Meaning making: psychological pathways to harm

The Buddhist perspective I read went on to say that vice comes from lack of knowledge or lack of perspective, this doesn't excuse the action but allows us to see it clearly and move forward from it.

So it removes hatred, fixation, etc.

That was attractive. The trouble was, I wasn't convinced by the "harm is just mis-seeing" point. But maybe I could take the second part of the Buddhist idea, attach to the front of it a better, psychological explanation and move on that way...

So my version would read: "Harms by others are caused by specific behavioural pathways with psychological explanations. Understanding these don't excuse the action but allows us to see them clearly and move forward from it,"

So what are the pathways to causing harm?   Eventually, I came up with a long list and it took me a while to separate them out and to separate pathways from mechanisms.  I realised you might be able to test if a pathway was a genuine pathway not a mechanism by using an "internal logic" quotation. I did this right of the bat so there are probably lots of errors and omissions and I'm sure my list is not exhaustive.

You can easily test these out by taking your most recent peeve / character in a novel / film and ask yourself what was the pathway to harm?   

I didn't include genetics because I don't think it's a pathway.  I think it's something that, depending also on environmental factors might make someone more inclined to take a certain pathway to cause harm. They are background risk factors. The same is true of environmental factors and upbringing.

The list could be ranked and divided any number of ways.  A court of law would certainly differ in categorisation. 

Non-vice pathways

1. Ignorance / unaware / misjudgement pathway.  This is accidental harm.  "I didn't realise / think it through.  It was a mistake".  
   
   
2. Moral conflict pathway: trolley problem, genuine assisted suicide partners, medical triage choices. "I did it to help".  Can be dangerously close to "misguided care".
   
   
3. Curiosity/ boundary testing pathway e.g. non desperate, non-compulsive shoplifting "I did it to see if I could get away with it".  Typical adolescent "high jinks" pathway.  This looks similar to the incentive based pathway but the fact that wrong-doer may benefit materially is not the primary motivation. It can slide into incentive based harm.
   
   
4. Obedience pathway: I was told to / just doing my job.  That's how the Nazi's thrived and how councils end up being ridiculed for "jobsworth" decisions ("for non UK readers: It was more than my job is worth not to" ). The 1960s Milgram experiments show the extraordinary susceptibility of people to authority figures, even to the point of administering lethal injury (when told to, subjects administered electric shocks they didn't know were fake to actors posing as victims.  In some cases, subjects administered shocks that would have been fatal had they been real.)
   
   
5. Conformity pathway: A cousin to obedience "I did it because I wanted to fit in".  Classic peer pressure induced harm. 
   
   
6. Emotional disregulation pathway: Unpremeditated assault e.g. "I saw red". Typically followed by regret or rationalisation.
   
   
7. Role compartmentalisation pathway: This is happening in Minneapolis just now. "In this role, different rules apply.” This  pathway is a moving of a goalpost.  E.g illegitimate harm is legitimised through e.g. non-legal means. Or "rules" regarding harm are suspended.
   
   
8. Occupational pathway: This is a pathway to harm caused by the military and similar groups, controversially seen as legitimised  harm.

9. Addiction / compulsion pathway: There is harm that drives the addiction, hence "I couldn't help it" and harm carried out under the influence of the addiction such as drugs / alcohol, "I didn't know what I was doing".

10. Survival pressure pathway "I did it because I was starving"

    
    
11. Institutional / structural / systemic.   This pathway to harm includes failure of care: institutional neglect, bystander harm, siding with perpetrators.  It is is harm caused by indifference, bureaucracy, tickboxes.  Systemic betrayal is aresult of this pathway.  “This is just how things work.”

12. Control as protection / Misguided care / Paternalism / Coercive "help". “I know what’s best for you.” This can fall close to a vice-based pathway depending on intention.

    
    

Vice-based pathways

1. Instrumental, incentive or cost / benefit based pathway:  "I did it because I calculated it was worth the risk / reward to me / harm to others"
   
   
2. Identity or Status protection or expansion pathway
   
   
   “I can’t afford to lose who I am / my position / what I have
    Also: "I'm entitled.  I deserve it.  I'm owed it / They started it / Because I'm good / right/ justified." 
   
   
   This category includes a wide range of mechanisms to cause harm.g. silencing critics, scapegoating, retaliatory harm, domintion, ego-building in narcissitic patterns, at other's expense, narrative distortion, reputational damage, power hoarding.
   
