Archive for parenting
Re-Parenting, Dissociation and the Desire to Escape
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As many of you know, I’ve recovered from dissociative identity disorder and I find it to be a strange feeling to be aware of wanting to dissociate, when for so many years, it was habitual ~ I just did it. Continuing with some of the conversation from the last post, see “Dissociative Identity ~ the solution became the problem” ~ sometimes I still get this overwhelming feeling like I want to get out of my own skin. And sometimes when I get that anxious feeling I actually wish I could dissociate the way that I used to. I have come to realize that this “wish” is about the desire to escape.
When I was a child I HAD to dissociate because I had no other way to cope and coping was not just about dealing with trauma or abuse. It was also the only way to escape the feelings of being nothing and being of no value, the fear of what might happen next, the confusion of not being protected, not being understood and not even being listened to. No one helped me to deal with stuff so I had to do something. I was forced to dissociate and disconnect because I had to. It was an effective coping method for me and eventually it became effective as a way of escaping everything. I would dissociate in all situations. I am not sure what I did a lot of the times when I was dissociative, I lost a lot of time and I have some vague memories of a fantasy life and there were alter personalities, but wherever I was, it was how I dealt with things, it was my coping method and it was my escape.
As an adult I had to learn a new way because that old way was keeping me back in my childhood of unresolved fears and emotional damage.
When I talk about re-parenting myself, I am referring to being there for myself emotionally, the way that no one was there for me when I was a kid. When I feel like running, escaping or using a coping method like eating when I am not hungry in order to deal with (which is actually NOT dealing with) the emotions that are coming up in me it is because I want to escape those feelings, and because I never had help to deal with them ~ I learned to check out ~ in a manner of speaking.
Re-parenting is about being there for me when I want to leave me because of the old familiar feeling that I am alone anyway and I am not safe, so I think I need to escape.
Here is what I wrote in my journal about the anxiety I was experiencing a few days ago because I have been working on taking better care of my physical health;
“I feel discouraged that I have the same old struggle going on in me ~ that I am not really making me a priority again. I don’t “feel” like taking care of myself. I am tired, I don’t want to do treadmill, I don’t want to cut veggies, I don’t want to stay active and be responsible for my physical health and I don’t want to write about it here. I just want to pretend that I’m fine and put off thinking about my health and self care. I want to eat junk food if I feel like it. I will take care of myself… tomorrow.”
Sometimes I just can’t, don’t want to, or I just won’t stay present with myself. And I hate this feeling ~ it feels like failure and that is what makes me want to turn away from myself and my thoughts and ignore it but it is always there. The biggest problem is that I tell myself that I deserve to escape.
I deserve escape? To tell myself that I deserve to escape those feelings is like giving myself permission to self harm. Escape is not the really productive or healthy. This is something that I need to be aware of, almost every minute of the day because of the pain that I cause myself when I do choose escape, and because escape causes more pain in the end and it makes me feel bad about myself, actually separate from myself and be angry with myself; which is what living through abuse taught me to do.
Being aware of dialogue with myself; ~ sometimes I ask myself what is wrong. And in my mind’s eye I see myself shake the question off and forcefully say to myself “just leave me alone ~ haven’t I been through enough? I don’t FEEL like DEALING with this right now”… and when I go a little deeper with those thoughts I hear myself think “I deserve to be able to put it off. I deserve to live in escape and to be able to escape.” What I had to realize is that in escaping, I am separating from myself. I’m doing to myself what was done to me ~I am discounting my needs and my feelings. I am leaving myself ~ emotionally abandoning myself the way that I was emotionally abandoned as a child. It is what I am used to; it is what I was taught to do.
I got stuck there for a long time in adulthood. The answer was logical enough, but I didn’t really see it while I was escaping and dissociating and finding ways to run from the problem. I had to learn how to do something different. I had to learn not to leave myself, to stay present with myself and this is something I strive to do more each day. The more that I am aware of the desire to escape, the easier it is to decide not to escape.
And the truth is that I don’t NEED to escape anymore because I am not in danger anymore. I do not need to disconnect and dissociate by separating from myself, my thoughts and feelings. The leftover fears are not valid anymore. That coping method is no longer necessary for my survival the way that it was when I was a child. I am still in the tweaking and strengthening stages of this part of my self growth, but as I learn to love, value and support myself emotionally, the less I seek any form of escape.
