General Need To Know "why?"

[Everhopeful]

I hope the following does not trigger or scare anyone too much:

This is perhaps a question that can never be answered. Why does a mother hate her child? Why does she abuse drugs whilst pregnant, causing her child to have a predisposition toward opioid deficiency for the rest of his life. Why does this same mother favour her older son, and torment and hate her younger son?

Why does she allow her paedophile brother to molest her child over years from a tender age of 5 or 6 to his late teens and why does she take payment in money from her brother for this?

Why does she lock this little boy in a confined dark space for hours on end and pretend he is not there?

Why does she encourage her older son to bully the younger son, and why do they do "torture acts" on the boy, like holding his head under water until he is blue in the face, or pinning him down and try to choke him? And then laugh at his panic and tears?

Why does she then start an incestuous sexual relationship with this boy from age 13 to 19 years and come to his bedroom in the night (no locked doors allowed in their home) and insist that he wants sex with her and makes him do it to help her relax and ease her headache. Then afterwards tells him to come and fetch some pills which will make him forget and feel better.

Why does this woman, whose love and approval the boy/young man was constantly craving, shout at him, physically hit and abuse him and tell him constantly that he is from the devil, and that she hates him.

He eventually left the home at age 19, without proper schooling and no tertiary education or trade skills or anything to fall back on. The next time he saw her again, was after she had a brain aneurysm (probably as a result of her lifelong pethidine and codeine abuse) and she was in a semi-vegetative state and brain-damaged.
She still said she hated him. A few years later she was dead of another stroke.

Why does a woman do this to her own child? Why was she capable of accepting the older brother, but not the younger child?

What drove her to commit incest with her own son?

Was she totally mentally ill? Was she psychotic? Evil?

Why, why why?

 

[Toria]

Hi Everhopeful - that's some catalogue and not something that any child should ever have to deal with. My first thought was, do you know anything about your sufferer's father? It almost sounds as if she blamed him for something from a very early age - not something he could be responsible for either if you know what I mean?

 

[Deleted member 1860]

It's human nature to ask "why?" But unfortunately the answer often does not give us any sort of resolution. I am so sorry for you and your sufferer. I know it's not easy.

 

[p-no]

Everhopeful, please be careful reading this post, and feel free to skip it... You can stop at any time, too. No need to read, no need to reply.


There was a time when I asked myself these questions starting with "Why". At a certain point I realized that I was really asking those questions because I was scared sh*tless of that incredible pain rolling over me and tumbling me, the pain that comes from allowing myself to feel that all those questions were really facts once I took the "Whys" away.

 

[digger]

My first thought was, do you know anything about your sufferer's father?

Mine too. Did both children have the same father? Were the father(s) on the scene at all?

Unfortunately, I think for lots of us, these questions are unanswerable (especially once an abuser is dead, but even alive, I don't think answers will often be found), and what it comes down to more in the end is accepting that it was not okay, whatever the 'reasons' behind it.

 

[bell]

To me, it boils down to the fact that some people are just bad. Plain and simple.

Whenever I get too sucked into the "whys" of a bad person, I find it important to remember that they are not worth the energy of even thinking about. Helping those we love recover from those wrongs is worth our energy and is something we can do something about, as we can help shape someone's future, because there's nothing we can do about stopping what happened in the past.

 

[Promicarus]

It's natural to ask "Why?". Humans, by nature, seek meaning in their lives-and it's in that effort that we ask the question. I used to think that if I could only "figure it out"--I could "solve" it, somehow-that if I did, and could then "make sense out of it", it would be resolved, somehow.

And after a long long time preoccupied with untangling all the factors involved, I believe I do finally have an accurate big picture of all the factors involved.

But the mistake was thinking that this would "solve" the feelings involved. And that wasn't the case.

That's not to say there's no value in understanding everything that went in to creating the experience you suffered through. Understanding the roles of the players, and where their motivations originated, enabled me to forgive, at least somewhat-and that at least somewhat relieved the seething hatred which dominated my every waking moment, and nightly nightmare.

But to be preoccupied with answering "why" as a sole solution kept me from addressing my symptoms with a professional for most of my life, thinking I could "do it myself".

"Why" is an intellectual question. Feelings don't respond to intellectual answers, usually, at least not entirely.

I agree with what's been said-focusing on yourself and those you love is what's worthwhile, not continuing to focus on someone who doesn't deserve more of your life.

 

[Everhopeful]

Thank you from the heart to all the replies. My husband was this little boy. He has stopped asking why at 36 years of age and he believes he is just cursed, but I am new in his life and when he gradually opens up about all his trauma, I cannot help but ask the Universe, why does this happen? Why is it allowed to happen? Why do some suffer so much unbearable trauma?

I hate his late mother, but I pity her for she was a truly wretched woman who had wretched things done to her, too. I believe the incest came from her family, her father did things to her too.

My husband says that his father spent a few drug-fuelled years being married to his mother, but then left the woman with her two young sons. He must have carried on having some sort of contact with them though, as he is still alive and was still in my husband's life before we met. It sounds like this man also has some sort of antisocial personality. They have cut all ties now.

Yes, finding factual answers does not solve the deep trauma feelings. It does not keep the trauma "tsunami of feeling" from crashing down on top of the individual.

 

[Deleted member 1860]

@bell,

We're very much on the same wavelength! Although my exact thought is "sh!tty people do sh!tty things. End of story."

My priest reminds me "the why's don't matter".... And she's right, they don't! I think the why's get in the way of acceptance.

 

[Promicarus]

This from "Trauma and Recovery", by Judith Herman

Reconstructing the trauma story also includes a systematic review of the meaning of the event, both to the patient and to the important people in her life. the traumatic event challenges an ordinary person to become a theologian, a philosopher, and a jurist. The survivor is called upon to articulate the values and beliefs that she once held and that the trauma destroyed. She stands mute before the emptiness of evil, feeling the insufficiency of any known system of explanation. Survivors of atrocity of every age and every culture come to a point in their testimony where al questions are reduced to one, spoken more in bewilderment than in outrage: Why? The answer is beyond human understanding.

Beyond this unfathomable question, the survivor confronts another equally incomprehensible question, the survivor confronts another, equally question: Why me? The arbitrary, random quality of her fate defies the basic human faith in a just or even predictable world order. In order to develop a full understanding of the trauma story, the survivor must examine the moral questions of guilt and responsibility and reconstruct a system of belief that makes sense of her undeserved suffering. Finally, the survivor cannot reconstruct a sense of meaning by the exercise of thought alone. The remedy for injustice also requires action. The survivor must decide what is to be done...."

Herman goes on to describe the survivor's conundrum with relation to both the philosophical questions of meaning, both within the personal value system of the individual, as well as in the context of the survivor's relationships, and social/cultural expectations, the nature of the attendant conflicts, in specific detail, and the role of the therapist and therapeutic process.

Reading this work was the single most significant factor in my life, as it opened to door to viewing Trauma as a legitimate medical condition which required appropriate treatment, and as importantly, gave me insight into the therapeutic process necessary to trust and participate in it. It blew open the door to my walled off, repressed self-and showed me it was possible not only to walk through it at last, but to emerge on the other side, into a more complete and productive human being--and that there was actually hope that the pain could be resolved.

 

[Everhopeful]

Thanks Solara and Promicarus.