   

3. Enjoyment pathway.  Sadists and "dark triad" personalities would use this pathway "I enjoy the humiliation / pain // messing with other people's ideas of good/ truth etc".   Control / manipulation, cruelty, provocation are mechanisms.  The perpetrator will like get enjoyment from these too as well as the results.  Cathy Ames in East of Eden is a classic example of someone taking this pathway.  Note, that none of the explain the psychological reason someone takes a particular pathway to harm.  

4. Ideological pathway: "I did it in God's name" "The cause is higher than the person"

Moral disengagement 

This is a well studied phenomenon where people detach their moral standards from their behaviour.  They know what's wrong.  They just choose not to see / admit it.

E.g.  “They deserved it”, “It wasn’t that bad”, “I had no choice”, “Everyone does it” "They brought it on themselves" "It wasn't my fault", "It's not a big deal", "It's just how it is" "You misinterpreted".

It is the line of least resistance that people take to avoid thinking about or feeling  the wrong.  It allows a neutralising of conscience because the mind is built to preserve an tolerable self image. 

In the literature it's often described as what allows harm to happen.  But I think it is less a pathway to harm but more a cognitive mechanism that enables, sustains, or conceals other harm pathways.  It's more facilitating and sustaining than generative. 

Is this the default lubricant for wrongdoing because of its ubiquity? It's hard to pin down because it's so common it's almost invisible.  It doesn’t require ideology, authority, pathology, or passion, just ordinary self-talk.

Clues are denial, reframing actions / facts, blame-shifting, diffusing responsibility, downplaying etc

It also sounds close to ego protection: but the identity pathway is a route to harm: I'm going to cause this harm because I deserve X or I'm right. Whereas moral disengagement is more a self-justification after the fact for whatever the actual pathway to harm was.   You can tell moral disengagement is not a pathway to harm because it is an excuse and an excuse is not a pathway.

Habitual drift 

This is also not a primary pathway to harm, but a post harm effect.  Small office stationary thefts are the classic example.  The pathway was identity entitlement "e.g. I deserve it" plus instrumental (cost benefit analysis: "I probably won't get caught and if I am it'll be a slap on the wrist").  Small violations become normalised over time.  The person stops experiencing the act as "wrong".   

Much wrongdoing uses multiple pathways

This was something else I noticed: 

E.g. a fraudster may use moral disengagement, reinforced by habitual drift, protected by identity narratives.

Pigface used several pathways and many mechanisms within these.  Clear pathways were:

- Incentive based

- Identity / status protection/expansion- enjoyment

- Control as protection

- Enjoyment

with  moral disengagement as an enabler

The pathways to harming me taken by social services were institutional and structural harm primarily, + role compartmentalization with  moral disengagement as an enabler. It was compounded by institutional harm from the other organisations mentioned and the general unawareness in society.  

Pathways explain why harm is initiated; mechanisms explain how it succeeds; enablers like moral disengagement explain why it persists.

Conversely, sometimes, a behaviour like "resource competition" might use one of several pathways depending on the context.  It might be about survival, or identity protection / expansion or instrumental.

Did it help move what happened into the past?

That's the key when it comes to recovering from trauma.  Do those memories reactivate? Do things in the world trigger them or trigger sensations of fear and lack of safety?

Did understanding the pathways to harm that exist and that were taken in my case help me? 

It was an interesting exercise.  Maybe it helped detach me a bit. Or maybe it confirmed some degree of detachment. I could do the whole thing completely unemotionally, even thinking about the things Pigface did. So maybe it has helped. But I think I will still get triggered by many things, and still feel unsafe .

Other ideas came to me during the exercise which made me think there was more to it than understanding the psychological reasons I was harmed. And then I realised - and had even stated it above.  That was just it.  I didn't know the psychological reasons.  I just knew the pathways.  Even while I had been careful to separate pathways from mechanisms from tendencies from character types, I had missed the main point.  I could now take a good guess at the pathways the abuser took.  But I still didn't know the why behind it. I was doing a Bertrand Russell, trying to excavate to find the truth and not getting there and not now wanting to excavate, at least not that way.   By now I didn't think knowing why was really going to help me.

Meaning making: "Harm is done from ignorance"

In his 1989 acceptance speech for the Nobel prize, the Dalai Lama, head of  Tibetan Buddhism made the statement above. 

So either people don't realise or care about the harm they are causing others because they focused on something else.