Please share how you relate to or struggle with the concepts of re-parenting, dissociating and the desire to escape.
Still on the journey!
Darlene Ouimet
You might also like to read the related guest post by Susan Smith ~ Turning Points and Emotional Healing
Announcement:
Therapist John Wilson from Onine Events presents ~ Emerging From Broken – Interview with Darlene Ouimet on Sunday Nov.03 at 12:00 Noon Pacific, 3:00 pm EST and 1:00 pm mountain time. Please visit the following link in order to reserve your ticket. Click on the first box ~ there is no charge for the live event. Hope to “see” you there. http://emergingfrombroken.eventbrite.com/
Feelings about Food and Mixed Messages
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Here are some of the things children are told which contribute to the development of a belief system when it comes to food and food issues. I have said some of these things myself, not realizing what message I was sending. My point in writing this post is not written to criticise well meaning parents but for the reader to take a look at some of the ways our belief system about food was developed in the first place.
~ “Eat everything on your plate and you can have desert” This message indicates that desert is better, desert is a reward, and that desert is somehow special.
~ “If you can’t eat what is on your plate then I guess you are too full for desert” This message encourages us to overeat in order to get the prize, which is desert, which we have already learned is “better, special and the reward”.
~ “Save room for desert” Often only the adults in the room and at the same dinner table are told to save room for desert. How confusing is that to a child? As children we often have to eat the kinds of food and the amounts of food that THEY decide for us to eat, before we get desert. We think to ourselves ~ “I can’t wait till I am an adult. I don’t have to eat my sprouts, asparagus, meat, potatoes, (or whatever it is that you don’t want to eat that day), AND I can have desert whenever I want. I can’t wait to grow up and get away from controlling adults.”
~ “Let’s celebrate ~ why do so many celebrations have to do with food?
~ “You can’t have this (treat) unless you are “good” ~once again food is a reward for behavior and when we are adults we often consider food as a reward or recognition for any achievement.
~ “You have been “good” so here is some money for candy” I am not saying that all of this is wrong, I am just pointing out how we develop our relationship with food. How food becomes a reward and these things translate into a belief system about food. If an abuser has used treats and food this is even worse.
~ Making children eat food that makes them gag or making kids sit at the table until they finish a certain amount of food ~ think about the message you got when that happened. This is about power and control. This makes me feel like someone is saying to me “I don’t care what you like or how you feel, you eat it because I say you eat it.” This is a strange way to control a child and becomes a battle of wills. The parent always wins. Once again I encourage you to look at the message that you adopted into your belief system about food if this happened to you.
~”Because you disobeyed me, you can’t have desert for a week.”
We see that in these last two points that now food has become a punishment. When food becomes both a reward and a punishment we have a bit of a conflicting belief about food.
What about these statements often prefaced by something like “You would be so pretty or you would be more popular if…?
~ “you would be so pretty if you lost (or gained) weight. You would be so happy if you lost (or gained) weight” These statements are loaded with innuendo and insinuation and come with additional info such as “you would be so happy if you cut your hair or grew your hair, if you stopped wearing makeup, or started wearing makeup; if you smiled more” and “You might have a boyfriend or girlfriend if you lost weight” All these statements indicate that you are not acceptable the way that you are. They teach us that we are not loveable unless our bodies, our hair, our clothing and our image, is a certain way! And we don’t even have an understanding of WHAT way. This big lie that we are not acceptable lives way deep down in our subconscious and cause problems that we don’t even begin to be aware of, tearing at our self esteem and destroying confidence.
Please add the things that you have heard or been told that contribute to mixed messages and a faulty belief system about food and food issues.
Exposing Truth ~ one snapshot at a time;
Darlene Ouimet
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
Dysfunctional Family ~ First a Child Then a Parent
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- Freedom just Beyond
Jimmy’s post “valued for my ability to work hard” was a big hit and so many could relate to being valued by the work they produced and by the results of their performance. This post is about the siblings who are often NOT recognized or valued for accomplishments.
As a child growing up I had a brother who was valued for his accomplishments. I always thought that he was the most important child in our home. He excelled at the sports he played and with the teams he was on and he got really high marks in school. My brother got all my fathers attention which left me feeling unimportant. My father seemed to love my brother for reasons that I could not seem to compete with. I was jealous of the attention that my brother got and my father never seemed interested in the things that I was good at other then when I cooked or made him a snack.
