Archive for mother daughter relationship
Mom and Grandma had a Dysfunctional Mother Daughter Relationship
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- From Surviving to Thriving
Through the comments discussion on my recent post “My Value and Learning to Love MY Self” here on Emerging from Broken, Lynda recently asked me the following question and since it is such a popular question I thought I would answer it in a post all its own.
Lynda says: Darlene,
“I’m so sorry your mother treated you the way she did. What I DON’T understand… if your mother’s mother treated her that way, why did she do the same to you? I was just the opposite, always trying to give my children the love and encouragement and affirmation that I never got from my mother.”
This is the realization that I finally came to when it came to my own kids; that I had a choice and I actively decided to pursue something different for my children. But the truth is that my mother made the same choice, she actually did do better by me then what was done to her in her own dysfunctional relationship she had with her mother and I think she thought that it was enough. We were fed and clothed better than her and her siblings were. We were clean and had clean clothing, bedding and nutritious food. But the love was missing. I was emotionally neglected. I was not heard. I was not acceptable. I was not encouraged to be an individual or regarded with equal value. Her own issues were way too much in the way and we ended up having a very dysfunctional mother daughter relationship very similar to the same dysfunctional mother daughter relationship that my mother had with her mother. Continued…. Read More→
Emotional Abandonment and Dysfunctional Relationships
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- My Cold Mother
I was in grade eight just thirteen and a half years old and I was crazy in love (I thought) with a boy at school. I was so shut down at that age. I was awkward, quiet and withdrawn. He was this really cool popular boy who was captain of his football team and on the basketball team; all the boys looked up to him and he was making it pretty clear that he liked me. ME! He asked me to “go around” with him which was the term used in that city when a guy asks a girl to be his girlfriend. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. The most popular guy in the whole school just asked me to be HIS girlfriend. And I was looking for a love source, an identity and someone to make me believe that I was special. I was trying to find self acceptance and self esteem through being his girlfriend. And I was sure that being liked or loved by someone like him could do all that! I believed that this was it; finally I was going to be “good enough”.
It was going great. A few weeks later school was breaking for the Christmas holidays. He gave me earrings with rings and hearts on them; I had never felt more special in my life and then he kissed me. I got dizzy and felt my knees go weak, just like I imagined it happened in romance books and movies. My first kiss was a fantasy come to life.
He defended me too. One of the boys at school said something mean to me and my boyfriend slammed him up against a wall. I was sure that this was the proof that finally someone loved me! Finally I meant something to someone and suddenly, I was popular too. He had a temper and there were other incidents of him fighting for me too but I thought it was just wonderful. Those were magical days.
Soon came the day that he wanted me to let him do a little bit more than just kissing. Continued… Read More→
Conflicting Feelings of Rejection when the Abuser Withdraws
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- Hope in the Darkness of Rejection
All abuse, weather it is emotional and psychological abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse or spiritual abuse, is abuse and that these articles that I write on Emerging from Broken apply to ALL kinds of abuse. I intentionally make a connection between depression, dissociation, multiple personality, eating disorders, addictions and other mental health struggles and abuse. It is my experience that my difficulties and struggles were birthed in how I learned my value or rather my lack of it. The following article is not just about mother daughter dysfunctional relationship. It is about ALL dysfunctional relationship. How it starts in childhood, how it goes from there. How it ends up in coping methods that although necessary for survival, become self destructive.
The subject of not wanting the abuser to leave me and wondering why they did is SO complicated! For me, one of the things it has to do with is compliance and how much of my life that I spent trying harder for them. The deeper that I look at the roots of my belief system, the more that I can figure out where things got off the track. First of all there are the tons and tons of mixed and conflicting messages that we get both from right sources and wrong sources. They all kind of go into the same pot and they mesh with each other. Remember the story of how when my mother declared that it was my fault that her boyfriend came in my room in the night to sexually assault me because I had a crush on him. Well because my self esteem was already so damaged that I believed her, I added that self blame to everything that ever happened to me before that event. Then there were a few things in my past where I was not such a perfect child, like the time I faked the nightmare for attention, and when a child is a mere child, it doesn’t take much for things to get really mixed up in the memory, the mind and then in the belief system. The grid that we try to process things through, gets damaged.
