Archive for recovery
Self-Worth Gives You Ability To Say No by Patricia Singleton
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- Patricia Singleton
Today I am pleased to welcome guest blogger Patricia Singleton from the blog “Spiritual Journey of a Lightworker” writing about the importance of improving Self Worth on the journey to wholeness. Please help me to welcome Patricia and feel free to leave your comments and contributions. Hugs, Darlene Ouimet ~ founder of Emerging from Broken
Self-Worth Gives You Ability To Say No by Patricia Singleton
Darlene recently wrote a post called Low Self-Esteem And Relationship Disasters. Someone else posted a link to the post on Facebook where I left the following comment:
“When you are taught self-worth, you can’t be controlled by the abuser. You will say, ‘No’ which they don’t want to hear. You will tell others what is happening to you because you know you don’t deserve to be treated badly. The abuser doesn’t want you to do that. Abusers don’t abuse children who might talk.”
The first time that I said “No” and meant it was when I was 17 years old. That is when the physical part of the incest stopped. I knew, in some small part of me, that I didn’t deserve how my dad had treated me for the six years before that. I had said “No” so many times before that day but wasn’t strong enough or courageous enough to stick with my decision. I really wanted the incest to end but didn’t know how to make my dad honor my decision and leave me alone.
I didn’t know it at the time but that small burst of courage came from the survivor hidden deep inside of me. All I knew was that I had just about reached my limits of how much stress I could handle without totally losing who I was. I knew that I couldn’t be pushed any further and continue to hold on to my sanity. I didn’t say it out loud but I had reached the point that if my dad hadn’t left me alone, I believe that I would have told someone about the abuse. I was that desperate, feeling an emotional break near the surface of my control. My dad must have sensed what I didn’t say. He accepted my “No” finally.
At that point in my life, it wasn’t self-worth that gave me the courage to say “No” to the incest. It was a need for self preservation. Sometimes I think that self preservation was the only thing that kept me going through the fog of pain that was the incest. Some part of me simply refused to quit.
I was still many years away from feeling my own self-worth, from really knowing that I didn’t deserve to be abused, from knowing that I didn’t cause the incest. Finding my self-worth was a long, gradual process that didn’t really start until I got into 12-Step programs starting in January of 1989.
In those 12-Step meetings, I met other survivors. I met people who were talking about growing up in alcoholic homes and its effects upon them as an adult. I learned about healthy boundaries, co-dependency and the disease concept of alcoholism. I learned that the control that I thought I had to have in my life was me being out of control and so afraid of life and people. I was able to recognize and step away from people who just wanted to abuse and control me. I learned that I had done some abusing of my own with my weapon of choice—sarcasm. I also learned that I could stop the sarcasm when I recognized that it was an unhealthy and destructive way to release my rage. I could make amends to those that I loved.
Probably the most important thing that I learned was that the only way out of the pain was to go through the pain. I could feel and I wouldn’t die from it. I could love myself and take care of my needs which I had never recognized that I had before. I could be the real me as soon as I found out who she was and people wouldn’t hate or blame me for the incest. People could love me for who I was. Being authentic was not only okay but preferred. I could trust people and they wouldn’t hurt me. I could trust myself. I could trust God. The abuse wasn’t my fault and it wasn’t God’s fault.
Patricia Singleton
Self-worth starts with learning to take care of yourself and learning to love yourself. How did I learn to love myself? Respect myself? I built a support system of people who loved me until I could grow to love myself. I stopped questioning their love for me as I saw that their actions followed their words. I learned to trust my own intuition or gut feelings that told me who was safe to be around and who wasn’t. To love myself, I had to learn to feel all of my feelings. I had to learn how to let go of all of the rage, hurt and sadness. I had to let go of it because it was hurting me, causing me pain and health problems.
I learned that I had inner children in me who were wounded by the abuse and needed healing too. I had to learn that I could nurture and love those inner children instead of hating them for causing me so much pain. You see I had blamed them for their own abuse—my abuse. I found out that I was so afraid of others blaming me for the incest because inside I blamed these inner children who were me for our own abuse. It was easier to blame them and me that it was to blame either of my parents because I depended upon my parents for my survival. I had to work with and talk to each of these inner children. I had to get them to trust me which wasn’t easy because I had abandoned and hated them for so long. In learning to love and nurture them, I learned to love and nurture the adult me.
I had to grieve. I had to let the tears flow freely. As long as I was carrying around all of the rage, hurt and self-hatred, I had no room for self-love. Grieving was the longest part of the process of recovery from incest. I had so many tears hidden inside of me—tears of rage, tears of hurt, tears of sadness, tears from abandonment, tears from neglect, tears from the physical pain of incest, tears from the emotional abuse, tears of hatred, tears of self-hatred. My fear of allowing myself to grieve was that once I started to cry, I would never stop. I went to 12-Step meetings and cried for over a year before the tears started to slow down. Looking back, I don’t know why I was so afraid to cry. As a child, I was told that crying was a sign of weakness. I was determined to be strong so I couldn’t cry, at least not in front of anyone else. The truth that I found out was that tears are cleansing and healing. The flood of tears that came out of me left room for joy and laughter to come back into my life.