All my life I have heard all sorts of comments about how every child feels that they are the one who has life the hardest. My suspicion is that how our value is defined for us, is what makes us all feel that way.
There is another layer of confusion with this whole concept for those of us who were NOT valued for achievements or lived in the shadow of another child’s accomplishments.
I was trying to measure up to my parents expectations AND I was also trying to be more like my brother to win the approval that I thought he got. (In reality my brother was likely feeling under similar pressure to what Jimmy described in his guest post for us.) I realized more about this child value belief system by watching and listening to my own children as our family emerged from living in an abusive and dysfunctional family system within our own home.
Everyone had great expectations for our first born child who happened to be a boy. When he showed signs of being a great athlete, everyone pushed him. Much to the delight of Daddy, Grandma and Grandpa, he showed interest in farm work before he could even walk. We pushed him in both those areas, but we called it encouragement. My husband also pressured my son to do farm work in a similar way to how he himself was raised but he only had one example of parenting, and it wasn’t a good one.
As our children got older, my mental health was getting worse and worse. When I finally fell apart and I felt that I couldn’t go on anymore, I decided that I was either going to leave my family or I was going to die so I sought help one last time. In the beginning I wanted help only for my mental health issues. I was sure that everything was my fault and that I just could not BE good enough or do it right and I didn’t recognize any of the dysfunction in our family. I believed that I had done much better than my own parents had done but still it wasn’t enough and I was extremely unhappy. In learning what my belief system was and how it had formed full of lies and pressure and other people’s expectations, many other issues were brought to light. It was apparent that my husband and I needed to make some changes in our relationship too. I had been in a position of “background” and not “partner” and was beginning to realize that I wanted to have equal value as a person, as a co owner of our farm and as a partner in marriage. As my husband and I both began to learn how to have a functioning relationship in the true definition of love, eventually the truth about how our children felt about the expectations that we had of them, their own perceived value, what each of them felt about us and each other and what was “fair and not fair” started to come out.
My son felt that the system was extremely unfair to him, that the girls got off easy and didn’t have to perform a certain way in sports; they were not expected to do the farm chores (exactly right) either. He felt that all the pressure was on him and that he took all the heat especially from his father. Our eldest daughter, then a young teenager, confessed that she felt she never measured up to her brother, and that he was the only one that was cared about by her father. She said that everything was about her brother and he got all the attention and only his activities and accomplishments mattered. Everything that he felt pressured by, she felt he was praised, loved and valued for. And what she felt was neglect and disinterest towards her, our son felt that she was more loved and valued then he was because she didn’t have to perform and didn’t have the responsibility or pressure that he had. What he saw as being picked on, she saw as being loved and what she felt was neglect he saw as more accepted.
So at the risk of sounding repetitive; both of our daughters believed that their brother had more value than they did because in their view he was getting all the interest. Even though they heard all the pressure that he was under, they viewed it as attention, and they recognized his value (the value placed on him verbally) for his sports ability and farm work ability. Society sometimes calls this “sibling rivalry” but you can see there is a valid basis to it. None of our children felt valued or acknowledged for who they were. All 3 of them felt pressured to live up to what we wanted them to be.
My son was resentful because under the guise of encouragement, he was being praised as a form of pressure to perform, achieve and produce. It was so bad that our son had serious performance anxiety to the point that he got sick before tests in school. We didn’t realize this was our fault and we thought that it was just his personality.
In truth, each of our children was right. Our daughters were not being recognized in the same way that our son was recognized and even depended on especially with the farm. They felt neglected, unloved and that they were not as valued because of it. Our son was right too, he was being pushed and getting a lot of negative attention and he was over burdened with chores and the pressure to perform at hockey.
This family dysfunction was exactly how my husband and I were raised, and it had become our definition of love and value. Therefore according to the definition of love and value that my husband and I had been taught we had taught our own children the same definitions of love and value. We were passing this false information on to them and in doing so, forming in them a belief system not based on the truth about love, value or equality. You can see how the cycle continues if we don’t stop it. As we all learn about truth, love, value and equal value, our family continues to recover.
I look forward to your comments,
Darlene Ouimet
A Mother Daughter Relationship ~ Part Four
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~By Debbie Dippel~
In my first post I mentioned that I didn’t want Carla to struggle with the same fears that I did. As a child I had many fears that I kept hidden inside and carried these into my adulthood. I won’t list them here but will focus on the one that I believe most impacted my relationship with Carla, which was the fear of being single.
