Containment and authorship

Hotel view 

I'm in another hotel room, still cheap, further north this time, with an interesting view of Aberdeen's port and ships.  The colour is a welcome respite to the Granite City's endless grey.  The view reminds me of that I once enjoyed in my first flat, an ocean eyrie underneath the penthouse at the end of The Shore, in Leith, Edinburgh's port.  

It was my birthday on Saturday.  Last year on the same day in the morning I had a meal out with my husband.  There's a happy, smiling picture in the restaurant.  In the afternoon there's another picture in my mother's house.  I look almost unrecognisable: shocked, in disbelief, and in tears.  A monstrous family member, (though not one I now recognise as having any family connection to me) the common or garden version of the truly evil despots that I started to write about nearly a year ago, announced that the next day he would be taking mum away from her home of thirty years to lock her up in England.  That was not quite the start, but just part of a campaign of terror against me and of indifference to mum and what she wanted in order to take control of and abuse her substantial assets and to force me, with joint power of attorney, completely out of the picture through intimidation, coercion, control of the narrative and all vicious, bullying cousins of that family.    

And he managed it. Eighteen months after it started I am still ill.  The symptoms are more or less manageable depending on the environment, context and triggers.  Yesterday I couldn't walk outside without a hoodie, dark glasses, headphones.  We came across, by chance, some family members he lied to and manipulated to do things he wanted.  They, like so many people, places and organisations are now connected with, part of the trauma I still live with.  I had a panic attack such that my throat felt like it was closing up. That particular version has never happened before and it was obviously terrifying.  For all you might think you want to die, your body panics when it thinks that's happening.

This year, with my own family, we were supposed to go to Glasgow for my birthday meal.  Son 1 wanted a second lift to university with the rest his stuff.  No, you drive, said the husband who had recently picked up a parking fine. I tried to make out the M80 through the hammering rain that made visibility almost nil he drove from the front back seat. Near the halls I pointed out a highly rated food truck I'd scouted out for him nearby, for future reference.  We were supposed to be eating the birthday meal elsewhere. We dropped off Son 1 and the husband then Son 2 and I got snarled up in the Glasgow LEZ, high parking charges and the coin-only parking machines. Twenty minutes later, somewhat frazzled we rejoined husband and Son 1, who, to my disbelief, were lunching from the same food truck.  We'll take you to the train station now, said Son 1, through his burger, mission clearly accomplished. I looked at the husband in astonishment, who shrugged in a perennial "What can I do?" way.  

"You could've said 'Wait!'" I said.  

"He hadn't had breakfast" he said, by way of ...something.  

"Whose fault is that?" I said, shortly knowing Son 1 never got up before lunchtime if he could help it. 

Son 2 wisely didn't say anything but plainly longed for a gyros.  

So I left them to it for that day, had a greasy snack on my own in a Venezuelan bodega and went to a tango practica where they were going to turn me away for having no cash. 

- "Can't you take a bank transfer?" 

- "No, we get charged," came the implausible reply. Luckily, a pal chummed me in with a fiver and another friend I've danced with since forever and hadn't seen for months turned up by chance. I went on to see a decent film.  It wasn't a bad day all in all, but I got home dispirited.

So I decided to treat myself to my own birthday treat instead: a couple of days away and visit Aberdeen art gallery which has long been on my bucket list. The trip also provided material for the most farcical tango experience since, well, since somehow announced they were going to run a class attached to my successful tango practica, which proved to be the beginning of the end of that adventure.  The vultures soon joined up, dived in. 

I didn't say, I was going to Aberdeen.  In fact, I didn't say anything at all, I just left. Figured he'd work it out from the door surveillance cameras, the bank account and the terse message the previous day about about unilateral decisions and being repeatedly disregarded. It seems to be a bit of a pattern.  Perhaps it's like pheromones.  It occurred to me later my surreptitious packing and desire to leave unobserved, avoiding the windows had  the flavour of someone living under surveillance in occupied territory.