As a child, I wasn’t taught any of the things that I learned in those 12-Step meetings. I wasn’t taught self-worth by my parents. I doubt that they were taught self-worth either. I have found out with a little bit of genealogy research that abuse in many different forms has been a generational thing in my family. Rage, domestic violence, alcoholism, incest, family secrets have all come down my family lines for several generations. The present generation can stop the abuse from damaging any more children.
I was easily controlled by my abusers when I was a child because I wasn’t taught that I had any value except as a sex toy for men. My dad wasn’t my only abuser but he was my main abuser. Because he was my parent, he is the one that I have the most issues with. His betrayal was the worse.
I never learned, as a child, that I had the ability or the right to say “No” to my abusers. They were adults who had all the authority to tell me to do whatever they wanted. My parents told me to respect all adults and to do as I was told. Please teach your children that they can say “NO” to anything that doesn’t feel right to them, to anything that feels uncomfortable to them. Children can say “NO” to any kind of touch or attention that they don’t like. And tell them you will believe them.
I was afraid to tell anyone about the incest when I was a child and even when I was a young adult. I was afraid that I would be blamed for the incest or called a liar. I know many of you can relate to this fear. I was also afraid that my mother would shoot my dad and kill him if she believed me. If she shot him, she would be arrested and my siblings and I would be left without parents and it would have been my fault. Today I know none of this was my fault but as a child, I believed that it was all my fault.
Because I didn’t have any self-worth, I went along with what my abusers wanted and kept the secrets of incest. I was silent until I was 38 years old and found 12-Step meetings. When I heard other Adult Children talking about the abuse of alcoholism and drugs, I decided it was safe for me to talk about the incest. In talking about my own incest issues, other Adult Children felt free to start to talk about their own issues from sexual abuse.
In opening the door for myself, I opened the door for other incest survivors to be able to speak about and heal their own issues with incest. Now I share my experiences with incest and with healing and recovery on my blog “Spiritual Journey Of a Lightworker”. Talking about your abuse and your healing from abuse is not only okay but it is a necessary step to take if you are going to stop any more children from being abused. I have taken this step in my own life. I hope you will take this step in your own life. Secrets can harm you and your children.
Patricia Singleton is a 58 year old incest survivor who chooses to share her journey through incest and recovery by writing the blog Spiritual Journey of a Lightworker and by participating in the blogs of other survivors. She calls herself a Lightworker due to the healing that she has accomplished in her own life and because of the ripple effect that her healing has on others. By sharing, she hopes to light the way for others in their own healing. She has a passion for others to know that healing and recovery is possible and necessary if we are to protect our children from being abused.
Patricia is a wife, grandmother and so much more. Today, Patricia loves life and is thriver, which is so much better than just surviving.
Turning Points and Emotional Healing by Susan Smith
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- Susan Smith
I am pleased and excited to have guest blogger Susan Smith sharing a piece of her story with us today. Susan is my friend and fellow truth seeker, as well as the author of her own wonderful blog “A Journey” and I’m also blessed to have her as a frequent commenter here on Emerging from Broken. ~ Darlene
“When I finally was able to make peace with the past I could write a new ending to the story and claim what was rightfully mine – me.” ~Susan Smith August 26, 2010
Like many – or most – of the readers of EFB, I grew up in a less than nurturing environment. Physical, emotional, mental, sexual abuse and neglect was the “normal” for me in my home and the rural community where I was raised. As one person put it, I’d grown up in a “battlefield”, a warzone where there was no “safe place” for a small child to even exist. I’d been taught that sex was where my value lay and that this was where my emotional and physical needs were met – by exchanging sex for physical touch. I came to believe at a very young age that this was how the world accepted me and valued me; this was what my role was.
And I’d spent a lifetime carrying this baggage with me. I’d become an irritable, angry, pessimistic person that tried to control everyone and everything around me. My relationships were unstable and fraught with conflict, confusion and replicated the abuse, neglect and violence that I came from.
Eventually, I lived in complete isolation and had gotten to a point where I was losing more and more time. I couldn’t remember things – not only things from a few minutes before, but memories of my own life and of raising my children. I’d gone from “normal” dissociation to the extreme on the dissociative scale where I realized years and decades were just gone from my memories…and that this wasn’t “normal”.
Depression had plagued me off and on for years. My anxiety was bordering on paranoia and I could easily be triggered into “psychosis” as I reacted to today’s world as though it was my past. PTSd symptoms had turned me into a prisoner in my own home. I was ashamed that I even existed and believed that I was “broken”, “ill” and somehow intrinsically defective.
I found myself stuck in that place where I was “acting in” and my pain was turned inward and expressed as depression, anxiety, dissociation and other emotional and psychological coping skills that were less than helpful. Sometimes my pain was expressed in “acting out” as I engaged in self-harming behaviors and abusive relationships that recreated the trauma I had been raised in.
My body was falling apart and no physical cause could be found for much of my physical pain and complaints. Life had become too difficult a burden to bear any longer. I had shut down mentally, emotionally and physically. I had dissociated to the extreme point and in the fall of 2007 I was told the newest diagnosis was D.I.D. and I was abruptly taken off the numerous psychotropic drugs I had been on for all the previous “diagnosis”.
At first – I listened as the latest psychiatrist told me that this was my “diagnosis” and he handed me a couple of books on the subject one that told the story of one mans journey through MPD and talked about “alters”.
And while I admittedly recognized that I felt fragmented, I had turned to another psychiatrist that encouraged me to become more attentive to time and what I was doing by using a time log and recording periodically the time and what I had done. This was an exercise in learning to stay present more than one of time management.