This was obviously pertinent to what happened to mum and me but it also reminded me of Plato expounding the Socratic doctrine: no one willingly does wrong:

If someone does what is bad or unjust, it is because they misjudge what is truly good, not because they clearly see the good and freely choose evil. Therefore, wrongdoing is ignorance, false belief, or distorted perspective, not deliberate malice.

It recurs through Plato's work.

In 'Meno' virtue is a form of knowledge with wrong action following from ignorance of the good; .

In 'Protagoras' Socrates argues against akrasia (weakness of will). People don’t knowingly choose worse over better; they miscalculate pleasure and harm.  (The ability to "measure" this difference well is a skill so this ability to choose well (virtue) is a form of knowledge/skill.)

In 'Gorgias' the claim is that tyrants and wrongdoers are more miserable than their victims because they act from ignorance of the good.

In the Buddhist doctrine, justification for wrong action is nothing but veiled ignorance.  

This part I could go along with: The abuser could have genuinely believed through persuading themselves in a misguided way that:e.g. 

-  he was entitled to take my parents money and overpay himself in "expenses" because of all his "effort" or because he "deserved" it.  The fact was we saw in the accounting there was a history of him going to dad for annual handouts to prop up his wife's redundancy or for house improvements and such like despite both living in a modest house and being middle class professional. 

- what in reality was a power grab and theft of information required to execute Power of Attorney could have been justified in his view as a burden placed upon him to administer mum's asset as the only "real responsible adult".   

Fraudsters and embezzlers often convince themselves that they deserve the things they take because of a sense of injustice or no one will notice or they can get away with it.  I was the only witness so I needed getting rid of.

- getting rid of me was also trying to minimize the "harm I was causing" so probably convinced himself it was actually virtuous.  Never mind the means of deliberately causing trauma, the end result was what was important. It's a kind of "I was the instrument of God's will" argument without God, or with him as God, which fits with the God complex characteristics that tyrants use self-justify. 

Ultimately anyway she "brought it on myself" is an even better, common justification in this kind of skewed logic.  That way the abuser can appear squeaky clean. They are just burdened by a problematic individual who, wait for it, they just tried to help. That would entirely in line with the warped reasoning of abusers who try to make the victim the problem.  

The US administration is doing the exact same right now.  The thousands of Minneapolis striking protestors and the local authority are mischaracterised as "left wing agitators".   Alex Pretti, nurse, nature lover, who minutes before he died at helped a stranger find a parking space, with his hands up had apparently pulled a gun on half a dozen armed ICE agents. And then lawyers had to file to stop ICE  destroying evidence. Anyone who opposes ICE tactics is apparently terrorist. They are arresting elderly members of churches just because they are protesting.  Many legal and law-abiding US citizens are afraid to leave their homes, not afraid of criminals, robbers and rapists, but afraid of being murdered by the State.

Someone who dominates and controls through force and intimidation and who distorts narrative by lying and manipulating facts is likely characterised in psychological terms as a malignant narcissist and are foundational in the dark triad personality construct. These are the terms on which Pigface operated.  If a state acts this way, as is happening just now in the US, its nearest definition would be totalitarian. 

Focusing on the individual behaviours described, all of this I could, at a pinch - and it took an effort - see as  "miscalculation" in the Socratic sense, or as mistaken/misguided in the Buddhist idea, driven by psychological reasons.

Plato approaches a more psychological explanation of a person or embodied soul later which we might leave for another time. 

Still, in the end I dismissed this Plato / Buddhist explanation of being "ignorant" or "misguided" as a "why" for the kind of relational abuse I experienced.  

First of all, he did know what he was doing.  He did know he was causing harm.  That was the point of it.  He wasn't ignorant.  He probably justified it as a "necessity" so as not to think of himself as a monster, but absolutely knew and he was probably also told by social services or his uncle who had been told by my husband that I was "claiming" I was traumatised. So he knew and he pressed on til he got what he wanted. At that point, I had forgotten about the "don't care" part.  Anyway, I had added that in.  The Dalai Lama was talking about ignorance and he did know what he was doing.

I also knew that there was part of the abuser that didn't just need or want the assets, power and control but enjoyed it and even enjoyed the distress that caused.  