I realised that I was finally taking some steps in authorship. My own life has been so shaped by looking after other people and the environment they live in.  It has been shaped by other people's voices: especially that of my father, his son,  mostly male bosses at work, my husband who has also been supportive, even our sons.  What they say to or me often followed a patriarchal line of domination, distortion, erasure, gaslighting and plain disregard.  

It isn't what my mother says about me.  If I want confirmation that someone outside the family perhaps might have behaved in a way that it might be better to quietly withdraw from, I ask mum what she thinks.  And even now, her moral compass is dead on. And for all her quiet, gentle, fun-loving good-humour mum could, and still can, turn a phrase to put someone completely in the their place with a devastating politeness I don't think I will ever be able to match.  And what the men say is not what, I might wonder if, perhaps, sometimes, on a good day, I might have some qualities that were not altogether contemptible or, more often, laughable.  

When you live in a state of shutdown or near shutdown, meaning, you can't move or speak you forget who you are, what defines you, what you enjoy.  

The suicide rate for caregivers is double the national average. That's without recent relational and institutional/systemic trauma layers on top. I learned a lot about how ways of coping.  It's actually ways of surviving.  You don't really cope with trauma, I think you try to survive it. And you can't heal from trauma until you're out of what is doing the traumatizing. 

It's perhaps not quite that linear.  You can carve out safer spaces for yourself where the trauma can't reach you as much but it's like hiding in a crater in a live warzone. When you have been so terrified that eyou become mute, frozen, you try to make yourself invisible even to you yourself.  The hypervigilant mind shuts down, being overloaded with threat. 

Anyway, those spaces you carve out, perhaps occasionally during the trauma and gradually thereafter, are I suppose anchors, harbours, refuges, sanctuaries.  They can be things like stones in your pocket, or a cherished object, places, people (people don't feature highly in my list).  

They can be rituals, environments like nature,  a safe space, a bench in a park. 

 

The recently regenerated Union Terrace Gardens, Aberdeen

They can be symbols you hold in your mind - earlier this year I created a whole dictionary of them to try to anchor what was happening to me and how to counter it.  That was before I learned that I am more aligned with Daoist concepts of flow and yielding than western ones of combat and countering.

They can even be even words. They can be a conscious breath, the sound of birdsong, a hot drink.  Birdsong once got me out of a car where I had been stuck in a shutdown for a Tesco carpark after the trauma freeze came over me during the period of intense assault by social services team that was oh, ironies, supposed to signpost, assist, support, with particular responsibility for vulnerable people.

Those "containers" allow you to begin small acts of authorship, of reclamation. A trip away, a hotel room, an art gallery, writing. 

Imagine my surprise when I turned a corner on the first floor and gasped.  Was it my imagination or "Does this look like young me?" I asked an art-savvy friend. Yes! He said.  I took it as a sign on my authorship journey. 

Anne Finlay by Dorothy Johnstone, Aberdeen Art Gallery

Sometimes I wonder which is the container and which the authorship.  Is the trip the container or the authorship.  On a big scale, the trip may be the container, but in itself, the railway carriage may not feel safe so the journey then becomes authorship, using your safe objects to give safety or containment.  

The container is something that makes you feel safe.  From there, you can do something that nourishes, fulfils, or expands your life.  Sometimes I think of the container as a bothy and authorship as walking wild land, land and events and weather beyond your control, but which gives nourishes your soul, perhaps freedom, perhaps adventure, perhaps breathing space. Authorship is something that you do even when there may not be carved out space for you, when things may not be going with you. It's not defiance though, not for its own sake. It's something more fulfilling.

For months and months my thoughts just looped in fear. It gets to the point where the triggers have been so successfully installed by the abuser fear loops and whoever works with them, that it creates an internal architecture of trauma that runs itself, that doesn't need those specific instigators to be there any more.  Then when I realised that I was afraid and all my behaviour was fear based then I started to loop on how to get out of it and when not completely shut down from exhaustion tried all kinds of obsessive strategies because you will try anything.  Now my thoughts don't loop on trauma all the time, just when I walk in my town or the phone rings or the mail comes through the door, so, less often.   

