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The thought came to me this morning that something is missing within me that used to be there:  My inner questions about the ‘WHY” of the abuse I suffered from my mother without my father caring, seem to have disappeared from any consideration I might now make about what happened to me.

I could ask,” What has happened in my long search for healing and understanding about my life that I no longer give any time or space whatsoever to asking any questions about why my childhood happened to me the way that it did?”

I could ask, “When did this happen?  How did this happen?”  Today it seems that I never even asked those questions or wondered those wonderings in the first place.  But I know that I did.  Those thoughts seem to have existed so far back in my mind that I can hardly remember they ever existed at all.

Certainly I never once asked “Why me” during all those years of my childhood, even though I could clearly see that my siblings were treated far different than I was.  Of course I know now that for me, things had ‘always been this way’, and I therefore had no other point of perspective – not for my feelings, not for my words, and therefore never for my thoughts.

Awareness of my abuse never crossed my mind, nor did it for many years into my adulthood.

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I came across the following passage this morning in a book I discovered while I was in art therapy graduate school in 1989:  Eskimo Realities by Edmund Snow Carpenter, (Hardcover – 1973).  During the span of time Carpenter covers in his writing and photography, the area of the eastern Canadian Arctic where the Aivilik Eskimo whose life Carpenter describes had not yet had any contact with Christian missionaries, and only minimal contact with any ‘westerners’ up until the time Carpenter arrived in their region of the world in the 1940s.

The book passage that caught my attention today has to do with what I see as a cultural clash between the Aivilik and ‘western’ thinking about this question, “WHY?”  Perhaps because for the entire 18 years of my extremely abusive childhood I could never ask this question in regard to my life, my parents, or my childhood home, I think I know what Carpenter’s point was in including the following within the covers of his book.

Having no ability to question why, and I mean NO ABILITY happens within a mind (and/or mindset) that has been formed without certain options in it.  The absence of the question, “WHY?” is simply a reflection of a certain kind of reality that mostly only those who exist within that reality can truly understand – from the inside.

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I do know that I could not make any progress in my own healing until I encountered so-called ‘treatment’ and ‘mental health’ information that for the first time, when I was 29, allowed me to begin to understand that there was something different about me because my childhood had been something different.

Yet looking reflectively within myself today, I suspect that at some point in the next 29 years that have followed my introduction into active healing of my infant-childhood severe trauma body-mind-self, I must have taken a turn along the road and realized that what REALLY mattered is that my home of origin existed the way that it did because it was able to so isolate its reality from the eyes or concern of anyone outside of the home.

What that translates into for me today is actually more of an anthropological perspective than a ‘mental health’ one.  My family of origin had its own culture.  I mean this literally.  Our family could have been picked up and transported somewhere else in the world and everything that impacted me personally within our home would have stayed just the same.  Only by intrusion from some outsiders’ influence could anything have been changed.

Such an outsiders’ influence really would have been the same as it would be should any different culture become introduced into any other intact and different culture.  That is an anthropological process from my point of view.  I realize that the power my mother had to control her family and to isolate us from outside contact was complete – certainly in regard to me.  My mother could just as well have been both the object of her own religion and the enforcer of its practices, as well.

This means to me that the moment I left my home of origin I essentially immigrated to an outside foreign culture.  More accurately, I was a refugee, but I did not know this.  How could I?  Certainly I recognized as familiar the trappings of the outside society and civilization the culture I was raised within was ensconced in.

Yet I, as an individual, had been no more included or integrated into the world outside my family’s home than were the automobiles used to transport me here and there beyond the walls of the houses I grew up in for those first 18 years.  In fact, I had no conception of what being a person as different from an automobile or a house could possibly even mean.

I was not a person who could even ask the question, “WHY?” about anything that concerned me until I was 29.  Here I am today at double that age, and although I know I went through a phase when that question seemed to be important to me in regard to my early experiences, that phase has faded so far back into my adult past that I cannot imagine ever asking that question again.

This passage from Carpenter’s book is about that ‘state of being’ where the question, “WHY?” does not exist.  For those of us with severely abusive infant-childhoods, where the culture of madness, trauma and abuse was present and surrounded us as we came into the world, we can recognize a part of our reality in the reality of these words.

Our own inability to describe to anyone else what our reality was truly like as we grew up — as we experienced it on the inside of who we are – is reflected (mirrored) back to us here.  We can see this ‘why-less’ state as being a cultural reality that happens when nobody thinks in ‘why’ terms at all.

Carpenter writes:

“Knud Rasmussen, the arctic explorer, in a sensitive, moving account, tells of a conversation with an Iglulik [Eskimo – circa 1922] hunter:  “For several evenings we had discussed rules of life and taboo customs, without getting beyond a long circumstantial statement of all that was permitted and all that was forbidden.  Everyone knew precisely what had to be done in any given situation, but whenever I put my query:  ‘Why?’, they could give no answer.  They regarded it, and very rightly, as unreasonable that I should require not only an account, but a justification of their religious principles.

“They had of course no idea that all my questions, now that I had obtained what I wished for, were only intended to make them react in such a manner that they should, excited by my inquisitiveness, be able to give an inspired explanation.  Aua had as usual been the spokesman, and as he was still unable to answer my questions, he rose to his feet, and as if seized by a sudden impulse, invited me to go outside with him.