I can't prove the enjoyment of the distress in any concrete way but I saw it with my own eyes as a child, the sadism in his when he engineered situations and lied just to get me into trouble for the sheer pleasure of watching it.  I had forgotten it but saw it again in his eyes and in his grin at me while he was manipulating mum, on my doorstep.  He refused to listen to her say she wanted to stay with us then using her dementia to try to coerce her to leave him "wouldn't you like to stay in your own bed in your own house tonight" (the one he'd moved her out of  and into the rothouse) and "he'd bring her back to us the next day if she really wanted" (no chance). He saw my horror at that manipulation of an ill, 85 year old woman, freezing cold and shaking, his mother and I could see he got the same pure delight from engineering and controlling that situation of pain.

So the Buddhist doctrine and Socrates were too simplistic. There are sadists in the world and I felt these doctrines just ignored that some people do know the harm they are causing and carry on anyway and even actively get pleasure causing what is bad.

I started to wonder if modern psychology or biology had better answers for why we do harm. That was the next question. 

I asked my son.  

- People don't realise they're doing harm, was his first answer.  Bang on Socratic answer! 

- Anything else? 

- An emotional response.

- What, like, crime of passion? 

He had other ideas and I realised there were plenty of psychological explanations for harm.  There was no need for "forces of good and evil" or "no explanation for great harm" or "they know not what they do" which had all been previous possibilities.

That felt like it could be a relief. Maybe there was a reason why he had done all these things that I could understand and then move on?  

I can hear at this point, and if you, reader, got this far, some part of you is probably also saying, Hmmm, not sure about that.

But it's a journey, right?

Meaning making: good and evil

As soon as dad died and Pigface did his power grab, it became clear he had been planning and plotting about money and control for months before dad’s death. From that point onwards I started grappling with the “why?”, the “how”. How could someone do this, do things so intensely evil, something that would never in a million years occur to me to do, never mind plan it out so strategically over such a long period of time? Everything stopped at “evil”. That’s the empathy gap I have mentioned. You just can’t imagine the moral world or the absence of ethics in the world of someone who could do those things. 

Then with the overwhelm of the trauma, meaning didn't exist, didn't matter, there was no meaning, get on with life.  

I think it was the news, the antics of Trump, the mobilisation of ICE that started to trigger the thoughts about the abuser again and of good and evil. I could see in Trump so many of those behaviours that I had seen in the dictators that I had written about previously, and that were shared by the abuser.

From September onwards, back at the site of the harm, in day-to-day life, every time I had a threat response that was triggered by something somebody said or did, I saw in that person the potential for harm or indeed the actual causing of some minor harm. Trauma induced hypervigilance was doing it's protective job on overdrive: scanning for harm.

Years before, I had read The Dungeon Democracy which I wrote about on The Outpost. The author was concerned with how ordinary people could become or support Nazis. He said that we all, we all have that seed to do great evil in us and we must be alert to it.

I thought there was much truth in this long before the Pigface trauma. After I read the book  I could easily see in people's behaviours the potential prison guard, the prisoner oppressing his fellow arm.  It felt like the book had been waiting for me. I could see those who might harm and those who probably wouldn't.  Dad had been an ethically mixed character but he was on the side of the good guys - along with us and the US so I though then (or America as I often referred to it back then).  Mum was on the side of the angels, it was plain as day.  

I'd been brought up to do as I was told and look for the good.  It damaged me in the real world. I was immensely naive and also sensitive. I was exploited and harmed many times. I could see how mum was good but not stupid.  I just tried to be good.  And eventually  I changed.  I became suspicious of people.  I began to read them, to trust my instincts and I reaslised my instincts could often be relied on - when I remembered to use them. Hope often did a number on caution. Seeing people's ethics increasingly so clearly through was part of my reluctance to rejoin ordinary society.  The milongas of the tango world were microcosms in which is was easy to observe behaviour.

Given the way the Trump administration has spoken recently about might and strength as though ethics has no place in the world, it was easy for my world to split into black and white, good and evil, not in religious terms, but in ethics. I was brought up with an immensely strong sense of ethical and unethical behaviour. My grandmother never lied.  She was lovely.  I believed from childhood that no-one should ever break a promise and you could tell a lot about a person by that. You still can!  I knew about the stupidities of polarisation but my experience became part of the much talked about polarisation of the world.  I had been brutalised and brutalised people can't afford to see much grey.

The abuser seemed the personification of evil on an individual level. Since the time of the abuse he had become not-really-human to me.  He was a monster.  I never referred to him by his "Christian" name.  I never used the family relationship title we used to have.  I will never have any contact with nor see him ("it"), ever again, under any voluntary circumstances.  The amount of abuse and harm has been so enormous. 

