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, the common or garden version of the evil despots that I started to write about nearly a year ago,  a sadistic bastard with co-power of attorney (I have the other) announced that the next day they would be taking mum away from her home of thirty years to lock her up in England.  They said it was temporary.  Of course, it wasn't.  This was the ramping up of a long period of the deliberate and systemic traumatising of me in order to control and exploit mum and her substantial assets. 

There aren't enough words in English, besides the truly vulgar to describe a Hitler character, a real fucking cunt. Rogue, scoundrel, reprobate, miscreant, blackguard, cad, they all sound faintly humorous, the kind of thing the cook in a period drama might say about the rascally elder son: Ooh, Master, so-and-so, he is a one.  Or, they imply contemptuous pity: wretch, low life, scum, as from high class to low.  The English caste system has to be to blame.  Even the more modern versions: prick, bellend, tosser, berk, imply someone more useless than evil.

And then we've got traitors and tyrants and machiavellian types - but they all sound a bit ...foreign, as though England can't convincingly produce such types. Too phlegmatic perhaps. Footnote: England's great at despotism, look at the protest laws nowadays.  We just lie about it. Pretend it's something else, for the good of the people. If any good came out of the 100,000 strong far right march in London - which, miraculously, has vanished from the news - it's that I doubt those people give a toss about protest laws.  the downside is that the government would rather arrest pensioners holding placards and truly challenging the protest laws is likely to end up making them worse, though it's hard to imagine what that can be, in a country that looks less like a liberal democracy by the year. 

End footnote. I don't know if words describing someone of the dark triad persuasion words exist in other languages. Scélérat, in French perhaps? It's one of those cases where unless you fully inhabit the language it's hard to know.

Anyway, the looping of fear that this evil motherfucker deliberately set running in me without my even realising what he was doing, is what has led to the year's absence of this blog, the anonymising and effective wiping of my Facebook account.  It is why my Instagram went private.  It even led to erasing my own name from my email and whatsapp accounts. It wasn't until I was living through disassociation, freezes, full body shutdowns unable to move or speak that I realised I was living inside a trauma state deliberately brought about by mockery, humiliation, intimidation, narrative control built on lies.  It was  ultimately to terrify me into silence and submission exactly as designed.  

It took me a long time to realise that you become so afraid you try to make yourself invisible in all ways. It led, in addition, to panic attacks, A&E, a pretty useless suicide intervention counsellor who admitted the case was "too complex" for her, a mental health home visit team (risk assessment more than help),  and a psy referral I never followed up, having glimpsed the horror of government social and psychological "services". I became unable to pay ourselves mum's basic expenses for months, when eventually, she came to live with us. It wasn't because it was logistically impossible.  I was just too scared.  Because of the abuser's actions and the many minions he manipulated to work for him (family, friends, social services), I couldn't answer the door, the phone, all message alerts had to be diverted.  I couldn't open my own mail.  I could barely function. I even stopped cooking for the first time in my life.

Many of these thigns I still can't do properly.  I sometimes wonder if there's anyone who occasionally answers the phone with more distillation of fear and scepticism in their voice. I still can't walk in my own town and feel safe.  I am terrified generally of obese, boorish, males with English accents and a hectoring manner. To ourselves we call him Pigface because of the greed and the resemblance though I regret the insult to pigs.  I referred to him as the Bloat on Instagram during a brief period when I tried to shed light on what was happening because to be trapped by him in all that stifling, suffocating darkness felt terminal and the lights of society very far away. It was a survival strategy, but I became to scared and too ill and too shutdown and stopped posting.

24.12.24

I have had to leave a cafe because one of those fat, aggressive English hectoring types sat near me, like a character from Men Behaving Badly or the manager in The Office. The Bloat never really grew up past those series, got permanently stuck in late 20th century off colour beery jokes and  misogyny.  I can still here the cackling, solitary laugh of the madman that accompanied anything of that ilk he found funny.  But because was sly, he didn't laugh at the jokes of course, he laughed at how cleverly everything was set up. It was all meta, you see, not actual misogyny, or anti gay, anti black or anything, just pretend.

The paramedic my husband called during an early shutdown too much resembled the abuser and couldn't treat me.  Canadian women are a trigger (Pigwife  - Canadian, obese, materialistic).  Pigwife is in marketing. I've never known how much the strategy of manipulating and controlling the narrative is down to her involvement as she's too canny.  Control the narrative and control perception.  Control perception and you control reality.  I was too afraid and then too ill to defend myself. I'd tried to raise adult protection concerns ten times with social services.  They were all ignored. I wrote to the Office of the Public Guardian twice.  Put it in a form they said. I became too ill, recounting what had happened.  I called John Swinny's office.  Oh, the council are a law unto themselves said the aide. I tried the police in Scotland.  Coercion and control only counts if you live with them they said, but were sympathetic.  he's taken loads of money. It's a civil matter they said.  We tried England.  They just scoffed.  I had another shutdown.    