I read about “Internal Family Systems” and began to understand that when I was “tuning out” I was avoiding some painful thought or feelings. The therapist I’d chosen to see encouraged me to become intentionally aware of where I was, what I was thinking, feeling and doing.
And while there are many more layers to my journey and how I found “me”….I first had to lay claim on and believe that I was a single person who had had some horrendous experiences and that I had the potential to be and live a whole healthy life.
I came to understand that dissociation was a wonderful tool that protected me from the pain of the past. I also understood that this skill of slipping into a dissociative state was no longer helpful – and was in fact hindering my ability to live beyond the past as I was in a chronic state of avoidance and nurturing the anger and pain connected to it instead of going “through it” to “get out of it”.
By facing dissociation and my other avoidance strategies as learned skills that had helped me to avoid my pain – I became strong enough to face the pain and begin to let it go.
about Susan Smith;
I am a trauma survivor…but I no longer live only to survive. After a lifetime of trauma’s ranging from physical, sexual, emotional abuse and neglect as a child to two violent marriages, I entered the mental health system seeking help for depression, anxiety, hyper-vigilance and irritability where my lifelong history of trauma was dismissed. For over 15 years I was given a variety of “diagnosis”, numerous mind altering psychotropic drugs and a routine of weekly “talk” therapy. In the fall of 2007 I was abruptly taken off of the drugs I’d been prescribed all those years and began to reclaim both my mind and my life.
I connected with a therapist trained in Trauma Informed therapy and heard a new message of hope – that I could learn to create the life I wanted for myself…in spite of the past I’d had.
Today, I no longer accept any labels for myself and live the life of my choosing, following my dream and passion to share a message of healing and hope as I write and speak about this journey that has been my life.
Please be sure to visit Susan at her Blog “A Journey” http://zebraspolkadotsandplaids.blogspot.com/
The Courage to Write about Emotional Healing
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- Home
I get asked a lot about “how” I can write what I write. Occasionally I get asked if I use my real name and if my parents are still alive. I get a lot of private emails expressing shock, admiration or awe and appreciation for the courage that I have to write the things that happened to me. So this post is about why I do what I do.
Darlene Ouimet is the name that I was born with. My parents are both still alive. My father is aware of this blog although I don’t know how often he reads it. If he told my siblings about it, then they know about it too. I don’t know if my mother has found it yet but I wouldn’t mind if she reads it.
Emerging from Broken is about the truth; it is my story and the reason that I do what I do is so that others can realize some of the ways we come to believe that we have caused our own pain and that we are somehow defective compared to other people. This blog is about overcoming depression ~ sometimes lifelong depression, by looking at the root causes and how confused we got about those roots. It is about overcoming trauma, sexual abuse, physical abuse, child abuse, psychological abuse, dissociative identity disorder, bi polar, post traumatic stress and every other mental health issue that you can think of. It is about freedom and wholeness and how it is possible to life a full life, and it is about thriving instead of just surviving. It is about emotional healing.
I write because what happened to me was wrong. The sexual abuse, the emotional abuse, the domestic violence, being put down and walked on and bulldozed over was wrong. The way that my parents regarded me was wrong. The way that I was abused and mistreated was wrong and it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t cause it and I didn’t deserve it and other people need to know that what happened to them was wrong too.
When I went through the process of clearing the old foundation and building a new one, I found out that I believed a lot of things that were not true about myself, and those things were in my way. I realized that I was having depression after depression because of those things that were in my way and when I got them out of my way, my whole life changed. I write a lot about my Mom; my mother was not one of the things in my way; it was what she taught me about myself that was in my way. Some of the belief system she passed on to me were in my way. When I emerged from broken, I was excited because I thought my mother would want to live the rest of her life free from chronic depression too. But that was not the case. She didn’t want to hear about my victory. I don’t think she acknowledged it at all. She just thought maybe I was having an affair with the therapist. (Remember I told you that she taught me that my only value was sexual.)
I didn’t ask my mother to leave my life, she left it because she didn’t want to live in a system of mutual respect. She liked the control she had over me. Well that is my version anyhow. Her version would be different. She might think I write for revenge, but this blog could just as easily be seen as a love letter to her. That is my version anyhow.
So to answer the question how can I write what I write ~ well it is the truth that set me free. If I can touch just a few others with that truth, then I have lived for one more purpose. If I can trigger a memory or a thought that strikes a chord with someone else, that enables them to realize a lie that they believed too, then I have done my work for that day. I believe that the freedom I live in today is a rare gift that I believe was intended for each of us to have. I think that gift was taken from us by abusive and controlling people who misused their power. I am passionate about sharing this message; often I feel almost driven to share it.
Sometimes when I hit the publish button on a blog post I feel a bit sick. Sometimes I am scared that my mother will fly into a rage and blame me for her fragile state of mental health, as though my truth has the power to kill her. Sometimes I feel sick because of the fear I had as a child of my abusers and their power over me and the belt my mother used and back then I knew that my parents had the power to decide if I lived or died. But today I don’t believe that anymore; I know it isn’t true anymore. So I write. I write to remind myself that I am free and how I became free and I write to tell others of this sweet freedom and the heady experience of emerging from broken and living in fullness. I write because it reminds me that I am alive and what a gift that life is when for so many years I was dead.