There was no explanation for how he had turned out.  There was no meaning other than evil.  For some reason, some people were made good and some were made near enough pure evil.  I didn't need religion to explain it, it was just what happened. 

And then I was reminded of another possibility.

Meaning making: if there is no meaning, move on!

Disquietude,  James McBeyy, 1914, Aberdeen Art Gallery 

Pigface and PigWife eventually got what they wanted. They  effectively got permanent control of mum for the second time because they had utterly crushed me.  I still had power of attorney but it had always been meaningless.  They took the information, the power, the assets, mum and the narrative. I've resigned POA so they have the house too and everything in it they haven't already taken.

My narrative is what this is about now.  At least trying to put down my story. It's all I've got.

 I was having panic attacks and shutdowns up until they took mum as the Social Services attacks increased . The direct attacks on me stopped because I was no longer an obstacle and the shutdowns stopped almost straight away. 

I was strung out for the last two weeks of June 2025. Although mum was a prisoner again I had finally accepted I couldn’t live my life for her and especially trying to defend her at the cost of my health, probably my life and my family had really suffered since February 2024 when I left them while my elder son was doing his Higher exams to look after both my parents at their house. 

I went away three times in July and August to try and get over it all and to get away from a hum that afflicted me in the house from the day mum left. They had won. Mum was trapped, their prisoner. I was in pieces. It was time to move on. Things seemed better when I was away but I realised I was more emotionally fragile than I thought. 

Once I came back, in September 2025 to my city, to my house, the site of the attacks. To counter those memories and try to rebuilt myself, I decided to make an effort to do nice things fo myself, something small every day. I went to the wonderful Art Gallery in Aberdeen during a couple of days away.

 There’s a view then that trying to understand why people can do the horrors that people can do to one another isn’t pertinent to recovery. It just pulls you on to their ground and potentially back into the sickening things they did. So the focus changes to trying to reclaim your life, get therapy, to doing whatever moves you forward. 

It didn’t wholly work. Stress and anxiety became quite severe. 

 Sometimes doing a nice craft thing with a group brought about a near panic attack. 

 I was terrified of people a lot of the time, but it could be situational. 

I couldn’t walk in the streets of my town without fear.  It got worse the closer I got to the council offices. I had to start masking up to go into town. 

I couldn’t see the GP alone because I became mute there. I had to wear a hat, dark glasses. There was a power imbalance there and a history of being disempowered there.

I couldn’t go to social events in my own town. I was terrified of meeting social services but not knowing them. 

Whole categories of people became threatening: including all Scottish women of working age in my town. 

 If I went to an event something without a clear structure, it was worse. Things improved if I returned to something where I knew the people and felt less threat. 

Between September and December I developed a raft of physical problems: suspected neuromas in my foot, upper right arm muscle pain, crawling in my face, tinnitus in my ears, a lesion on my spleen that hadn't been there in January, muscle pain in my left arm, and finally my neck. From December 2025 through January 2026 I have had near constant pain under my right ribs. I've had it before.  The cause isn't known.  I've often had it in the holidays.  

I didn’t think much about meaning I don’t think, in this time. I was mostly trying to deal with the health issues, get therapy and move on. My grounding techniques were helping keep the intrusive thoughts at bay.

Meaning making: Moral injury.

 

After a while I thought that there was no point trying to find meaning in situations where a moral injury has occurred: when you are forced to act or witness things happening against your most deep-seated values, where you suffer betrayal from people supposed to protect you or be on your side. Your mind can’t grasp, can’t fathom how that can happen.  That is where the moral injury in relational trauma comes from.  Your values don’t make sense any more.  Your safety doesn’t exist any more.

I came to a point where I was so overwhelmed with trauma I thought there is no meaning in what happened. It was just a terrible, long period of evil affecting me and mum. Maybe a similar thing happens when after a terrible event people decide there is no God.  God is meant to give meaning but when someone doesn’t understand that meaning and doesn’t want to accept that His meaning is mysterious, they abandon him.  I guess I just skipped the God phase and decided there was no meaning, no reason for such evil. When you can’t comprehend what seems like immense evil, it wouldn’t be surprising to just not admit meaning.

Do perpetrators of abuse get caught?

While dictators or those who murder and infringe human rights are eventually often assassinated or pursued, exposed and rightly condemned by history, abusers with similar behaviours on an individual level are largely ignored and usually not caught. 

Almost none of them are caught and even fewer punished. Even then the punishments are often felt not to fit the crimes.  Again, we can only talk about domestic abuse because the wider relational abuse of the type I suffered isn't even recognised.