I had to look at the “foundational foundation” to start with. That is the belief that we need and depend on whoever our caregivers are for our very lives, protection, security, the things that children need to grow into healthy adults. And when something happens that alters those basic needs, we have a problem. We get this split belief about love somewhere along the way and we start to believe that love is something that it isn’t. My mother taught me my value, she taught me the version of LOVE that she believed, but it isn’t real love. So I think that what she is doing is love, and I used to say “I know she loves me, I know she is doing her best”.. but today I know differently. She doesn’t love me at all. She uses me to make her feel better about herself. But it doesn’t work and it isn’t good enough and it hurts me every time. Where is the love in that? Part of my recovery was realizing what love is and what it is not.
When I told my mother that I was not willing to have a relationship on her terms, she finally asked me what “my terms” were. I told her that from now on she could no longer say that I had a crush on her boyfriend when I was just a kid and that was why he came in my room in the night. AND I told her that I was sick of having to prove to her husband that I liked him. I guess my terms were too high.
She was silent. She did not respond to any of the “terms” I stated. Then she told ME to think about our talk and get back to her and I said no mom, you can think about it and get back to me. I could write a whole other blog post about how everything was always up to me but that particular time I had given her MY terms, what the heck was I supposed to think about? That was the last time that we spoke.
And the message that I got from her withdrawal was that I was not worth her trying for. If I was going to draw boundaries and demand equal value then forget it. She said NO. The message was that I was only good for kicking around. If she had to respect me, then she didn’t want to be bothered with me at all. And that message meant to me that I am NOT worth it. After all the years of loyalty and compliance. After keeping my mouth shut about her boyfriends ~ I wasn’t worth her effort. I had never stood up to her all those years. I didn’t dump HER. I put up with all of the degrading in front of the whole world. I stood silent when she told men they could sleep with me because I was on the pill even though I was only a teenager! I didn’t even tell the family therapist (we had to go because my brother got arrested) what was really going on in our home or how she treated me. I let her take me to bars as a man magnet when I was 17 and I never said a word; I followed HER one sided definition of love and loyalty and I kept thinking that one day it would pay off ~ AND she dumped ME! It was incomprehensible! This was just the most unbelievable “thing” for me to try and comprehend. I was such a GOOD VICTIM and it was all for NOTHING? Because when it came right down to it, I was not worth her effort.
And it feels like rejection, because IT IS REJECTION.
As the months went by I felt more and more shock and disbelief as these truths sunk in. But something else was happening. I realized that I didn’t miss the abuse. I didn’t miss having to constantly do damage control and make sure SHE was okay. I didn’t miss having the joy sucked out of every single exciting moment in my life. I didn’t miss the put downs, the insults, the sexual innuendos or the family problems that she caused with her gossip and trouble making. I didn’t miss the anxiety.
And I started to grow. I started to come out of the fog in a much bigger way; I had so much more clarity about the truth and realized how many lies about myself that I had accepted.
This whole story does not just apply to parents; I had a couple of boyfriends who fit this same pattern. Oh and a few friends too. And employers…………. well you get the picture.
Please share your journey, struggles or victories or whatever you need to share for your recovery.
Exposing Truth one snapshot (or two) at a time
Darlene Ouimet
Founder of Emerging from Broken
Related Posts: The little girl who Cried Wolf ~ Belief system development
Sexual Abuse ~ Devlaued, Discounted, Unprotected
More on Mother Daughter Dysfunctional Relationship (and the comments)
More on Mother Daughter Dysfunctional Relationship
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- Mommy Please….