Please share your thoughts, struggles, victories or anything else you would like to share,
Darlene Ouimet
The Body Disconnect: A Journey to Self-Love. By Kim Vazquez
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A few weeks ago I wrote a post called Foundation of Eating Disorders and Body Issues and I mentioned using a technique mentioned to me by life coach and Author Kim Vazquez. I am excited to have Kim as a guest blogger today! Please help me welcome Kim and feel free to leave your comments for her. You can visit her website at www.kimvazquez.com or join her author facebook fan page ~ click here.
The Body Disconnect: A Journey to Self-Love. By Kim Vazquez
I was only eleven when my dad married a woman who was closer to my age, than his. It seemed to me that his young, second wife and I were in competition. As my dad became less and less available to me, I felt she was winning the competition. When he left my life altogether, I was eighteen. Game over. She had won, and I was officially the loser. A woman discarded. Unloveable. Without value. And I had my whole life ahead of me. I’d have to face it without self-esteem.
During the years that followed, I believed in my worthlessness. It was easy to find a multitude of people who helped me keep that story going—employers who didn’t pay me fairly, abusive boyfriends who hurled more than insults at me, friends who just didn’t seem to care enough. The energy of my pain worked like a magnet, pulling toward me evidence that the world at large agreed with me that I was irrelevant. I was so busy looking outside myself, so stunned and distracted by the unkindness of others that I was unable to see what my own actions were doing to me.
During those tough years, a spell was cast over me by a dark voice in my mind. Not the voice of a separate personality, but the voice of my ego, which promised me that if I pushed myself harder, I’d eventually achieve enough to force the world to acknowledge my worth. I thought this voice was trying to help me. I called it a motivator. It wasn’t until much later that I came to understand that this voice, the one I now call the Taskmaster, was really teaching me self-abuse.
When the Taskmaster said, You don’t need to eat yet, finish your project first, I learned to resent my body for having needs that interrupted my time. When the Taskmaster said, You don’t need to rest. First, let’s get your to-do list done, I learned to push through fatigue. Ignore that migraine, the voice in my head told me. You have one every day. What are you going to do, lay around and never get anything done because your head hurts? I learned to push through pain, no matter how severe. You don’t have time to be sick. We’ve got a lot to do, the voice would say. So I began to feel disappointed in my body for failing me when I was already stressed out by my busy schedule. I resented the body for holding me back when I had too much to do and not enough time to do it in.
Don’t worry about drinking six cups of coffee a day, the Taskmaster murmured. I learned to have no regard for the body’s need to be hydrated with water so it can function optimally. You don’t need anyone’s help. The Taskmaster urged me to be independent and reminded me that I couldn’t count on anyone else, anyway. I never gave my body a break. Okay, the voice said, you can take a bath, but if you do, we’ve got some endless thinking to do while you’re in there. The Taskmaster encouraged me to spend every moment of so-called downtime chasing my tail around my mind so I never had any real peace or rest.
The Taskmaster also took charge of my social life. You’re too busy to meet up with your friends. Forget about sitting on the couch with your husband. The voice encouraged me to do only things that were task-oriented. It—and I—ignored any activity that might bring joy or balance to my life. Buy another rental property. Buy a new home. Get a new car. Buy a vacation home in Tahoe. Open your own business. Open a second business. I learned that my happiness was in my future when I achieved (fill in the blank).
At age thirty-seven, I hit bottom. My body was failing. Seventeen pounds fled from it in just nine days. My organs ached. My mind was fried. I was put on disability and was forced to change my whole life.
My body had let me down again.
Will the real offender please stand up?
While I was recovering from that episode, it began to dawn on me that I was the problem. I had taken a lot from my body over the years and had given it very little in return. I was mad at everyone around me because I thought they should take better care of me, but I couldn’t see that I was The Queen of Self-Abuse. Five-year-olds probably knew how to take better care of themselves.
From a new sense of compassion for my body, I decided to look back to see where I’d gone wrong. Where could I make some changes? I found that in the past when I was sick, I was always impatient and basically demanded that my body dare not inconvenience me. Forget that I didn’t eat nutritious food, get any rest, exercise or drink water. Talk about a disconnect.
When my body had physical needs, I had just thrown whatever I could into it to get it to shut up. Here’s some Nyquil. Here’s an Ambien. Here’s a Vicodin. Here’s some fast food. Now, hurry up and quit bugging me with your needs.
When my body had felt emotional pain, I’d berated myself for having needs and for being weak. If I couldn’t chastise the feelings out of myself, I used work as Novocain or went out for cocktails.
Yes, it was clear. I was the person who had harmed me the most. I was ready to make amends. With pure gratitude, I began a conversation with my body. Please teach me to speak your language, I said. It responded with joy, and a beautiful source of wisdom and guidance opened itself up to me. Our new relationship began with my commitment: Body, I said, I will listen to you. I will care about your needs. I will love you.
Today when I don’t feel well, I get quiet and ask my body, What do you want me to know? How can I meet your needs? Just like a whole person, a body responds to love and acknowledgment. It will heal so much faster when it’s spoken to with kindness. My body works with me to reveal the areas of imbalance in my life that need attention. Sometimes, through malaise or a touch of funkiness, it will gently remind me that there’s unresolved emotion lurking. I thank my body for letting me know this.