Less than 24% of domestic abuse is reported.

Only 6% of those result in a charge and even fewer in a conviction.

Most abusive men are easily clever enough to evade the police, cover their tracks or avoid circumstances where they could be charged altogether while still committing abuse. It's easy to do and the law is weak. For Pigface it was an absolute walk in the park.  Too easy, really. The really shocking thing is that the Social Services department that should have investigated the serious allegations of abuse of mum, never mind the carefully planned traumatisation of me, fell over themselves to help him - and they all seemed to be women! 

it is often only in the cases of a few incontrovertible and extreme cases of usually physical abuse where the victim (invariably a woman) has either killed herself or sometimes killed the partner in self defence that abuse is investigated at all. There are countless men doing, today, killing and causing life threatening harm, through injuries to women, psychologically abusing them to suicide, causing levels of fear and stress so that many die anyway from stress related diseases and these men are just not being caught. Most frightening of all: they know they can get away with it.

Until it happened to me I had no idea about this. You don’t.  You don’t think it will happen to you. You think someone else will take care of it.  And when it happens to you you think someone will protect you. There isn’t anyone. Most of us are totally ignored. Unless you have money to pay lawyers. Then someone is paid to listen to and advise you but that by no means brings protection. An abuser can't afford to be wrong, not legally and not in terms of their ego. 

They are not punished, or are insufficiently punished, because the witnesses are intimidated into erasure, or because they kill themselves and it is often never known and because we don’t have a strong enough mechanism, or enough interest, to link victim abuse to suicide even when it is long term.  We don’t even have that.  I think the known, victim suspected suicides are vastly higher even than is reported.

We don’t recognise in a punitive way, the severe physical damage that is caused by the stress of psychological abuse. 

We don’t  allow torture, officially, but we allow men to torture women all the time and get away with it.

We don’t genuinely recognise abuse that isn’t domestic or sexual and that it can have the same effect.

Sometimes the victim manages to escape or survive as best they can only to ensure the stress induced illnesses associated with abuse victims. The victim just wants to try and reclaim the fragments of their life and not dwell on the past. That's what happened with me. I feel relieved that  - so far at least - I have escaped with my life even while my physical and mental health is in tatters. But the last thing you want to do is provoke the perpetrator or expose yourself to more institutional betrayal.

An abuser that is not punished is emboldened and is always waiting.

What happens to the victims of relational abuse?

 Individual vs mass trauma

It's easy to lose and ignore trauma that happens on an individual level, the inestimable, interminable cruelty of one person to another: the woman who kills herself, found trapped in a flat with an abusive partner, who tried to get help and was ignored. That is an individual horror that affects everyone around her. The horrors of WW2 were many individual horrors on a massive scale.  They, for obvious reasons are remembered.  But she and the many like her are not because they are all separate cases and nobody sees a pattern because almost nobody is looking.

The victims

I had been betrayed on multiple levels, I had been gaslit, I had been made to look like the problem. I started to think about all the victims of relational abuse and what happened to them.

They die.

A lot of them die.

Women who have experienced domestic abuse (there don't seem to be figures for more generalised relational abuse) have a 44% higher risk of mortality from all causes compared to those who have not. The University of Warwick found they have a 51% higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, and a 31% increase in  cardiovascular disease. 

Why diabetes? With chronic stress, cortisol and adrenaline stay elevated far beyond what the body evolved for. These hormones raise blood glucose on purpose (to fuel escape). When this happens daily, for months or years, cells become insulin resistant which is the core defect in type 2 diabetes. It is the direct metabolic consequence of living under threat.

And it’s so easy to blame the victim: they brought it on themselves.  The person is so ill they can’t argue back. They’ve also been crushed. Trauma removes agency, fogs the brain, creates short term memory problems, and fills your days with fear. How can someone in that situation argue back?

Even if you have money, going to a lawyer is not failsafe. Dad's lawyer supported and thus emboldened the abuser. And even if you can afford a lawyer and even if a lawyer helps youyou may not win because an abuser will lie and try to make you the problem. You may end up poor and . 

This is one of the greatest failings of society: the failure to recognise politically, legally, punitively and as a society the evidence that shows that abusers cause long term illness and death in their victims. 

It’s another one of these too messy, too confusing, too hard to prove, too individual issues that crop up when one human causes massive harm to another.  