“If your progress in recovery is thwarted each time you see your family, if you revert to being a subservient or a fearful child, then you may need to stop seeing them for a while. Most importantly, you may need time to develop your own separate “self”, since it may be impossible for you to maintain a sense of individuality when you are around them.” The Right to Innocence – Beverly Engel
Lisa, one of my readers, made the following comment on the post “welcoming a new year of emotional healing” in regards to drawing boundaries with her mother; “What if there is no me without her?” this post is dedicated to that comment and it applies to all relationship where equal value is out of balance.
I was a really good victim to a lot of people. That means that I conformed and complied to many. I did what they wanted. I was who they wanted me to be. It makes me angry to think of how compliant that I was and that it was still never enough.
I lost myself and I got sick. As I got older, the overall dysfunction that was so familiar to me grew, and I got sicker. This was especially true in the dysfunctional mother daughter relationship with my own mother.
Looking back I realize that in most of my relationships, the interest that many people had in me was pretty much only about what I could do for them and about how much they could make me into who they wanted me to be. Sometimes that is about power and control. Sometimes it is about ownership and servant hood. Whatever the motive is, it is not healthy and it is not about love. And when we continue to live in that kind of relational dysfunction, the more we lose ourselves. In my case, the farther I got from my identity, the more depression and dissociation manifested. I lived only to live for others.
In the case of my mother, I think she wanted children because she was looking for a love source of her own. And so she created a love source. And she might have loved those babies to the best of her ability but as we grew older, something happened. She had expectations. She wanted approval and validation and she wanted it from the love source that she created. And when people get love mixed up with ownership, they believe they have a right to get what they need or want from those other people. But love and relationship doesn’t work that way and because she didn’t really know love herself, the whole plan failed.
The foundation of our relationship (overtime) became about my usefulness to her. When I was little my unconditional love and acceptance of HER was all she needed, but as I grew into an individual who had my own individual ideas, I think she felt threatened. And she did things that if I put up with them would prove to her that I still loved her. AND it seemed that she was very mad at me when I could not fill the void in her and make her feel good about herself. She put me down. She reminded me in strange ways that I was nothing. (and somehow I heard that I was nothing “without her”.) She did mean things that when accepted by me seemed to make her feel better because she equated them with love.
I got away from her, but it was never far enough. She sucked the joy out of every accomplishment that I ever had with her sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious put downs and questions designed to devalue me. She mentioned my weight. She put down my husband, my home, and my choices. She made inappropriate sexual comments about me in front of others. I was always on edge around her. And I never thought to confront her about doing it. She even commented that my breasts used to be so nice before I had children. WHY does someone feel the need to say something like that?
When I was small she taught me that I needed her, and I did. But she never taught me that I was capable of being an individual. She never wanted me to stop NEEDING her because it restored her value. I believed that I needed her to survive and even to exist.
And one day about a year after I began to take my life back by doing the foundational work that I write about all the time in this blog, I started to stand up to her, just a bit and just in tiny ways at first. But the more that I grew, the more I realized that my mother and I had a very dysfunctional mother daughter relationship. And eventually I stood up to her in bigger ways. And the tension between us was getting really bad. Then came the day when I said NO MORE. And this time I meant it. My boundary was not in my mouth anymore, it was in my heart now. She knew that I was serious, and she withdrew.
At first I was confused. I could not believe that she didn’t care enough to even try to discuss it. But I had lost my “usefulness to her” and what I didn’t realize is that part of my usefulness to her was in how she got to put me down. I felt so sorry for her too; for most of my life I tried to restore her value, but no one can do that for someone else. (I have written about this stuff under the mother and daughter relationship tabs.) The problem is that my purpose in her life wasn’t about love, value and equality. The way that she treated me wasn’t fair to me and it was when I finally put myself first, something we are told we must never do, that I found my healing.
