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Having just written my last post, +DO EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS HAVE THE GIFT OF QUESTIONING? and as I prepare to enter my arena of garden creation for today I had the thought:  “Can I apply what I wrote in that post to my own abuse survivor mother?  Can apply it to my father who so perfectly participated with my mother in her insane, terrible abuse of me?”

Well, I both can and can’t apply my ‘theory’ about severe early abuse survivors having the ability to ask questions!  To my knowledge my mother never questioned the rightness or wrongness of anything she ever did to me.  My father never questioned it, either.

I am not talking about minor crimes against an infant-child here — if such a thing even exists!  All crimes against little ones are major crimes – but my parents performed HORRENDOUS acts of abuse that went on and on and on for the 18 years of my early life.

This awareness of patterns of abusive realities makes me wonder if there might be something very specific about the way early abuse can combine to create trauma altered development in body and brain that completely excludes the ability to ask meaningful questions.  This seems to indicate a rigidity of harmful thought and action that could defy belief if we didn’t know that they DO happen.

My mother seemed incapable of asking questions from the OUTSIDE of her psychosis, so pervasive to her complete existence was her ‘mental illness’.  Thus, no opportunity for self-intervention of extremely damaging patterns of living could possibly exist.  Questioning would have had to come from the OUTSIDE of our family.  This did not ever happen.

It seems to me, from my point of view, that the inability to question the perpetration of the horrors of abuse especially against one’s own child might be particularly related to personality disorders including Borderline and Narcissistic.  In these patterns of survival-mode within such a trauma-altered body-brain all ongoing patterns of action are a PART OF the disordered personality — by definition as demonstrated by repeated, ongoing and unquestioned thoughts, feelings, perceptions and actions.

When ‘experts’ note that the inability to ‘self reflect’ is a key side effect of personality disorders perhaps they are at the same time describing what happens when a trauma-altered person has LOST the ability to question anything that might really matter.  Without the ability to question there will be no opportunity to find answers that can lead to critically-needed self-change.

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Of course this post reflects my bias that given the possession of the ability to question how is it possible that someone wouldn’t USE IT?  Did my mother actually possess the power to question?  If she did, could she have chosen to question and change?  Or, did she have the power to question but had lost the power to choose?  More of my questioning…….

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