By the time I tried getting in touch with lawyers it was too late.  Mum's life was destroyed, so was mine, my health was ruined, her assets plundered. He'd made sure he'd have effective  control of everything practically since before dad died and could remove or hide it from me - while keeping me under literal surveillance using cameras.  In any case, said the lawyers, it wasn't a foregone conclusion that we'd be able to use mum's money to fight her case to protect her from the abuse.  We'd have to pay up front and try to claim it back.  We didn't have the money to risk it and I just couldn't fight another battle. 

Within my town now I have to avoid - literally cross the road - overweight middle aged Scottish women.  This seemed to be a  "type" in the local social services who he manipulated to do his bidding, which was, his harassment of me and they could do it with far more time and resources.  While the Bloat initiated, they severely exacerbated the trauma symptoms described.  He might phone (using mum's phone) to manipulate, mock and frighten every now and then, or he'd turn up or scare, insult and shock me through the cameras at mum's house when we went to get clothes.  But they could do it every few days for him, so the shutdowns and panic attacks became constant under their assault. 

I cannot be part of any social group unless I know there is no-one from social services, and, ideally, the council or the NHS there. Since the council employs 5000 people in my town of 40,000 this is difficult.  I never feel safe walking in my town because of those women.  I need talismen, things that ground me and ideally dark glasses, hats, headphones, things to stop me spiralling in to panic. The nearer I get to their offices the worse I feel.  I don't think that fear will ever leave me unless we leave this backward and parochial town where my children grew up.  The fear has extended to anyone wearing a lanyard, anyone officious, institutions and anyone associated with them.  I am no longer able to go to the GP alone because I become mute again. GPs, with all the power imbalance associated with them, particularly at our surgery, are part of that whole trauma architecture that is so tied to systems with power imbalances.  

The GP referred me to me Community Mental Health who lied, tried to disempower me and hand me back as a vulnerable adult to the very team doing all the traumatising. I learned that the NHS doesn't protect you, the council, the government trumps the NHS.  And the NHS, for trauma, mostly medicates or risk assesses.  If you got anything useful at all, you'd be very lucky but probably end up more traumatised than before you had any contact with them.  That was certainly the case for me and everyone I've met to date.  So far with systems, so not so good.

*

This year, with my own family, we were supposed to go to Glasgow for my birthday meal.  No, you drive, said the husband who had recently picked up a parking fine. He proceeded to back seat drive  as I tried to make out the M80 through the hammering rain that made visibility almost nil. Son 1 wanted a second lift to university with the rest his stuff.  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.  I was somewhat frazzled when, some twenty minutes later we rejoined husband and Son 1, who, to my disbelief, were lunching from the aforementioned 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.  Silence is often the most successful strategy. 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 I somehow allowed someone to run a class off the back of my successful tango practica, which proved to be the beginning of the end of that adventure. 

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 disregarded over and over.  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.

It 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, is also shaped by other people's voices: especially that of my father, his son, my husband, our first son and that what they say about me often followed a patriarchal line of domination, distortion, erasure, gaslighting and just plain disregard.  Also, that that that is not 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.  Mum eventually came to live with us for 5 months before the Bloat's lies forced her to be taken away again.  She had a great life within our family, was fit, out every day, doing activities, going to concerts, seeing people. I realised one day she had walked 8 miles at 85.  This was not long before she she left.  She and I had chosen a snazzy pair of white and gold Nike trainers for her that in the home she never wears, slippering about in a pair of ballet pumps with no foot support.  

Mum came to us of her own volition.  He tried to stop us.  Manipulated her.  Lied to her.  Refused to leave. We called the police and he was sent off with a caution. She'd never wanted to leave her home, or Scotland, or us.  She'd begged us all her life not to put her in a care home.  It was her great fear.  It was damn near the first thing the Bloat did - well, after theft.  She came to us in a very poor state from 4 months of incarceration in a dementia unit 250 miles from her home, community and church of 30 years.  She was suffering from lack of activity, poor footwear, foot damage caused by the same, a bad back, over-calorific meals, a lack of mental stimulation, as stated by the GP, physio and podiatrist.  She could barely walk two blocks.  He had confiscated her hearing aids and told the staff not to reinstate them.  Inability to hear properly is a recognised key risk for dementia or worsening it.  \

Now once again she's alone, neglected, in the second care home he stuck her in and reverting to exactly the same condition.  He controlled everything about the first care home and set up a narrative of lies about me to the staff.  We got zero information and were completely cut off.  He controlled mum's phone, her environment, what the staff were told about us, we asked if we could take her out, the home didn't reply.  