When some time had gone by, my mother called and she wanted to try to mend fences. The problem was that she wanted to start from that day and asked if we could “just put it all behind us” and I said no. That is how we had always done things in the past, with me backing down. With me saying that her treatment of me was okay with me, (what I thought was forgiveness) and with me laying there broken and bleeding on the ground once again doing what she wanted and being who she wanted me to be. Always about her, always taking care of her; never about me, never taking care of me. She asked me what my terms were and I said equal respect. That was the last time I talked to her.
As I said, this time my boundary was drawn in my heart. I finally knew that I was worth equal respect, and that I have real value, equal value and that she doesn’t own me. I finally knew that her life is not my responsibility. She failed me as a mother, but I am not going to fail myself anymore.
I am not afraid anymore to live as me because I found out that the value that they gave me was a lie. I am far more valuable then they ever wanted me to find out about. I found out that I do not need anyone else in order to exist. I am not defined by anyone else today. AND I am not an extension of my mother.
Please share your thoughts. One of the biggest search phrases used to find Emerging from Broken are the key words “dysfunctional mother daughter relationship”. This is a huge issue in our society. We are not alone in this.
Exposing Truth, One snapshot at a time
Darlene Ouimet
See Lisa’s comment #19 on Welcoming a new year of Emotional Healing
Related posts: Mother Daughter Relationship Nighmares
What Is My Anger Telling Me? By Christina Enevoldsen
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I am excited to have my good friend and guest blogger Christina Enevoldsen from “Overcoming Sexual Abuse” writing once again for Emerging from Broken today while I am enjoying my vacation in Mexico. As always please feel free to add your comments, share your experiences and post your feedback in the comments section following Christina’s article.
Darlene Ouimet, founder of emerging from broken
What is My Anger Telling Me? by Christina Enevoldsen
I used to have a persistent fantasy of stabbing my mother in the face. It came to me in sudden flashes accompanied by adrenaline surges. The recurring image of something so horrific was quite disturbing. I’d never consider doing anything like that; blood makes me nauseous and even hurting someone’s feelings bothers me. If I imagined doing something like that, did it make me like my abusers?
It was hard to admit something so awful, even to myself. I was taught not to ‘entertain negative thoughts’ and conditioned to judge my anger. The prescribed method for handling such unpleasantness was to ignore it and to think about nice things—nice things like envisioning treating my mom to a facial or stroking her hair. Imagining loving things while I had so much anger flowing through me was impossible. The frequency and intensity of those thoughts wouldn’t allow me to discount them. Besides, I’d closed my eyes to things long enough and that wasn’t getting me anywhere. I had to face those awful images head-on.
I had to own my desires, face them without criticizing myself and find out their source.
Where did that come from? What purpose did the desire serve? What was the significance of destroying my mother’s face? The fantasy was an important clue in my healing process. By examining it closely, I discovered the reasons why.
I remembered an incident from my childhood sexual abuse. I was alone with my dad in my parent’s bedroom. My mom took great care in decorating the whole house, but especially their room. The bedding matched the drapes, which coordinated with the carpet. Everything was specially chosen. I sat on the edge of a raised platform that was designed to elevate their bed and make it the focal point of the room. My dad sat on the floor across from me with his collection of Playboy magazines spread out next to him. During the abuse, I looked up at the drapes and thought, even in my fourth grade mind, that appearances were all that mattered to my mom. She could make the house look like a palace, but it would always be a dungeon to me.
My mom was more interested in image than reality. She chose the happy family facade rather than protecting me. My slashing fantasy was an expression of my hated for her effort to make everything look nice, rather than making it nice. Her face represented the image that was so important to her.
By ignoring the unpleasant, scary flashes, and replacing them with more acceptable images, I was doing the same thing my mom did—I was decorating over the horror. My desire was a messenger, communicating my specific area of hurt. Paying attention to my anger allowed me to resolve it. The only way to resolve it was to acknowledge it and clean it out.
Once I identified where my anger was coming from, it was easier to process it in a healthy way. I expressed my anger by journal writing, letter writing, (some I sent and some I didn’t), talking it out with friends, crying, shouting and pounding my bed. I worked through it until I didn’t feel anything. I haven’t thought about hurting my mom in a long time. Facing the ugly feelings was one of the best things I did for myself. It helped me to empty out another layer of anger and take another step in healing.
