Audio Transcript between Christina Enevoldsen (CE) and Darlene Ouimet (DO)

CE:
Hi, this is Christina Enevoldsen at overcomingsexualabuse.com and this is Truth Talks. Today on Truth Talks we are discussing getting to the truth and the role of truth in our recovery process and I have with me my good friend Darlene Ouimet from Emerging from Broken.

DO:
Hi Christina.

CE:
Hi Darlene. I just love your tagline; exposing truth one snapshot at a time. That’s the way I look at the process of recovery, that any kind of abuse or neglect, any maltreatment, distorts the truth and that the process of recovery, of healing is to restore the truth.

DO:
That’s exactly how I see it. I actually accidentally found a blog post without even thinking about with that line one day just exposing truth one snapshot at a time. Because I see my blog post as a loophole, tiny ways of getting people to relate to where the fog was and how the fog lifted so that they could see the truth and it just kind of stuck and I don’t post it on every post, but when it’s appropriate to sign that way, I do.

CE:
That really seems to be your philosophy and I think that’s why we really connected like we have, because that’s the way I’ve approached my healing, that the abuse has so distorted the image that I had of myself that I say myself as a seductress, as a victim, as a tough girl and that wasn’t the true Christina, that wasn’t me at all. So my goal in healing, the thing I’m always looking for is the real me.

DO:
Yeah, that’s a really good point and in my case, having associative identity disorder, I had different personalities that would conform to whoever you wanted me to be, so if that was a tough girl, I could be a tough girl – if it was that of innocent like a child, I could be that and my purpose for being all those different personalities was all about survival. I believed that if I could be who you wanted me be then you wouldn’t hurt me and this was one of the first truths that I had to realise, that being whatever other people wanted me to be did not keep me safe.

CE:
So can we talk a little bit about how we discover the lies in the first place, because the lies that we believe are our truths – we don’t know that they’re lies, they’re true to us.

DO:
That’s such a good point. One of the things that I did, and it helped a lot, I took one incident and what I believed because of it. A really impactful post I wrote on my blog one time was about a teacher who, when I was in grade 5, picked on me, she picked on me so much that I got, I got physically sick and had to go to the doctor and I developed asthma. Even though I had all the symptoms of asthma, things just didn’t quite click and I could get so sick I would be home for a whole week at a time from school, so when I told my parents I was being picked on, they told me, you know, respect your elders and that kind of stuff; that really didn’t do me any good. But what I think, in my head I thought, well, they’re not going to help me, so I have to figure this out on my own, they don’t believe me, or whatever.
The doctor finally, he asked me to come into his, he told my parents he wanted to speak to me alone. I remember him sitting on the corner of his desk and he’s chatting with me, getting up, walking around and sitting at his desk across from me and, I don’t remember exactly what I told him, but I remember him calling my parents back into the room and saying “it’s the teacher – the teacher’s abusing her emotionally, she’s picking on her and I want her out of that classroom”. Well my parents thought, like they’re, like, I don’t think we can do that and he just told them “You know, if you don’t, I’m going to phone a lawyer” and he made them deal with it or he was going to take it into his own hands and deal with it and, you see, that’s how I started to realise that the truth was, the teacher was wrong, I wasn’t wrong. The teacher was wrong and my parents were wrong for not listening to me and believing me and not taking care of me.
That was it for me, a really good incident for me to pick apart and look at the truth and there were 4 or 5 truths about my life in there and about how I was being devalued and about how I was being seen by the adults in my life; the teacher, both my parents and the doctor. He didn’t care about the consequences, he wasn’t afraid of being bullied, he didn’t care if he had to go to the law. He was willing to stick out for his patient, this child and he said “No more. If you’re not going to take care of her as her parents, then I will”.
So it was a good example for me also and for me to follow in my own life for myself, so I became the person who was going to be responsible for me to grow up and mature and to stand up to the beliefs in my life. I became my own advocate and I believe that that’s the only way we really get to the real truth.
Like the thing is that, I had to look at that situation like OK, I just had to accept that she hated me because I was not an attractive child. I was some kind of a child that made this adult hate me. Was I really doing something as a child that was so irritating to the teacher that she should threaten to cut my hair off and give me zeros on my tests, you know she was humiliating me in front of the whole class – was that really right? No, the truth is that wasn’t really wasn’t right. I wasn’t the one who was wrong.
Again, that’s one tiny snapshot of a life and if that was the only thing that ever happened to me, it still would have been a big deal in the way I saw myself; whether I was important or not, whether I was loveable or not, whether I was worthy of love and protection or not. Now I grew up believing I wasn’t worthy of love or protection, and that was a belief that was in me and I, I had to turn that around. And you know our abusers are not going to do that for us, we have to do that for ourselves if we’re going to recover.

CE:
The way that I uncover the lies is that I recognise something that’s happening in my life right now. Sometimes it’s that I seem to be overreacting to something, that whatever the current situation is, it seems that either I reacted in a way that the situation didn’t call for, or I feel more deeply about something than it seems like I should and so that tells me that I’m not just responding to the current situation, that I’m responding to something in my past. So I look at what happened, what did this remind me of, when did I feel rejected like this, when did I feel betrayed or misunderstood and I look at commonalities in the feelings rather than in the pattern of the experience.
And then when I examine the situation, the original event, I ask myself – so what are the messages I believed about that, what does this tell me about myself, about my values, about how I should be treated because that is where the pain is coming from. The pain is coming from those lies that I believed. Abusers may tell us that we’re trash or only good for sex. That’s bad enough, but the way that they treated us informed us about our value about ourselves, about who we were and what we were worth and we need to make sure we uncover the lies in both of those; the overt and the covert messages.

DO:
Which brings us right back down to the maltreatment which informed us.

CE:
Right – it’s our image of ourselves that we need to rebuild and that will protect us from further abuse and it will restore our full identity so that we can live our full life that we were meant to live

DO:
Exactly, yeah; who were we meant to be? And when we’re abused and devalued and hurt and not listened to and neglected and all those things, the true self, it doesn’t grow, it doesn’t form, and it doesn’t emerge.

CE:
So we’ve been talking about the power of truth in our recovery process. I hope that’s helped you. Darlene, thanks for joining me, I had a really great time talking with you and I think we brought out some real truths.

DO:
I loved talking to you too. I always have learnt something, every time we’ve talked.

CE:
This is then Christina Enevoldsen at Overcoming Sexual Abuse with Darlene Ouimet from Emerging from Broken with Truth Talks. Thanks for joining us.