One national police report showed 93 victim (i.e. suspected abuse related) suicides vs. 80 homicides in England and Wales, 2022-23. What that means is that suicide from abuse can be and has been higher than murder while conviction rates are almost non existent.

That was a very clear sense that I have had all through this ordeal.  That the perpetrator was trying desperately hard to bring about my illness and ideally my death but not in a way that anyone could point the finger directly at him. He knows society is not there yet and he could get away with it. He wants me to "bring it on myself" because, with, no link between harm and illness and death that's the obvious attack. It would get rid of me, he would inherit alone and most of all he would “win”, through domination, control and this lack of interest in messy, harm cases, by society.

Women are also more likely to have chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, three times more likely to develop severe mental illness and other debilitating health issues.

Three female victims of domestic abuse die a week by suicide.

A woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK.

Why isn't it treated as a public health emergency? Because 60% of the House of Commons are still men. Domestic abuse doesn’t touch everyone who is in power and some are perpetrators. And there are a lot of other crises, especially in health.

Why is this different? Because it is not random illness. It is deliberate harm inflicted by a man on a woman. But if more people can be saved by spending money in another way in health then that is seen as more important. Maybe it is.

But this is not really about spending money.  It’s about our values, who we are, that we think letting abusers kill women every week and give them life sentences of ill health is not a priority, in fact so not a priority that these astonishing figures are not more widely known.

Remember, those figures are  only about domestic abuse.  Abuse of vulnerable adults like mum does have a name but it’s not really domestic abuse if it’s not by a partner. That’s what domestic abuse is seen as. Other kinds of relational abuse don’t even have a proper name. By how much would those statistics go up if other kinds of relational abuse in families or in other settings were included?

Institutional complicity in relational trauma

There are lots of quotations about the indifference of bureaucracies and how that aids corruption, abuse, all kinds of harm. There are very few about institutions actually aiding abusers, which is what happened to me and to mum.  I don't think that's because it's not true, I think it's because it's not known. It's not known because the victims have no voice probably because they have been so badly harmed. And, because the institution is powerful and the allegation so bad that they must cover it up.

Mum and I were massively harmed by the intervention of Social Workers on behalf of our abuser, but they are perceived to be godlike, beyond reproach, stopping harm not causing it. I think institutional harm, probably especially by social work is far more common than is currently known.  

Institutional betrayal is particularly horrific because a victim is harmed by an agency supposed to protect them, that in my case, I went to, on much advice, for protection, who ignored me and then turned on me when the abuser went to them.

This is a list of the institutional complicity which ran between

1. The lawyer who let him get away with taking the first lot of money when dad died.
2. Social services who didn't investigate the abuse and then actively and knowingly and possibly deliberately traumatised me, complicity with the abuser and who illegally failed to support me as carer in any way.
3. The NHS local mental health services who didn't protect me from their abuse and actually at one point tried to hand me back to the very team causing the abuse as a "vulnerable adult"
4. The family GP (doctor) who wasn't sure what to do or where to send a suicidal person
5. The "At home" NHS team who couldn't really help and just kept me under regular surveillance increasing the sense of being a problem.
6. Mum's GPs: one took her off the antidepressants she had been put on when locked up for the first time in Manchester. He said mum seemed in great spirits with us, but I don't even know if Social services bothered asking him or what he said. The other GP I registered mum with also saw mum being cared for regarding a foot problem and back problems she arrived to us with from after the spell in the first rot house. I organised physio for her. That GP apparently sat on the fence at best when social services tried to get a report on me / mum from her. Or that's what it sounded like from the SS report.
7. The Office of the Public Guardian who did nothing
8. The police who did nothing
9. The office of the local Member of the Scottish Parliament (also First Minister of Scotland) who said the council is just a law unto themselves and did very little.
10. The supposedly "Independent" Advocacy service which is meant to help you speak to the council when they demand it but who admitted they were given a steer by the council on what the council wanted to know and who quizzed mum about behind closed doors so that the council could invent and distort a wildly biased story of what mum supposedly wanted. We were never allowed to see that report first hand. By then it was clear all forces were moving in one direction.
11. The care homes who supported the abuser in refusing to give mum her hearing aids, who complied with his one sided demands to lock mum up, ignoring me, as co- power of attorney who opposed them
12. The care agency who initially provided live in carers for mum before he locked her up, (where he could better control her) but only listened to him because he had (behind my back, again obviously), made himself "primary contact".

There is no point mentioning the elder, elder abuse, Alzheimer and trauma charities I went to. They have no real power anyway and they are more part of societal complicity than institutional complicity.