Christina Enevoldsen
Christina Enevoldsen is cofounder of Overcoming Sexual Abuse, an online resource for male and female abuse survivors looking for practical answers and tools for healing. Christina’s passions are writing and speaking about her own journey of healing from abuse and inspiring people toward wholeness. She and her husband live in Los Angeles and share three children and three grandchildren.
Self Worth; Where does it Come From?
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There are little messages that we get when we live in an abusive or dysfunctional environment, or even if our home environment is not abusive, but we are being devalued or mistreated in any way somewhere outside of that environment. Remember that all abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and spiritual abuse is all equally destructive to self esteem and self worth.
Our self esteem suffers so much when we are being abused or mistreated and it is extremely confusing to a child. Other messages factor in to complete and to complicate the picture. So a lesser message piggy backs on an already seriously damaging message and confirms the suspicion I already have; I just wasn’t worthy.
My parents divorced when I was 13. My mother constantly said she didn’t have enough money to live on. I don’t know if that is true, I didn’t have access to the books, but as a child we can only base our judgements on what we see and what we hear. We base our conclusions on what we believe to be the proof.
My mother said that she didn’t have enough money to raise us kids and that our father didn’t give her enough child support. She constantly complained about the power bill; we were not allowed to have heat in our bedrooms and she complained about groceries. To this day her voice rings in my head “I never wanted to be a single mother” This was a statement that she made as an excuse for everything. As a child the message that I heard is that she didn’t want me and that her love for me was conditional and the condition was that unless she had someone to help her raise children, she didn’t want children. By the time I was 15 years old, when she said that she never wanted to be a single mother, my mind replied “ oh ..so that is why you are not a mother at all”
My father acted like he paid child support so that was all he had to do. I remember when I got my first period, I was 13 and I had to go to my father’s for the weekend after school. I needed money for sanitary napkins. When I asked him for some money, he would NOT give it to me unless I told him why I wanted it. What a nightmare that was. As an adult I told myself that it was his right to know why I wanted a couple of dollars. But the problem was the belief that developed when I was just a young teenager who didn’t want to tell her father that she needed pads, complicated by the fact that I believed he didn’t trust me with two freaking dollars to go to the drug store. And so the conclusion that I drew was that he didn’t have to, or want to give me anything extra then what he paid my mother for child support, that I wasn’t worthy OR trustworthy.
I stole my clothes when I was in grades 7, 8 and 9; not because I was a bad kid but because my mother didn’t buy them for me. I didn’t steal tons, just what I needed.
Remember I am talking about my belief system and how it formed. So here was the conflict. My mother had an amazing wardrobe both for work and for social. She has several full length evening gowns and shoes which she wore every weekend to attend the singles dances she liked to go to. She had money for her, but not for me. My mother had a diamond dinner ring made for herself from the diamonds out of the wedding set my father bought her. I knew that it cost her about 750.00 to get that ring made. Jeans were $20.00. How come she didn’t have enough money for me, but she had enough for her?
I learned my “worth” by the messages that I received. I was not as important as her dresses, her diamonds, her boyfriends, her girlfriends. I was in her way and I cost money, precious money that could have been put to better use and spent on herself.
And my father washed his hands of me the day that he left.
Those are the messages that I got, right or wrong and when I write about this stuff, it isn’t for the purpose of exposing my mother and father, but exposing MY belief system. (I don’t have any resentment anymore.) Those were the conclusions that I drew from the decisions that they made, from the things that they did and said. And from those messages, I drew the conclusions that I did about myself, my value, my worth and lack of it.
What are the conclusions that you drew about your worth or lack of it? Can you link it to a message you got that caused you to draw that conclusion?
Exposing Truth ~ One snapshot at a time.
Darlene Ouimet
There are many posts on this blog related to the belief system development, self esteem and self worth. Please use the Category buttons to access other posts for further snapshots.
