that one day I would find the magic key. I finally accepted that it wasn’t going to happen because SHE can’t do it. It isn’t because I can’t be what she wants. The lack is not in me.
I feel sorry for my mother. She doesn’t know what love is. She never saw me as an individual. She doesn’t know that love is more fulfilling when it is mutual. She doesn’t know that obligation isn’t part of love. My mother is so sure that she is right about how it should be that when I finally said enough and that I was not going to accept her system anymore, she could not consider my feelings. She could not stop blaming me, she did not want to bother with trying to work it out with me because it had to be her way and I had the nerve and disrespect to ask for something more.
I miss and even sometimes mourn the idea of (one day) having a loving mother. When I told my mother that I had had enough and she closed the door, at first I felt this horrible fear. I felt like I could not function without a mother, that I HAD to have one. I think that abusive people teach us this lie ~ that without them we will die, so that we are afraid to stand up to them. It is all part of the control they have over us. Within about 3 months, I started to realize that the oppression that I lived under was lifting. I realized that I was not getting wound up all the time about proving myself. I began to see how toxic the relationship really was and I began to realize a new freedom. In my wholeness I have realized that I do not have to have a toxic relationship EVEN if that means that I don’t have any relationship with my mother.
The bottom line with all of this is that I had to determine and own my own value. I had to stop living under my mother’s definition of love, and find the real definition. I drew my boundaries with my mother as I was learning to love and value myself. I grew in my emotional health to the exact extent that I was willing to stand up for myself and to stand up for the truth. Today I know my value and that I am equally valuable to every other human being. If people treat me as though I am not equally valuable, (even if those people are part of my family) I no longer accept that. I am in charge of my self esteem and in the past I just told myself not to feel bad when someone devalued me but today I choose not to be around people who hurt me.
Because I am worth it,
Darlene Ouimet