Some words/phrases that pop into my mind regarding singleness are: “old maid”, “spinster”, “she never married” (which sounded to me like a tragedy) I once had a family member ask me the question regarding my children who are still unmarried: “What’s wrong with them?” Another comment that stands out in my memory during a family get together is “Life doesn’t begin until you are married!” I remember hearing comments about single women like, “She is being too choosy” and “What is she looking for?” I felt afraid of what people would think about Carla and how she was raised.
I believe that being the youngest in the family contributed to my desire to “keep up” with my siblings. They all married very young, from the age of 17 to 20. I was married just before my 22nd birthday and often said “I was the old maid in the family by the time I got married”. This sounds ridiculous to me now but it was a huge deal to me then. The need for me to “keep up” carried on with our children. As their children dated, married and had children, I felt the anxiety that my daughter keep up with them. We had children close together and so the weddings should also occur close together, followed by grandchildren.
Being slim was also very important to the women in my family. In my mind, this was connected to the possibility of attracting a man. So for Carla, the pressure was on to be slim. I was concerned for her happiness but my fears clouded my ability to see her as an individual person who had every right to live her life as she was created to live. I thought I knew what was best for her and what would make her happy.
I had a different relationship with my son. By the time I had him I had dealt with some of my fears about parenting and was more relaxed. In my mind there was no stigma attached to being a single man, in fact, there was something attractive in being a bachelor. I enjoyed our relationship and was not eager for him to have a girlfriend. When he had a girlfriend, (which he usually did) I didn’t have much time with him and may have felt replaced. I did not dislike his girlfriends, they were nice girls, but when they broke up, I felt relief. I feel ashamed to admit this and want to say that this has changed and I am very happy with the relationship he now has and am excited for their future together.
I am certain that my marriage played a large part in the dynamics that occurred between me and my children. I may expand on this in a later post.
This blog has been an excellent platform for the truth to be told, and along with the truth, freedom. I am in the process of learning to live free and allowing my children to live in freedom as well. I am getting to know Carla as a beautiful woman inside and out and I love spending time with her. It is a work in progress and backslides occur, but we are moving forward in the right direction.
~Debbie
My Teenage Son’s Point of View ~ Unintentional Teachings from his Father
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Carla’s last post “Unintentional but Destructive ~Belief System Inheritance” caused a bit of a stir on Carla’s personal profile page on facebook last week. Someone on her friends list took offence to her post and accused Carla of devaluing her father and being hurtful. My son is good friends with Carla and he stood up for her and for the right to state the truth by writing the following comment on Carla’s wall. He has given me permission to post it in our blog to give our readers another perspective from someone who has been through what Carla is posting about. He shares about what it was like for him to have absorbed his own father’s belief system, and then what happened when his father got help. My son is 18 and is usually quiet when it comes to how he was raised before our family Emerged from Broken. ~ Here is the comment:
TJB wrote: “I agree with the person who wrote ‘If you don’t like it, don’t read it’. We live in a free country, we aren’t Communists; we can post and say whatever we want (as long as it doesn’t break the law, hate crimes and such). Carla is only stating her opinion, much the same as you are stating your opinion saying that she shouldn’t be writing such things. I don’t understand what is so horrible in stating the faults that one grew up with?
Off the top of my head I can list multiple things that my dad fell short in: he worked too hard and expected me to do the same, he put pressure on me to be better than him the first time I did something, he told me to do things without communicating where or how he wanted them done and then gave me heck for doing it different than the way he wanted it done, and he unintentionally made me feel like I wasn’t good enough for him or as good as him.
I started working on the farm from a very very young age and because of this I picked up many of the bad qualities / feeling / opinions that my father possessed. He unintentionally transferred his opinions about himself on to me, he unintentionally transferred his opinions about certain types of people on to me, and he unintentionally gave me a false belief system about myself. Since he thought he wasn’t good enough I automatically thought I wasn’t good enough because I wasn’t as good as him at anything, which is obviously understandable considering it’s hard for a 4-8 year old to do things better than or even as good as his father. The only thing I was good at that he wasn’t was crawling inside machinery to take apart and fix parts that he was too big to get at but that was only because of my size not because I was actually better than him.
