Trauma and Abuse

Questions to Ask about Trauma and Abuse

Questions youth could ask the adults (therapists, counselors, teachers, relatives) in their lives who are trying to help:

• Can you trust that I will stop harming myself when I have become part of a community of my peers where I feel safe?

• Can you help me explore the idea that they were wrong to harm me at a pace I am comfortable with?

• Can you help me tell my story even when I don't have words for it?

• How could you do this?

• Can you help me find new ways to relate to my body?

• If we have different ideas about my problem, can you validate my ideas about why I do this ?

• Can you support my primary need to be in community with my peers?

• Can you support my healing in primary connection with my peers?

• Can you work with me as a team to fight the self-harm?

• Can you trust that I will stop cutting, burning, or other self-harm when I have learned to trust other ways to tell my story?

Questions for single women:

• Do you believe your own hands that harm you are "innocent hands"?

• Is it possible to make the connection between the self-harm and the early trauma, but still believe that you are capable of being in charge of stopping those activities that harm you?

• Do you believe that, until now, you have found the best way you know how to tell the story of your childhood abuse by harming yourself?

• How can members of your support network (maybe including your family) get involved in fighting against this self-harm? Can you coordinate these efforts?

• If you were not so busy dealing with trauma, what else would you be doing? Or like to be doing?

• Do you think it's fair that you have to reexperience the injustice of abuse over and over again?

• Why do so many women end up suffering through their lives at the expense of the people who have abused them?

• Do you not feel that you have already suffered enough?

Questions for couples:

• Do either of you believe that the woman's self-harm/addictions could be connected to her childhood trauma?

• Is it possible to make the connection between the self-harm and the early trauma, but still believe that she is capable of being in charge of her self-harming behaviors/addictions - instead of a slave to them?

• Do you both believe that the woman, until now, has found the best way she can to show to tell the story of her childhood abuse by harming herself?

• Could you imagine what life would be like if you could unite against this trauma (vs. her drinking, or other abusive behavior)?

• Who else could help you in this battle?

• What else holds you together as a couple besides your mutual enslavement to past abuses?

Questions for families:

• What is it that X is trying to tell us?

• What has each family member already tried to do to change the impact of this self-harm?

• How can each member of the family get involved in fighting against the reenactment of the trauma in a way that is supportive of the woman?

• Is their any trauma being reenacted in your own lives?

• What would help you to understand that the woman reenacting trauma is doing the best she can do at the moment?

• What might help each member of this family understand that letting go of self-harming behaviors takes more than the "just say no" approach.

• Based on your experience, are their specific ways this family interacts that have been proven to be helpful?