“It had been an unusually rough day, and we had had plenty of meat after the successful hunting of the past few days, I had asked my host to stay at home so that we could get some work done together.  The brief daylight had given place to the half-light of the afternoon, but as the moon was up, one could still see some distance.  Ragged white clouds raced across the sky, and when a gust of wind came tearing over the ground, our eyes and mouths were filled with snow.  Aua looked me full in the face, and pointing out over the ice, where the snow was being lashed about in waves by the wind, he said:

“’In order to hunt well and live happily, man must have calm weather.  Why this constant succession of blizzards and all this needless hardship for men seeking food for themselves and those they care for?  Why?  Why?’

“We had come just at that time when the men were returning from their watching at the blowholes on the ice; they came in little groups, bowed forward, toiling against the wind, which actually forced them now and again to stop, so fierce were the gusts.  Not one of them had a seal in tow; their whole day of painful effort and endurance had been in vain.

“I could give no answer to Aua’s ‘Why?’, but shook my head in silence.  He then led me into Kublo’s house, which was close beside our own.  The small blubber lamp burned, but with the faintest flame, giving out no heat whatever; a couple of children crouched, shivering, under a skin rug on the bench.

“Aua looked at me again, and said:  ‘Why should it be cold and comfortless in here?  Kublo has been out hunting all day, and if he had got a seal, as he deserved, his wife would now be sitting laughing beside her lamp, letting it burn full, without fear of having no blubber left for tomorrow.  The place would be warm and bright and cheerful, the children would come out from under their tugs and enjoy life.  Why should it not be so?  Why?’

I made no answer, and he led me out of the house, into a little snow hut where his sister Natseq lived all by herself because she was ill.  She looked thin and worn, and was not even interested in our coming.  For several days she had suffered from a malignant cough that seemed to come from far down in the lungs, and it looked as if she had not long to live.

“A third time Aua looked at me and said:  ‘Why must people be ill and suffer pain?  We are all afraid of illness.  Here is this old sister of mine; as far as anyone can see she has done no evil; she has lived through a long life and given birth to healthy children, and now she must suffer before her days end.  Why?  Why?’

“This ended his demonstration, and we returned to our house, to resume with the others the interrupted discussion.

“’You see,’ said Aua, ‘you are equally unable to give any reason when we ask why life is as it is.  And so it must be.  All our customs come from life and turn towards life; we explain nothing, we believe nothing, but in what I have just shown you lies our answer to all you ask.’

“Commenting on this moving passage, the anthropologist Paul Riesman writes:  “A very important idea emerges from this intense episode.  This idea is clearly stated at the end when Aua says, ‘All our customs come from life and turn toward life.’  It is an idea which is so basic to the Eskimo sense of place in the universe that it is not really an idea at all, but a way of being in relation to life.  This way of being is the highest value for the Eskimo.  It is not an easy way to be, but it is a necessary condition for being Eskimo.”  (Carpenter:  pages 46-49 – bold type is mine)

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If an anthropologist had entered our home’s culture of trauma, deprivation and abuse in our childhoods, what we could have said about our experience would probably have been very similar to what the Eskimo told this one.

I believe that this is a large part of what the isolation experts refer to in relation to abusive homes is about:  One must enforce within the home the culture that best ensures survival within a malevolent world.  This culture is not one based on ‘reason’ that might exist in a far more benevolent universe.

When Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group talk about the ‘evolutionarily altered brain’ that develops within severe infant-child abuse environments, he is describing what happens when change is required for adaptation ALSO to a future in a continued malevolent world.  Once these changes have occurred in development (as they did for my mother), there is no vision of a better world and no possibility of changing BACK the consequences of these early forces that shaped the survivor.

The way Eskimo adapted to the malevolency in their environment was built into them individually as well as into their culture (including, of course, their language).  The same process happened within my home of origin.  Just as the Eskimo described in this passage do not ask the question, “Why?” within their world because it would be pointless – and there is no answer – those of us who grew up in the malevolent world of severe early abuse without reprieve never learned to ask that question in the culture we were raised within, either.

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While so-called ‘therapy’ approaches DID introduce the question of “Why?” into my own thinking about my childhood, it served me no purpose and I have evidently completely let the question go for the same reasons that these Eskimo never asked it in the first place.  The question of “Why?” in regard to abusive and traumatic malevolent homes of origin only applies if we look at the entire BIG picture of the entire culture that existed not only within that home, but also at the larger culture our smaller culture was contained within.

Just as anthropologists are carefully trained not to take their cultural biases into the field with them as they ‘study’ other ‘foreign’ cultures, we need to be just as careful about taking understandings from benevolent environments and applying them to malevolent ones.

In my mother’s culture, the only thing that mattered to her was her own continued survival.  Whatever part anyone else played in her continued survival was peripheral to her main aim.  I cannot begin to imagine what the outcome would have been had anyone from the outside tried to introduce a more benevolent culture’s reality into hers.  I cannot begin to imagine that such an attempt would have been successful.

So today, if I look at my mother and my experiences of trauma within the culture my mother created in her home from an anthropological perspective, the question of “Why?” evaporates as if it never existed at all.  I am left having to take the same perspective about life that these Eskimo did:  “How do we best ensure our continued survival given the circumstances of our existence?”

That is what my mother did.  That is what I did.  We found “a way of being in relation to life” as the Eskimo did so we could keep on living it.  Staying alive   ” is not really an idea at all.”  In a harsh and malevolent world survival IS all that matters.  To try to add “WHY?” into this kind of an equation is pointless.

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