Many of these beliefs and habits carried on into my teenage life until my father got help and realized that the things he was doing to me were so very wrong and he started to correct the shortfalls and teach me that what he had unintentionally taught me as a child was wrong. Now you may be sitting there thinking I just tore a strip off my Father, threw him out to dry, insulted him beyond belief, and that I devalued him. That couldn’t be farther from the truth- all I did was state the short falls that my father had, just like I could state the shortfalls of my favorite band, or my favorite movie. Everything has shortfalls and nothings perfect. Just because you state shortfalls doesn’t mean that you’re devaluing something.
Despite my father’s shortfalls I love him very much and I look up to him as he has the most respect from me than any other man in my life. Since this comment is public and my father is friends with Carla he could possibly read this (I guarantee he will not take anything I have written as insulting or devaluing) just the same as Carla’s father can read her public blog. I in no way insulted or devalued my dad, just like Carla didn’t insult her father. We both simply stated the things our fathers lacked in and how they were transferred to us. I don’t believe it’s hurtful to state things like these, it’s just stating the truth. It happened and we learned from it. No matter what, parents transfer things to their children; good, bad, funny, it doesn’t matter- it gets passed on.” TJB
My husband (Jimmy B) did read TJB’s comment and wrote one of his own on Carla’s facebook page in response, affirming all that TJ has said. Jimmy also commented on my last post “Anger at Parents~ A pathway on the journey to freedom” here in the blog where you can read a bit more from the father’s perspective.
As always, your comments are welcome,
Darlene Ouimet
Sexualized at a Young Age~ my Mother my Teacher
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I have been writing about the belief system and how it develops; the ways that we view the world and ourselves according to the teachings that we receive from our parents, teachers, media and society in general. Today I continue with a more personal account of behaviour that was modeled for me by my mother.
Growing up, I was taught in so many ways that my value was in my looks and body. That I had to be appealing, attractive and if I were, my life would be successful. My value as a woman would be determined by men. At the same time I was taught that when I got molested at the age of 13, it was my own fault and that I had done something to invite it. All the terror, horror, and the nightmares that followed that event, got mixed in with the teaching that my value was in my looks and body.
There is something really confusing about these mixed messages. The fact is that neither one is true, however for years I went back and forth between these two lies; they ruled much of my life. I found my value in men, I loved to be noticed, my self esteem came from the men who pursued me regardless of how old they were; married or not; nice or not. Most of these men devalued me, used me, treated me in disrespectful ways which I realize today I believed was my fault BUT I also lived in fear of being hurt because I was attractive and if I did get hurt, raped, or assaulted, I had learned that it was certainly something that I had asked for~ again, my fault.
Parents are encouraged to model good behaviour to their children. As a parent myself, I learned things like “if you want your child to eat the right food, then you eat the right foods. If you don’t want your child to have bad manners, then you model good manners. Easy stuff like that makes sense. But our parents often model wrong behaviour and we learn from that too. My mother modeled sexuality to me; she told me that the only power women have is in their sexuality. She taught me that men were lucky, that men had all the power but that women had sexuality. We could make men do what we wanted with our sexuality. Sexuality was control. But what about when men did what I didn’t want them to do? Well I had been taught that was my own fault, so how does a person comprehend that kind of thing? How does a woman or child sort that kind of thing out?
My mother sexualized me. She taught me in so many ways that my only power in life was in my body, my sexuality. This was of course her own reality. She flirted her way through life. She is what would have been called a “cock tease” in my youth. She flirted with men right in front of my father and in front of us children. It was worse when Dad wasn’t around. She acted as though her value, her validation depended upon how men reacted to her. Especially important to her was how they reacted to her sexually and as a woman. She taught me that my value was rooted in my sexuality too. She modeled it for me.
My mother started competing with me not long after her boyfriend came in my room when I was 13. This further reinforced her accusation that her boyfriend sneaking into my room was my fault; my mother no longer trusted me with her men. She started accusing me of flirting with her boyfriend’s when I was 14. She started flirting with my boyfriends by the time I was 16. She publically accused me of being sexually active way before I was sexually active. What a mess.
These are the kinds of things that cause us as adults to get stuck in our own lives. Our beliefs conflict, they argue, they make no sense and they don’t add up. These conflicts cause depression, and all kinds of mental health struggles. When I began to sort through all this in therapy, I saw the confusion and I identified the conflicts which was the beginning of emerging from broken for me.
