Archive for parents
Parent Child Relationships in Recovery
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With my Children ~ THEN and NOW
“If we are going to raise happy emotionally healthy, self reliant children with high self esteem and independence, who know their own value and the real definition of LOVE ~ then we have to be an example of those things and we have to know it for ourselves too”. ~ Darlene Ouimet
I used to feel a huge panic about the time it was taking to go through the process of recovery; like every moment that I struggled was going to damage my kids. On top of that I thought that every moment that I took to figure myself out was taking away from the time I needed to take care of all their needs. Mixed in with that was the thought that the depression and other mental health related struggles “should” just “go away” because I believed that depression was selfish too. All of those beliefs, all at the same time, adds up to what I call “the spin” and it is a huge waste of time. Time that I learned I could spend on my recovery!
In some ways it is a good thing that I was desperate for some help and I was pretty much forced to deal with life as it was. There are two ways to look at everything, and looking back I see that there was a major upside to my having such a huge breakdown followed by recovery resulting in major changes; my kids also got to witness me dealing with life. They got to see me FACE depression, tackle it and overcome it. They know now that it is possible that when life gets too hard, it isn’t hopeless. I was the example that they watched, and they watched me overcome. This makes sense to me now when I watch the way that they face the things that come up in their own lives verses the ways that they dealt with things in the past. The past was the way that my husband and I taught them to handle it. (and most of our examples were “just don’t handle it!”)
In facing my depression and where it came from, I faced my parents too. I told my mother that she could not treat me like “nothing” any more. And eventually, my mother did what she always did ~ she didn’t bother with me anymore, but my kids got to see that I was stronger than the abusers. My kids learned that they don’t have to be treated like “nothing” they can say “no, I don’t think so” ~ and just like me they said it first to themselves and then to others. In facing my depressions and dissociative issues, I stood up and declared that I was worth it; I stood up and declared my value, when up until that point my kids had witnessed their entire lives that my value was mostly in what I could do for them, how I could serve my family and my husband’s family. I thought that by putting my needs on the back burner, that I was modeling something GOOD for them. Did I want them to grow up thinking that a “good person” puts their own needs aside in favour of taking care of others, or did I want to be an example of independence, competence and individuality? Was I raising door mats or strong individuals with high self esteem? I hadn’t thought about it that way before.
In the old days, I modeled subservience to my children. I lived as though my only value was to serve others, to cook, clean and take care of everyone else. I was exhausted and believed that I was lazy. My husband (and I) have a big cattle and haying/grain operation. I was just his back up program though. I did the things he didn’t have time for, and I made sure that he and all the hired men were fed and taken care of every day. I didn’t have any life as an individual. I was just a wife and mother and I was dying. Instead of seeing that my life was way out of balance, I thought I was lazy, incompetent and selfish because I secretly wanted something else ~ something more.
Looking back I am not sure why I thought that I was going to raise happy self reliant children who took care of themselves, when I didn’t model that for them. That was part of the fog that I was in. My husband and I were still emotional slaves to our own parents, and I was really just a servant in my marriage and in our home. I just didn’t see the truth of it then.
No longer in that fog, I believe that everyone has equal value and I model that to my children. My children know that no matter what anyone says or how anyone acts towards them, THEY have equal value to every other human being and I live like I believe that I have equal value.
Love is not sacrificing oneself for others. Love is taking the very best care of me so that I can take the very best care of them and model real self esteem for them. it is never too late for parent child relationship recovery! My wishes for my 3 children make much more sense to me now that I pursue the same things for myself.
I welcome you to share your thoughts or your struggles and fears.
Exposing truth one snapshot at a time!
Darlene Ouimet
Please join me on the Emerging from Broken facebook page.
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
Invalidation ~ When the Truth is not True
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- The truth will set you free
As a child, I had no understanding of why things were the way they were. I don’t think I even thought that the rest of the world was any different from my world. My parents lived in denial which stemmed from their own childhoods and the situations that they were raised in. They had organized their worlds around their own wounds and traumas and they developed their own belief systems. I would imagine that years of denial led them to raise their children in a similar way to how they were raised, expecting their children to have that fierce loyalty that they themselves developed for their parents and never questioning why.
I don’t write this blog to blame my parents for their shortcomings; I refer to them only to illustrate what happened to me in the parts that had to do with my parents. I write about how I came to be an emotional mess, constantly struggling with depression due to many different incidents, how I discovered the lies that formed my belief system and how exposing the lies enabled me to see the truth; the same truth that set me free.