In-between the moments of fear I carve out authorship.  I shaped them big - whole trips this summer, to Devon three times between May and August - the first for respite and the others for recovery, so I thought, and to France.  I have overdone these trips. I was so desperate for authorship, but it becomes a different kind of tiring and all those unknowns in travel aren't necessarily good to an over-sensitised system. But I needed to get away from Scotland and reminders of what I have lived through

A sea change

You have to relearn what is safe, because almost nothing feels safe.  And if you start to feel safe then you can begin those small acts of authorship which might be creative but something that replenishes you. Because we don't just need air and water, food, sleep and shelter.  We need to feel safe because without that we can't move.  And then to function in a way that is not just providing those core physical needs we need things that feed our inner selves, that bring us joy and fulfilment and a sense of who we are. 

It surprised me that despite the last 18 months, when I did eventually dance again, it was in the milongas that I had a much better sense of who I was.  It was as though the milongas for me were outside all of what had happened. I hadn't lost my sense of discernment, my values, what I looked for, what I allowed, what I didn't.  I had and still have a sense of clarity in the milongas, that I don't have outside it.  Let there be no mistake, that clarity and confidence took me years to establish and many hard-earned lessons.  I also realised at a recent event that the milongas were not an impermeable shield.  I was more fragile than I thought and was easily pierced by reminders of mum's situation, by abrasive people or by people who sent mixed messages and confused me. 

But mostly I held on to that core clarity within tango, within tango events, because none of those undermining voices can reach inside the milonga.  In large part, that is because I had a good example of reference points early on.  Those chimed with my own instincts and made sense to me. A safe kind of  garden or bower grew around me so that although there were snakes, and things that could bite or sting I knew how to deal with them. On the whole, I kept myself safe, much safer certainly now, than many of the women I meet. Experience within the milonga, living in the milongas in accordance with those values lent me that clarity. Someone within the tango community said recently that I had a lot of confidence.  I don't.  I have very poor self esteem from my life outside the milonga, from external voices that run me down, and what has happened to me, especially over the last eighteen months, but also before that.  But it's different inside the milonga, it's a container that allows me authorship. I do see a common and sad lack of confidence in women who dance just fine, who are nice to dance with. I even dance with them sometimes and say nice things, specifically to try to boost their self esteem because I know that is what is happening to them.  I experienced something earlier in my tango journey, but found ways to overcome and it isn't through joining advanced dance classes. It has nothing to do with that. I think a lot of women never get over it though but I know from conversation that they don't have those guiding values that I was shown early on, that made sense to me then and more so with experience. Those values make sense to me and give clarity and confidence. They are like buoys, like markers but also like good instinct.

Good instinct, example and education don't always line up though, in fact rarely do. Twice now, I have heard of "socialisation" spoken of in let's say, not the usual positive terms. Once was by my Devon-based Alexander teacher who uses it when she is talking about how small children have good posture to "before they get socialised".  Robert Kegan from developmental psychology explicitly frames the “socialised mind” as limited: when your identity and values are shaped primarily by external voices (parents, culture, institutions), you lack authorship. His “self-authoring mind” is the next developmental stage: constructing your own system of values and compass. Beyond that, he even posits a “self-transforming mind,” able to hold multiple systems in dialogue. I was describing socialisation in this way to my more local Alexander teacher, recommended by the first.  Ah yes, he said.  This was given to me by one of her teachers (it must be decades ago). 

So dancing, for me, though I still don't do a lot of it, is certainly an act of authorship and a relational one at that, co-authorship then. I think for anyone who has been through relational trauma (where the trauma is caused or deliberately inflicted by another person) the possibility of this is surprising.  That I mostly lead, probably helped.  With great dancing from men being so thin on the ground, and relational trauma tending to come from men, to once or twice dance with a man and enjoy it is nothing short of miraculous.

So how to extend clarity and authorship outside the milonga? That's a whole other story.