Solutions and Recovery from Depression and Trauma
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Depression was like a thick heavy blanket that sometimes felt like a cozy warm nest and I felt so safe there that I was afraid to let it go, even though the weight of the blanket was killing me; Just one more day I would say.. “just one more day in this dark cocoon and tomorrow I will start to live, but for just one more day, it feels safer to hide.” (Darlene Ouimet)
That was all about the illusion of safe. I did not overcome depression by dealing with the depression itself because depression did not stand alone in my life. Facing the depression isn’t exactly what led me out of the darkness; it was realizing where the depression came from and why it had become one of my coping methods that led me to overcoming it. Just like my dissociative identity disorder, for me depression started when I was very young. I realize today that all coping methods have a common reason for existing. There is something “back there” that isn’t resolved. We have all these coping methods because the mind is such an amazing and powerful thing. They are literally the way we deal, how we cope and how we survive.
There was a comment on my post “Mother Daughter Relationship Nightmares” that got me thinking about how all my coping methods and my recovery discoveries work together and how I came to this place in my life. The following question was posted by Mark Alan Effinger; Mark asked “Is there a direct path through this &^%$ to a better place? Or is it so individual, that no formulaic method will do?” Although Mark is referring to the serious and graphic comments about sexual abuse, I have come to realize that the answer is the same for this question as it is for all questions about emotional healing and recovery.
To recap, I sought help from a therapist when I was heading into my third serious depression in five years, the previous two serious depressions lasted two years each, so I hadn’t had much of a break off the medication this time. I was going to leave my husband and three young children, believing that they would be better off without me. I got frustrated when the therapist wanted to talk about my childhood. I didn’t want to talk about the past, I was having trouble NOW. I needed help for my life in the present, not for my life in the past. I really didn’t see any connection from the past to the present. But he was insistent and I was losing money arguing with him, so I gave in. We talked about the past. In fact we started with my first trauma memory.
I began to see how my depressions were very much related to my childhood trauma and that depression wound its way through my entire life and intertwined with other coping methods, addictions, dissociative identity disorder, and that in reality all of these coping methods were an amazing survival system that I had built, and I started building it when I was very young. But now, it had turned on me. Because I began to see the patterns, I became willing to keep digging up that rotten foundation. The whole key for me was uncovering and discovering how my belief system about myself and the world, had formed. As I replaced the lies with the truth, the coping methods fell away; because I didn’t need them anymore.
The process isn’t simple and it isn’t a quick fix. The good news is that for me it wasn’t a band-aid either and the resulting freedom from all that hell on earth has been permanent. I have the occasional down day, but they are rare. I don’t dissociate anymore, I no longer have multiple personalities, and I don’t fall into the depths of darkness; depression is no longer something I worry about.
When I began speaking in metal health seminars, and working at the director of client relations in a counseling firm, I realized others were also having the same astounding results as I was having ~ finding the way out of the darkness and into the light; finding freedom from depression, freedom from addictions, gaining a new understanding of coping methods; where they came from and why we needed them and how it was possible to uncover the mystery of how to ditch them.
In writing this blog, Emerging from Broken, I am attempting to deliver a message of hope; step by step, mixed in with story by story and tiny little snapshots of how I uncovered the layers of lies on top of other lies, all which built my belief system which falsely defined who I was, my purpose or lack of it, my value and lack of it. I write snapshots of how I found the truth about why I believed all that stuff about myself. Not knowing that I didn’t know the truth about myself prior to my recovery, I wasn’t searching for it. I was searching for freedom and recovery from broken, but not in the right places. How is one to know where to look? So I am sharing where and how I found it.
So to answer Mark’s question; I think there is a formulaic method that works for everyone. The trauma events (or mistreatment) and the belief system belong to the individual, but the way out, the pathway to freedom and wholeness is not so unique.