My body is an ally that is willing to work with me and guide me to optimum health and joy.
For me, it works out best if I listen to my body, not the voice of the ego in my mind. I am only a work in progress. Due to the many years’ practice of being disconnected from myself, I must be patient with myself as I learn new behaviors.
My intention is to honor myself and live the way of self-love.
Today I see my body as a gift. It’s an honor and a privilege to have this physical vehicle that I use to navigate through my life. My body is my own personal miracle. Have you ever thought about how truly amazing the body is?
What day is better than today to begin a loving relationship with your body, with your SELF? For me it started with gratitude: Thank you for all you’ve done for me. And then the question: What can I do for you?
Peace & Love~
Kim Vazquez
Kim Vazquez is the author of two books: New From the Inside Out: How to Transform Your Mind and Your Life and Living in the Rear View Mirror: From Substance Abuse to a Life of Substance. Kim has found her true calling helping others connect to their divine guidance. She offers Transformational Life Coaching, Workshops, and Sacred Healing Circles through her practice in Placer County, CA. For more information, visit: http://www.kimvazquez.com/
Restless, Irritable and Discontent
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Living in the struggle, trying to overcome depression and abuse I had a lot of questions like “what is the point? What am I doing here? There must be more to life then this so what is it? What is the meaning of life? And there was that ever present feeling of having to “survive” so that I can…… WHAT?….. So that I can do “what” with my life? Raise another generation? WHY? What is the point, what is the purpose? What was I born for?
In the beginning of recovery all I knew was that I wanted something better for my life, I wanted to feel more alive, be more engaged and to know there was some reason for being. I knew that I wanted more out of life way before I found the answer to my longings which were so deep.
I thought I was chasing a rainbow; that recovery, freedom from depression and personal wholeness were not really possible. I thought I was ungrateful and selfish; always wanting something more but I didn’t think about where those doubts and those negative thoughts came from. I didn’t question if they were right or wrong. I didn’t think that maybe those thoughts about wanting something better or wanting something more out of life came from my inner being, my spirit or maybe even from God himself. I didn’t consider that maybe it was my longing for real life or that I really was missing “real life” and that life was meant to be fulfilling. Instead I thought that maybe those thoughts came from my ingratitude towards God.
I thought that I should KNOW by now what “life” is all about and to admit that I did not know would be like admitting failure. When I wasn’t feeling foolish that I didn’t know, I thought that the greatest joy should be about being in service to others, making a difference, being selfless, and showing love to all others but the problem was that I was not doing any of that for myself and had never actually been taught to take emotional care of myself.
Not having a proper foundation for emotional self care means that it is really hard to provide that for someone else. You know the old saying “you can’t give away something you don’t have”.
So ~ the world’s universally known recipe for a happy and fulfilling life, which is something about serving others~ didn’t work for me. So I was stuck. I would not only to serve others, I would try to live for others, and I would fall. Sometimes the ‘falling’ looked like a serious depression. I would give up and give in and go to bed and pull the covers over my head. I would plead with God; “Why can’t I just be happy? What is wrong with me, why can’t I just be normal?” And then I would answer my questions with a stream of mean and unsupportive answers “because you are ungrateful, it is never enough for you, you are selfish, you are self centered and there must be something really wrong with you that you keep on ending up here hiding under the covers”. (metaphorically speaking)
One of the first things that I had to learn was that I did not love myself and that I kept hoping that I would find someone to love me ~ to prove to me that I was lovable or worthy of being loved. In retrospect I realize today that that I believed if I could find someone to love me then I could love me. This is a left over from not being valued as a child and a belief that I carried with me into my adulthood. I thought someone else could provide my worth and provide my worth because it was defined for me as a child. I had to learn to define my worth and value for myself.
It was a shock and a relief to accept the truth that
a) I could learn to love myself
b) People did love me, and it didn’t change anything.
c) No one could ever love me enough to prove to me that I was lovable.
Self esteem had to come from me and for me; recovery began when I decided that there was more to life then the depression I constantly struggled with and there was more than always trying harder, and I was determined that I was going to find out what that “more to life” was….. and I did find out.
Living in the Truth means knowing that I am worthy, loveable and equally valuable!
Darlene Ouimet
I welcome everyone to share a piece of your journey, victory or struggle; please comment.
Effects of Abuse. Guilt, Shame and Solutions
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In this post I have purposely not defined exactly what kind of abuse I am talking about. Really they all cause similar damage. It is my hope that the reader will define “it” for themselves as it has impacted their own life.
I was convinced that if I kept “it” a secret that no one would know and it would go away.
Then I thought that if I could just figure out what I had done wrong to bring on such a thing, or if I could figure out what I had done to deserve it, I could stop doing whatever behavior that it was, so this terrible thing wouldn’t happen to me again. But because I could not figure out what “it” was, I was never sure that I had stopped doing it and I lived in constant fear.
Then I was convinced that if I told someone, then someone else would know and it would go away.
Then I thought that if I dug deep into all the details, admitted everything that happened, even what I did or agreed to in order to protect myself, even what I thought was my fault, even my own guilt and shame, that it would go away. But it didn’t.
I thought if I “put it behind me” that I would be free. But I wasn’t free and I didn’t know HOW to put it behind me. Everyone told me to “let it go” but no one told me how. They said “just give it to God” and I said how? They said “have faith” and I said HOW? I tried and I tried harder and harder and they said “just believe” and I said okay… because I was exhausted.