I was conditioned to hold it all in. When we are children, we don’t have a choice if we have not been helped through a trauma. We just go forward from there, with the pain and the scars of the trauma. We can only learn positive self care if we are taught self care but because no one helps us through the things that happened to us, we learn to not take care of ourselves we learn not to speak about the trauma or about anything else. We don’t know the difference between what is serious abuse or what is just a person or parent in a bad mood. Everything becomes our version of “normal” We keep silent because either we have been told to keep silent, or because we have learned from experience that we will not have any impact if we do tell. We learn not to speak about our emotions, believing they are wrong and that no one will listen. If we learn that telling won’t make a difference we also learn that we are not important and we try very hard to prove that we are important. If only we believed it ourselves we wouldn’t have to prove it.
So much of this problem comes from being told who we are and who we are not and from being told who we should be and who we should not be. When we are defined by others we are invalidated as an individual and as a person. Invalid. That means NOT VALID. That is a serious thing for a human being and it can cause serious problems with emotional health, physical health self image, self worth and self esteem. One lie (one false belief about ourselves) builds on another lie and we carry the whole mess with us into our adulthoods.
The false beliefs that we have about ourselves have to be undone if we are going to have any lasting freedom from the results that manifested in our lives from being invalidated, mistreated, unloved, devalued, neglected or abused.
We have to relearn how to validate ourselves.
I had to learn how to validate myself. I had to dig into that foundation that was built on those lies, expose it and talk about it so that I could knock it down and start fresh with the truth. I had to face the fear that the situations and the people who taught me “who I was” might actually be right ~ because in facing that fear, I found out they were wrong.
The truth will set you free,
Darlene Ouimet
Note: This week I did a ten minute audio interview with Christina Enevoldsen from Overcoming Sexual Abuse ~ here is the link : how we uncover the truth.
For the article I wrote and refer to in the audio about the Dr. discovering that I was being psychologically abused ~ you can find it here: Psychological Abuse ~ how self doubt grows
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!
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
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
Victim Mentality (What Happened to Prince Charming?)
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Okay I admit it! Deep down I had dreams that prince charming would arrive and whisk me away on his beautiful horse and save me from the sad life that was mine. I was sure that being loved and treasured by the right guy was the answer that would solve all the problems and sooth all the hurt. As soon as that guy showed up, everything would be okay and I could start my real life. (Man oh man I waited a dang long time before I gave that dream up.)
But I had been victimized; I had a victim mindset and I was attracted to broken men. I was attracted to guys that needed me to rescue them, and for some reason I believed that if I did rescue them, then they would love me enough to make my life worth living.
I had this idea that if I did all the right things and soothed their pain, I could prove how much I loved them and they would love me back. I never noticed that I had this same belief about my parents. I didn’t realize that I believed that love is something that comes from doing something “good enough” for someone else. I didn’t know that deep down I thought that I was missing some key thing which is why no one would rescue me from my pathetic life.
Have you ever made excuses for someone because you knew that they had been hurt by life? Have you ever stayed with a boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife, because you wanted to somehow communicate that you would not hurt him/her like the rest of the world had. Have you ever had a deep desire to prove to someone that not all life is bad, that not all people will hurt each other and that you could be the one person who understands; that one person that could make the big difference?
I had a few relationships like that.
I made these kinds of excuses for others. I seemed to have a soft spot when I knew that someone had had a tough break in life, and I felt sweeter towards them. At the very heart of my heart, I wanted to be understanding and I wanted to think only the best about others; I didn’t want to believe that they might actually intentionally hurt me, so I let it go when they did. I believed these people when they said “You know I would never hurt you on purpose, I love you, you know me” So I was cheated on, hit, forced to do things I didn’t want to do, degraded, devalued, stood up and so many other things and when I complained I was told there was something wrong with me and that I just didn’t understand. They assured me that they loved me so much. I adjusted and I believed, just like I believed my other abusers; just like I believed my parents.
Something that comes to mind when I think about all the boyfriends that I “understood” and believed I could love into wholeness and ease their pain with my amazing love powers, is that I never cut myself any of that same slack. I was always willing to be the one who tried harder. I was always willing to say “oh that’s okay honey, I know you didn’t mean to hurt me”. But I was also always willing to chastise myself and tell myself that I was a bad person. I never thought that I deserved that healing love power myself.
I didn’t consider that I deserved to be loved and saved by ME. I didn’t even think that if I loved and cherished myself, that my dreams of feeling and being “good enough” would come true. I didn’t consider that if someone cheated on me, degraded and forced me, that I didn’t have to take it. I didn’t have to TRY HARDER; I just needed to get out.
Today I don’t have that same definition of love and I certainly don’t think it is up to me to rescue, sooth, restore value or carry all the burden of the relationship. I have learned to value and respect myself and to look at myself with the empathy that I have always had for the ones who treated me like crap. I declared my own value and I embraced it and believed it. When I finally figured out how my value had been defined by others, and where they were wrong and why I believed it, I was able to re-wire that belief system and eventually I knew who I was and what my value really was. It is others who treat us like we are not good enough to be loved; it is not that we are not good enough to be loved.
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
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