If this method worked for me, and for others, then why can’t it work for everyone? Who can say that it won’t work? Who can say that there is too much damage? Who really knows that? I believe that this is the way and so I write to inspire others.
As always, please feel free to express yourself in any way that you would like by adding your comments;
One Snapshot at a time ~ Darlene Ouimet
Mother Daughter Relationship Nightmares
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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
Low Self Esteem and Relationship Disasters
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I’ve written a lot about my childhood belief system; how it developed and how I came to believe that I always had to try harder; that it was my fault if others were unhappy and even that it was my job, my task to make others feel better about themselves. This all tied in to why I ended up in such serious depressions and need so many coping methods. It was in realizing some of this stuff that I was able to move forward and recover my life. Taking a look at the mother daughter relationship with my mother and how one sided it was, and the father daughter relationship with my father and how nonexistent it was; adding individual events, and adding the way that I was regarded, (before, during and after) mixed in with the way that I learned to regard myself, all added up to the bigger picture of who I was and where my problems started.
With the back ground that I had from my unhealthy dysfunctional relationships to my parents, believing that I was not worthy, not lovable, not good enough for the love and regard that I thought other people had, coupled with the fact that I had learned to try harder and harder and was willing to get angry and frustrated at myself when I “failed”, is it any wonder that I started to have trouble in relationships as I got older?
I was attracted to guys who were “troubled” and I thought that it was my job to love them enough that they would feel better about themselves. Deep down I was pretty sure that if I could love them enough ~ they would realize that they were lovable, and then they in turn would love me back. I was very attracted to these broken guys but I went into the relationship with the idea that I had to “earn my love” from them. I didn’t realize that I felt that way, but I looked back on my relationships and that is the way that it played out. I carried the beliefs about myself and about the way life worked, into my relationships.
The guys had their own belief systems that they brought to the table with them. I picked the ones that needed me to “restore” them, and it seemed that what “restored them” what made them feel good about themselves, was if I put up with devaluing treatment. It was as though they were saying “Will you still love me if I do this?” (for example, forget to call me and ignore plans with me) And if I did accept that treatment, (I always did), then they upped the ante. “What about if I do this….?” and maybe the next thing would be flirt with another girl in front of me or call me a nasty name, or stop talking to me (punishment) because I made a better joke then he did which took some of the attention away from him. There are a billion examples and ways that we can be “asked” to prove our love; their worth, and our worth (or lack of it) in a relationship. There are a million ways that we can be “manipulated” and taught that the way we are isn’t acceptable ~ and if I wanted to be accepted/loved then change was the silent message. I was used to not being accepted.
When I was 17 I had a big crush on a neighbour who was 20. He drank, but I didn’t mind because he liked me better when he was drinking. I didn’t have the self esteem to take that as an insult. I wanted him to notice me. All the girls thought he was dreamy, and I thought that if he noticed me, then I must be okay. I sought my value through other people, just as I had learned to do my whole life.
He used to come over to my house at around 10:00 pm at night and with no prior phone call or any prior arrangement, he would beep the horn from the driveway, and I would grab my jacket and go with him. I was “sure” that I could prove to him that I was the right girl friend for him, but I never considered that he was the wrong boyfriend for me. I accepted that kind of treatment from him for almost 5 months until on New Years Eve, he didn’t ask me out, but he showed up at my house at 1:00 in the morning after the party he was at, raped me, and then demanded that I call him a cab. That was what it took for me to realize that he was “not the one”. That was also when I reached a new depth in giving up on myself.
Everyone is welcome to share ~ Please tell us how you feel about this post.
Darlene Ouimet
P.S. It isn’t surprising that I had these beliefs, I have written a few blog posts about how my mother expected me to define her; to make her feel loved and valued and how by her actions it was obvious looking back on our mother daughter relationship, that she thought my purpose in her life was to restore her value. I just accepted that as “my job” and carried that with me into all my future relationships. See ~ The beginning of Broken ~ Family Foundations about my mother’s expectations in our dysfunctional mother daughter relationship.