I thought that if I acted as if I was happy, joyous and free, that eventually I would be. It didn’t work.
I tried travel. I tried bright lights and exotic locations. That wasn’t the answer.
I prayed for years, at first just praying to die, and then praying for the answer, the truth, for freedom from the struggle. I tried religion, spirituality, meditation, relaxation, and bible study, and although each worked for a time, I often felt rebellious, unworthy, and even more aware of my shortcomings. Sometimes I felt too ashamed to go to God. Sometimes I felt that He had abandoned me too. I was ashamed that I thought that. Then there was more confusion, more guilt and shame, more self loathing and self blame.
I tried men, and then marriage and children. The fear of failure made it worse. How could I raise healthy children if I was so messed up and couldn’t seem to break the lifelong cycle of depression, guilt, shame, self blame and low self esteem?
Then I thought that if I threw myself into making everyone else happy that I would be fulfilled. That didn’t work either.
More guilt and shame; more feelings of failure and worthlessness. More depression.
I tried vitamins, whole foods and physical fitness but my spirit never caught up with me.
It was when I looked at the details of my life through new eyes that I began to see things differently.
It was when I looked at the details of the events AND the details after the events that became the key. It was the looking at the whole picture. The first thing that I realized was that the guilt and shame were not mine to carry. Even though I only realized this about ONE event at first, it was a beginning.
I began to heal when I realized that I believed a lot of lies about myself and when I understood how I came to believe them I was able to change the beliefs that I had about myself, and the abuse. I was able to change the belief that it was my fault. I saw that it wasn’t something that I had done so I didn’t have to keep looking for something to stop doing. I was able to see how people, more powerful and influential then I was, used actions, looks and sometimes words to manipulate me into believing I deserved what they did and then believing that I was unworthy of better. I was able to see how they misused their power.
As I began to look at the whole picture, I began to get a different picture. As I continued with this work I emerged from the broken life I was living as a broken and discouraged woman, into a life of fullness and wholeness. I felt peace and love flow into me, replacing the guilt and shame. I came to understand my worth, my value and my ability to love. I began to appreciate myself and recognize my gifts. My self esteem grew, my depressions became less frequent and eventually disappeared and the fragmented person that I used to be, emerged into one whole healthy wonderful person.
I pursued the truth and I found it and it set me free.
Please share your thoughts and comments.
Darlene Ouimet
Mother Daughter Relationship ~ My Poor Mom
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- Cold Hearted Love
This comment came in from Cyndi on my last post (click to view Standing up to Dysfunctional Family Relationship ~ Part two) and it prompted me to write today’s post ~ another little snapshot of how messed up I was in the mother daughter relationship that I had with my mother.
Cyndi wrote: “I went about telling the truth in a different way. My mother grew up with a volatile abusive father just like mine. In my initial efforts to face my childhood and change the way I dealt with her, I mistakenly believed that if I could just talk to her calmly she would explain herself, apologize for her shortcomings and we’d ride happily off into the sunset. HA! Instead she denied everything, said I exaggerated, focused on only the bad things, blatantly called me a liar and said my childhood was much better than hers…I was lucky” Cyndi
My mother was really good at making me feel sorry for her and it was a very hard trap to crawl out of. My mother did have a way worse life then I did; we heard the stories all of our lives; her father was a bigamist and her mother found out when she was pregnant with her 6th child and that resulted in the marriage being annulled. The 6 children were split between both parents. My mother lived with her father for a time. He put locks on the cupboards (restricted food) and hired a housekeeper (a live in girlfriend). My mother never tasted chocolate until she was 17. She begged for orange peels at school. Her father took the money she made running errands for the neighbor lady. She had to go to work so she was only went to school until grade 8. There was worse abuse too. When she was able to live with her mother again, there were scary men. Then there was a drunken step father added to her burden. You get the picture ~ and the list goes on. It is absolutely true that my mother had a very tough childhood and it was true that it was worse than mine. I never even thought about whether or not it was true. Her mother, my grandmother was mean and nasty and still had the drunk for a husband. I didn’t need proof. My mother had a terrible mother daughter relationship with her own mother. The last time she saw her father she was 15. So I felt sorry for her. It didn’t take much for me to believe that I was a very ungrateful child. I felt so guilty because I was so unhappy. If you heard my mother’s story, you would feel very bad for her, I am serious. In so many ways her life WAS way worse than mine. “I was so lucky…”
BUT what does that have to do with anything? What does that have to do with ME? Is that an excuse for her behavior? Should I discount my own feelings and struggles because hers were worse? Should I be happy that my life was not as bad as hers and therefore be grateful for what DIDN’T happen to me?Well I sure thought so.
Believing this would be like accepting and agreeing that if one kid was beaten bloody and another kid was beaten bloody and a few bones were broken, and the one kid says to the other kid “well at least none of your bones were broken, “you were so lucky”. WHAT? NO WAY. Abuse is abuse.
I didn’t think I had a right to be depressed. I didn’t think that my life had been as bad as hers. I thought that the abuse that I suffered was my own fault, in fact that belief was so deep in my belief system that when I finally dealt with the sexual abuse that I endured at the hands of a babysitter at the age of around two ~ I told the therapist that I knew I should have been able to STOP IT. I was two! And that belief ~ that I brought things on myself or should have been able to stop them, permeated through every event, big or small for everything that I felt bad about, from then on.