Let the light of truth shine on,
Darlene Ouimet
The Process of Normalizing Abuse
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Darlene Ouimet CTACC
Something happens that causes us to somehow live with abuse. Something happens either over time or because of one single trauma, that is not dealt with properly. If it is an abuse that happens in childhood, then it isn’t up to US to deal with it properly, it is up to the adults in our lives to help us deal. There are a few things that teach us to live with being abused, and even encourage us to accept it. It could be that we are not protected from it or that it somehow gets normalized; it could be that we are convinced that we deserved it, asked for it, or liked it. It could be that we were threatened and then slowly brainwashed into believing any of the above. Something happens that causes us to eventually accept abuse as part of life.
When I was a child, I learned through a series of behaviour modification techniques how to behave. I learned that when I was sweet natured or when I tidied my room, that I got a wonderful smile and approval from my mother. When I went to bed without a fight, there was peace. When I ate what was on my plate without complaining, I didn’t get yelled at. When I tried to skip eating the potatoes, I got forced to eat them. If I didn’t fight with my brothers, everything was fine, and if I did, I got in trouble. I learned there were different degrees of “trouble”. There was the kind that got me sent to my room and there was the kind that got me a spanking. There was also the rejection kind which I hated. My mother was proud when I was polite and courteous and smiled at people and she was displeased if I talked back. You get the picture. This is how most of us learn which behaviours are good and which ones are bad or wrong, and most of that kind of learning isn’t the problem.
But what happens when a child lives with mixed messages about right and wrong? What happens when there is abuse which is wrongly justified? What happens in the mind of a child when something like this happens? I get this picture in my mind’s eye of a huge circuit board (the belief system) with the wires getting plugged into the wrong spots and the sparks just start flying as everything begins to break down. That is what happens to a child’s mind. That is what happened to my mind. There are mixed messages, wrong messages, lies, confusion and pain. I am told that I am imagining what happened. I am told that I am exaggerating. Sometimes I am ignored. Other times I am made fun of. Eventually living with the mixed messages, the devaluing and being told that I am wrong becomes my normal. Eventually the abuse also becomes “normal”.
My world became familiar and even comfortable in the sense that the way things were was what I was used to. My belief system was formed, but it was full of false truth.
Any kind of abuse or devaluing behaviour can lead to leaning how to accept being treated indecently. This normalization process is not caused only from sexual or physical abuse; learning to accept abuse as deserved can happen from ANY type of abuse inflicted on a child and that will set the stage for ANY other type of abuse to be accepted later on.
Darlene Ouimet
Psychological and Emotional Abuse ~ How Self Doubt Grows
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A Lesson in Psychology
Do you ever wonder how we arrive at a place where we don’t trust ourselves? Why do we doubt ourselves? Why do we think that someone else must know better than we do, what is best for us even when we are grown up? And before we get to that place what happens that causes children to so easily accept that they deserve to be treated badly?
This is a story that I hear every day in the lives of others who struggle for freedom and wholeness. This is just one example of how I learned to doubt myself. I guess you could say that I was encouraged to doubt myself from a very young age by the way that I was raised.
I was a very quiet, compliant and sweet kid. I never caused trouble or got into trouble. But for some reason I was completely ready to believe that I was indeed a problem and I carried this belief with me into adulthood and into every relationship I ever had. When I was in grade 5, which would have been when I was 10 years old, I had a teacher who hated me. I don’t remember thinking that she hated me back then, I was too busy trying to please her.
This teacher humiliated me in front of the whole class. She regularly threatened to cut my long braids off if I so much as touched them. When my homework was correct, she told the class that my father must have done it. She said that she didn’t know why I was so slow. I disgusted her! She said a lot of horrible devaluing things that damaged my self esteem and I was deathly afraid of her. She seemed to just spit her venom out at me.
When I told my parents, I was told that I must be exaggerating; that I should respect my teacher. They accused me of lying! There was no protection OR validation to be found from my parents. I didn’t try very hard to get them to listen to me. They had been telling me for years that I was overly dramatic and that I liked to talk to hear myself talk, so I knew that I was wasting my time. Furthermore, I was willing to accept that it must be my fault. Somehow I had done something to make this teacher hate me. I was causing her stress somehow. I believed it.
I was taught to respect my elders by being told that I was lying, that I was exaggerating, that I was dramatic. Worse yet, these statements were made by my parents in smiling gentle tones so I could be told that I misunderstood those reprimands. Respect came to mean that everyone else is right; I am wrong. I believed that I was less valuable then others because I was not heard. I was dismissed. There was no equality. I didn’t even get a say. These things defined me, they became about who I was; a liar, dramatic, an attention seeker.