Because he still controls everything and everyone connected with mum I can't go to the new care home directly and I can't go alone. The first time we went my husband had to double check he wasn't there even though we'd been told ahead of time that he wasn't.  He's nothing if not unpredictable.  Even so I couldn't get our of the car and had to be walked to the door, whereupon I had panic attack. I could only get through the visit in dark glasses, a mini bottle of prosecco I shared with mum and music.  Now the family gets her and I meet her in the village.  The last time it took a glass of wine at the nice hotel where we meet her and two  whiskys in the normal, friendly pub afterwards to get over it plus another one back home. It destroys me, what he's caused, seeing her like that.  She retains though all her authentic emotional impulses, delight to see us, sorrow if I'm sad, her desire to help, her enthusiasm. But last time he locked her up she was put on antidepressants for the first time in her life.  Though I was 250 miles away and unable to see her, naturally he blamed me - for sending her loving cards about our life - cards  that I discovered he confiscated anyway.  We sent a photo album for Christmas of what we had managed to do in that past year before the enforced separation.  He intercepted that too.  It contradicted what he wanted to believe, or pretended to believe, that we didn't care about mum, that our move to Scotland, the nearly twenty years we'd spent choosing to living twenty five minutes from them, our more than weekly visits with them, all meant nothing.  

It would have been entirely in his interests and, because of the degree and viciousness, lies and calculated treachery, seemed to be his design to drive me to suicide.  Through Herculean efforts, he nearly succeeded, several times.  In October when it became clear that mum going to England "temporarily" had been a ruse, another lie; also at Christmas and in February when we got mum back but he started his new terrorising campaign using social services.  

It must have been so galling, so near to all the spoils, all the control, none of the questions.  

When mum stayed with us, she could still talk about happy periods of her life, time in Africa for instance.  But he'd stolen those photo albums so those memories couldn't be reinforced and he'd cherry picked his way through the rest of the family photo albums.

I was happy to give mum a good life within our family. She had my room and en suite. We all moved rooms.  I slept on the floor in another room at first.  She had my rest and work space for her sitting room.  I was her sole caregiver, even when she eventually went to daycare for a few hours each week.  When that state of trauma-induced shutdown is compounded by the burnout of 24 hour caregiving to someone with Alzheimer's in a siege environment and with attacks rather than support from social services, you live very close to the edge.  

I was too scared at first to get mum outside support.  He'd gone on about "continuity of care", using all the buzzwords.  Anything I did, if I breathed, it was harming mum.  So obviously, if she went to daycare for a change of scene and to give me some much needed relief, it wasn't going to be continuity of care so I couldn't do it. And then of course I imagined him mocking me in front of the monitoring professionals: "Of course she can go to daycare, are you mad?"  No matter what you do, it's wrong. But he's not there, in any of this internal discussion, so all of that, is the architecture of trauma, set up by him with that one specific criticism, accusing me, falsely and in another context altogether of failing to provide "continuity of care".  Because it was always criticism.  Dad was like that, blaming, criticising. And dad played games too, to control and to win. Just nothing like as vicious and as avaricious as this.

When mum was taken away, he and social services between them engineered it the same way I suspect he tried to drive me to suicide: we don't have to do it, we can make her do it.  If we pile on enough pressure, she'll give her up herself. He was always like that, cunning, strategic.  The kind of person who sees truth not as a value, but as a tool.  

And that's what happened.  Lies.  Complaints.  A damning one sided, entirely partisan report. It really was as if he was paying them. 3 doctors, the police, Alzheimers UK, mum's friends, social services, themselves had seen mum, seen how well cared for she was, how happy, how full of praise for her care she was, for me, and heard her say categorically that she wanted to stay with me.  Now apparently, I was harming mum, keeping her from the person who'd abducted her, isolated her from everything familiar against her wishes and stolen money and possessions. He got a friend to back him up, that I was keeping mum from this friend too whereas in fact we'd bent over backwards to offer this person opportunities to see mum.  I was too traumatised by then so my husband went to respond to the complaint.  He was completely ignored.  We never got to see what the so-called independent advocate wrote about mum but i'd already found out they were steered by the council and what the council claimed mum said was nothing like what mum said to us. 

They said they were coming round and threatened the police if I didn't co=operate. I ran out of the house in terror the first time. The left a letter saying, bizarrely, they were coming to investigate suspected harm to mum, even though the report had already claimed it.  It made no sense.  The next time I froze and made awful wailing sounds that were increasingly accompanying the shutdown.  My husband there and then said that was it.  He went out and to the background of this awful sound, told them they had so thoroughly traumatised me they had taken away my ability to function or care for mum any more and that they were to remove mum by Friday and do whatever they had been angling to do - obviously give her back to Pigface. So that's what happened.  They didn't even bother telling us where they put her.        

Bloat wriggled out of any accountability by sheer bullying and lies. The expectation is he'll either change mum's will or more likely not bother and just continue to siphon off the assets with no accountability.  Visibility of all mum's savings, investments and income streams has been hidden from me by Bloat since dad died. It's amazingly common, I've found with power of attorney situations, for one person to be left with the care, often unpaid, as I was, and the other the other take all the control, especially financially control, and to line their own pockets, though there isn't usually the level of abuse and complicity there has been here. 

  The first time mum went to daycare I went to lie down for ten minutes.  I found I literally couldn't move my legs to get up.  It wasn't the increasingly familiar trauma shutdown from a trigger by the abuser, his allies or social services.  It was exhaustion, a kind of burnout compounded by trauma.  At that stage I was only just coming to realise I was living with trauma.  I lay there semi-comatose for a few hours drifting in and out of consciousness. 

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.