This is all part of the brainwashing that goes along with being less important than someone else. This is how the control is established. They weave some loyalty stuff into it, and add some guilt and tell you how ungrateful you are… and say things like “after all I’ve done for you” and… well you know the outcome.
This kind of communication in a mother daughter relationship is really manipulative on the part of the ADULT. AND this began when my mother was the adult and I was the child in the relationship and when I was an adult I was still regarding my mother through the eyes of HER child, the way that she trained me to think about her.
So yes, my Mother had a terrible time, and I feel deeply sorry for her and I wish more than anything that she could be free too but that isn’t up to me, it is up to her and I am adamant that I will not be pushed around and devalued or treated like I am less than equal in the meanwhile. If we are going to have a mother daughter relationship, it is going to be a functional one based on the true definition of love.
I found that looking at these situations through a different grid ~ a more truthful grid ~ is the beginning of freedom. Please contribute in whatever way you wish.
Life is so much better with the truth,
Darlene Ouimet
Dysfunctional Family Contributes to Sexual Coping Methods
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In my last post “Psychological Abuse is the Root of All Abuse ~ many years later ” I talked about one incident that reflected on how my belief system impacted my life. I continue today with examples of how this played out in the past.
I have written in the past about how I was actually taught that my value as a woman was sexual and how that belief became true for me over time. This false belief has caused me many problems some of which I continue to become more aware of as time goes on. Like so many other multi level belief systems, this belief that my value was sexual has been a very complicated belief system to untangle, especially since I acquired it by the time I was about 6. As I grew up, it was continually reinforced along with the connected belief that I brought on and actually caused any sexual misconduct or inappropriate behaviour that came my way.
Coming from a dysfunctional family system, out of necessity we develop survival systems and these become our coping methods in order to deal with the feelings of not being valuable, not being safe etc. Each person has their own way of doing this and the dynamics between us can be very similar and very different or a combination of both. Because these systems were developed in the first place to protect us, it is hard for us to re-wire them. Our minds actually caution us against changing our thinking because we so deeply believe that these coping methods are what are keeping us safe.
Coping methods become like a buffer zone. Sometimes there are some really destructive behaviours that we believe keep us safe and we are afraid to give them up because we are convinced that these behaviours are part of the solution, such as in the case of addictions. Depression and sexual behaviour can also be coping methods though. The purpose and passion that I have for writing the posts for this blog is to shed some light on the stuff that gets in the way of this work; I believe it goes deeper than just the coping method. It starts in how we develop our belief systems in the first place. The challenge is that we have developed so many belief systems and coping methods, therefore there is so much to untangle.
When it came to men and my belief system about my sexuality, I believed that my power, value and even my safe existence all depended on men; not just men but men who desired me and part of the problem is that therefore, I tried to make men desire me. Taking this all apart and sorting through it was difficult because there were so many different beliefs, fears and aspects to it. I remember in high school I had a science teacher, a much older man who wore nerdy glasses and bow ties and I was very afraid of him. How I coped with that fear is that I constantly stared him in the eye and smiled while he was in the middle of teaching. It was my way of throwing him off. He was not at all the kind of teacher that any girl would flirt with. I was so mixed up that I thought being sexually attractive proved my worth, but it also might keep me safe in certain situations. If he was sexually attracted to me, he would not yell at me or pick on me for not understanding the work. He would show me “favour”. It wasn’t that I thought “having sex” with someone would keep me safe, it had more to do with the misunderstanding of my value, and my behaviour around sexuality. I thought that a man “wanted me” I was safer. I thought he would feel more tenderness towards me. I had love and sex mixed up. In the case of this science teacher, I was not afraid of him sexually, I was afraid of his moods, so I threw him off balance with my sexuality because that was the foundation that I had been taught about survival.
As you can imagine, this tactic sometimes backfired.
Because I had been sexually abused, I also associated sexuality with fear and when I was afraid of a man, I often turned on the sexual energy thinking of that as somewhat of a protection. It made me feel more in control and I believed that being in control was all important. I associated not being in control with being hurt in all ways. When I was 19 I had a boss who was over 40 years old and married. I was afraid of him and saw him as having power over me (my job was in his hands) and I turned on the charm; it backfired when he took me up on my flirting. I was so sure that everything in life was my fault so I just froze the same way that I did when I was a child. I froze and dissociated ~ disconnecting from myself and from the situation. (Another coping method.) You can also see how this coping method does not work. Once I dissociated, I had even less control and my job was in jeopardy even more then it was originally.
These two stories illustrate two very different aspects of one coping method that was born out of my belief system based on how I was taught that my sexuality was my value but I was also afraid of it and believed it was the cause of my problems as well. As I grew in my understanding of how my belief system formed, I was able to untangle the beliefs as well as replace them with truth and I was able to stop reacting to situations this way. I also stopped connecting my value with my sexuality and realized that my definition of safe and in control was very wrong. As this all got sorted out, I needed coping methods less and less.
Fearlessly exposing truth!
~ Darlene Ouimet
Breaking the Cycle of Automatic Self Blame
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“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being” Hafiz
Have you ever noticed that when you are driving a vehicle, some of the things you do are automatic? I don’t really think about using my turn indicator when I am about to turn a corner; it is so automatic that I often find myself indicating when I come to the corner in my own laneway. When the brake lights come light up on the car in front of me, it is automatic for me to touch my breaks too.