I got very sick that year. I suppose the stress affected me physically, but there were some things about my illness that caused the paediatrician to gently pry into my emotional life. He asked my parents to leave the room and I remember that he talked to me; he wanted to know about me and he listened to me and it came out about my teacher. I don’t remember all the details, but it resulted in him ordering them to take me out of the class that I was in. He said that if they didn’t, or if the school would not co-operate he would get a lawyer. The teacher was what psychology degree students would classify as emotionally and psychologically abusing me.
I felt guilty that he stuck up for me. I felt unworthy. Deep down I was pretty sure that I was the one that was causing the problem and that now I’d caused my parents embarrassment; they would have to go to the school and get me out of that class. This was a horrific time for me and my dissociation took a different turn that year. I can still remember the internal fight, I constantly questioned myself about whether or not I had made the whole thing up and then in the same breath consoled myself with the fact that my parents told me the teacher confessed everything in a meeting.
I learned to doubt myself way before this teacher abuse thing. I had learned to doubt when I was being abused and where the blame lay by the actions, reactions and teachings of the adults in my life.
Darlene Ouimet
Punk Goth Rock Star Faces Society ~ a story about my daughter
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My daughter dresses in interesting clothing. Her style would be classified as part punk and part goth. She wears heavy black eyeliner and has her hair cut in a very long mohawk, generously highlighted with greenish blue streaks. (The picture here is not current in fact it is about 2 years old; you can imagine the progression….=) She likes to wear Harley Davidson boots, but she also wears Chucks (high top runners) and Vans (slip on runners). She wears safety pins and colored paper clips in her ears. She has several pairs of black pants inlaid with over 20 zippers each. She often wears black fingerless gloves even when it is warm out. It is common for little kids to point at her and say things like “Mommy, look, a rock star!” Typically, the mothers will grab these little kids to kind of discourage them from approaching my daughter any closer… but as soon as her eyes connect with the eyes of a child, her smile melts any hesitation on the part of the parent and she gives those kids a thrilling moment in their lives ~ conversation with a rock star! She empowers them, she encourages them and she models to them that not everyone that looks different is BAD
I know that clothing often does express a bad attitude; it is often used as a wall, to keep others away, but this is not the case with my daughter, and I have always known that.
My daughter has homeschooled since grade 6, but this year in grade 11, she decided to go back to traditional school in a neighbouring town instead of going back to our local K-12 school. I was pretty nervous about the way that she looks and how she would be perceived. She is really academic and I know that not many academic kids in small towns look like her. I tried to encourage her to tone down her appearance. About 6n weeks before she started in the new school I made her stop shaving the sides of her hair. I tried to convince her to change the colors in her hair. I forbid her to wear her knee high lace up platform boots. I warned her that she would suffer rejection and that kids can be so mean, and assured her that I was just looking out for her.
I forgot that when she was 4 years old I started teaching her to be who she is and not try to be someone else. I forgot that by the time she was 7 that the biggest goal that I had with her was to empower her to be who she is and walk away from the kids who rejected her because she was not who they wanted her to be. I forgot that I myself had spent thousands of dollars in therapy to get out of the tight box I was in, the conformity box of meeting other people’s expectations. I forgot that my dissociated identity disorder was rooted in trying to be all things to all people and that so much of the money I spent on therapy was to learn who I really was! I forgot that her clothing doesn’t define her; it doesn’t make her who she is; Clothing ~ like wrapping paper, doesn’t always give a clue as to what the present is inside. I forgot my own mantra because I was afraid that she would get hurt.
So she went to school. No one in her classes talked to her. She phoned me at lunch time from the safety of her truck the first few days. My heart hurt for her.
But she met other people and she learned some great truths. I think I learned (and re-learned) even more then she did. Her appearance turned out to be a great screening process. She made friends with people who are willing to look beyond her style and were willing to get to know the person inside. She grew in her confidence because she chose to be herself and she knows that her value has nothing to do with her appearance. She is a bright light in an often otherwise dark world. Does it get any better than that?
As for me, I learned that my old belief system still creeps up on me all the time. Oh I could write pages and pages more on this… and rest assured… I will. =)
~Darlene Ouimet