When you are making the bed, or doing the dishes do you think about what you are doing, or are you thinking about something else? These types of mundane everyday tasks become habitual and automatic.
It is the same with the way that we think about ourselves. It was habitual for me to think that I was not as valuable as others; it was so deeply inside of me that I was not at all conscious of how I viewed myself or how deep my belief was. My mother often told me that I was selfish and I believed her. When I went to a 12 step program, it was very easy for me to agree that the root of my problem was selfishness and self centeredness, but it was not positive for me to believe that because my view of myself was wrong to begin with. Because my belief systems and my view of self were so skewed, even self help books and programs were not helpful for me in the ways they were meant to be and very often had a negative effect on me. I did not realize this until I stepped back and decided to take a deep look at the beginning and where the confusion started.
Getting back to the beginning was kind of like navigating a deep dark cave with long winding tunnels and scary obstacles. Carrying a flashlight that only worked some of the time made it even more frightening. I was afraid that I would get lost in the dark and that I would end up hurting even more. I was afraid that I would get stuck there and be forever in the painful part of the process. I was so afraid of the repressed memories; I was almost positive that I would remember something that I could not deal with. I was afraid that I would discover that it was my fault after all; that I deserved what had happened to me, that I had indeed brought it on myself and even asked for it. I was afraid because I thought the lies were the truth and the truths were lies.
In my mind’s eye, there lived a little girl who was about two years old. She lived alone in an attic; it was very cold and dark with only one broken window letting in a bit of light. She was filthy dirty, wearing a sleeveless and tattered little dress, which barely covered her bottom. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears, her hair a tangled mass and she was cold. She was unable to speak, and she clung to a broken dirty dolly. I had no idea why I had this image of this little girl in my mind, but eventually I knew that she was me and that was the self image that I had deep inside of me. No one cared; no one even knew she was there. No one was coming to rescue her and she knew it. That hope had died years ago. When I realize that she was me, I had to rescue myself.
The key is to keep going. Keep navigating that cave. Find your beginning and go from there. Have the courage to keep striving towards the goal, believing that freedom is on the other side. Keep going. On the days that you doubt with every fibre of your being that you can have this too, come visit me here for little bit of encouragement. As always, I welcome your feedback and comments.
Darlene Ouimet
Mental Health Recovery ~ Ten Necessary Changes
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I had to get it sorted out. I had to separate the real from the imagined; the true from the false; the facts from the fiction and it all had to be looked at from a new perspective; the true perspective. The way things really had been. These are a few of the necessary things that I did in order to give myself some space to come out of the fog enough to see clearly and begin to heal. This is part two; continued from “The Recovery Journey ~ Common Bonds“
~ I decided that my version of the truth was not really mine and that I didn’t know the truth at all. I gave myself permission to examine the truth and to realize that my survivor mode was a leftover from childhood. I was strong enough to know the REAL TRUTH now.
~ I decided to spend some time with myself, to invest in myself and my health and to pay attention to me and give myself some of the value that I had shown to others.
~ I decided that I was not going to be responsible or accountable for other people’s feelings during this process.
~ I put aside my constant obsession with guilt and shame over not having enough faith (because if I had enough faith, I would be healed) and over not being grateful for my wonderful life (because I thought that I didn’t even deserve the good things I had) and put aside my obsession with doing things “the right way” (the right way according to who??)
~ I stopped trying to look at things as a mature adult who was responsible for the results of my own life and just looked at what my own life had somehow become.
~ I stopped feeling sorry for my parents and making excuses for their behavior and decided that I was going to just open my eyes and LOOK at the truth.
~ I gave myself permission to feel however I really felt. If that meant feeling angry; fine. If resentment came up, then that was fine too. I had to allow those feelings long enough to really feel them, so that I could let them go and become able to get over them.
~ I decided to put aside the whole forgiveness issue. I did not think about forgiveness, I made a decision NOT to think about it until I had time to sort a bunch of things out because by then it had gotten really complicated. I was beating myself up for not forgiving and hiding the fact that I had not forgiven.
~I decided to put the time and effort into the process no matter what, because life the way that it was ~ was not worth living. I decided that I was going to at least find out what my “worth” was even if that meant that I was going to be disappointed. (I was so afraid that “they” were right about me, that really I wasn’t worth it. There is NO SUCH TRUTH!
~ Somehow I knew that doing all these things~ including putting my faith aside~ to examine the truth about faith itself and my faith, would not get me thrown into hell. I decided that I had to clear all that clutter, so that I could start fresh, with a clean slate, without all the garbage that was on my old slate.
Most of these decisions were not conscious. I made many of them along the way. My therapist had to tell me many times that I didn’t deserve to be so disregarded. He had to tell me many times that I had a right to have been protected and that the abuse was not my fault. It was in believing him that I was able to start to look at the truth. It was in seeing how my belief system formed, that I was motivated to change it. It was in taking everything apart that I was able to be put back together. When I was able to make a beginning on even the first few of these decisions I began to see the road ahead. Eventually, I walked into a world of freedom that I never thought possible. I was able to own my value; I not only felt my worth, but I knew it, and I found my purpose.
How does this post make you feel?
To Your Freedom on the Journey to Wholeness,
Darlene Ouimet