Manipulation of authority

Because perpetrators are so clever they pull the wool over the eyes of those tasked with investigating abuse: in this case of my mum. I read an article a year or two about this, about how easily certain controlling personalities can dupe authorities over abuse and how they are putting processes in place to address this but I saw absolutely no evidence of that.

Social services

Social services here were not just duped and they didn't just stand by. That's what they did at first. I sent at least ten emails to social services and made many phone calls about what was being done to to mum and as a result to me, trying to protect mum. There was not a single acknowledgement. After that, they actively aided the abuser. The primary form of institutional betrayal came, by a long way, from Social Services.

The legacy of that harm, beyond all the trauma and trauma symptoms they caused is that I can't socialise properly. I am constantly afraid of social workers in any context, obviously professional, but even in any social sphere. This team was also responsible for vulnerable adults. and this team caused more harm and damage than any professional I've ever known. There is a profound problem where damage to health and lives is being caused by the people in local government services who are supposed to be stopping harm, protecting people and that is being denied, covered up, not even recognised for their own interests.

Council education department

The same thing had happened with the education department when I complained about a bullying incident with one of my children. There was complete silence regarding the very incident taking place. I complained about how it was handled. They closed ranks. Then they made me the problem. The council is the dangerous and the most harmful "legitimate" entity I know and have ever encountered.

Obtaining complicity

The abuser must have set up a "nothing to see here" scenario with them: appeared competent, apologetic for his "problematic" sibling. It was all done behind my back. But I saw the report against me and I saw the emails the abuser wrote us or social services before he was blocked and they were brimming with lies, distortions, manipulation and narrative control. That was near the start of the trauma, mid 2024.

In those letters and that report there was obviously nothing about all that I'd done for mum charging nothing and obviously nothing about all that he had taken in terms of control and assets nor obviously the intimidation and harassment. He was whiter than white, a saviour actually, the resolution to the problem. I can see the way he would have pitched it: if they could only help him he would make it all go away.

This was part of a broader strategy with friends and family. I watched in silence as the abuser went to the wider family, lied, distorted, got them onside, got one of them who'd never shown the slightest in mum and dad, to visit the country, with her policeman husband to check up on us. He turned a couple of the more aggressive and insincere of mum's friends to his side and spread more lies and distortions about me to the rest, not all of whom believed him and were staggered when they eventually heard what he'd done. I didn't actively go out recruiting people as he did. The first contact I had with mum's friends was when she came to stay with us and I wanted to share her life with us with them and to keep them in touch. The evidence of mum's quality of life with us shone out from that shared album

At least one of these friends supported him with out and out lies about me despite my trying to accommodate her. From whatever angle, I was the problem, obstacle, I had undiagnosed autism, apparently which was "disease" - sick since birth, apparently. I was mentally ill - this much by now was true, not that they had evidence. Certainly they persuaded the council that the harm came from me despite much recent evidence to that very department and many other relevant professions of the contrary. But social services wanted to railroad this campaign against me through their process and they did.

He used the institutions’ weaknesses, which is usually lack  of resource to his advantage. Institutions run on straightforward processes.  They don’t like anything messy, complex or human. That’s why all institutions are so dehumanising.  They remove all humanity from a process or a problem. They like easy tickboxes.  The Office of the Public Guardian's processes to engage with Power of Attorney abuse cases are likely triggered more by inputs from other institutions or professionals - banks, care homes, social work.

Few organisations hold a lot of power

Most real power is concentrated in only a few institutions. Other organisations I thought would help just pushed me to Social Services or the Office of the Public Guardian or the police or lawyers them because in serious cases of abuse regarding vulnerable people and asset stripping, they are the only agencies who can do anything and they did nothing. Everything is dealt with by expensive lawyers and / or government agencies.

Strategy: Deny and deflect.

Deny and deflect is such a common strategy within councils at least in Scotland, it now has a name. A mum and campaigner against the institutional abuse in Scotland of handicapped children in Scotland, and winner of the Saltire Award, told me it. You make the complainant the problem.  If anyone rocks the boat in any way, you make them the issue.

And it’s so easy to offload on to the victim. Social work followed the abuser's lead: if I became the problem then there was no other much more serious problem of long term abuse involving money to investigate, never mind the ten ignored emails to explain, mum being abducted from her home and locked up, denied her hearing aids, all the missing money. If I was made the problem it all vanished, very conveniently in a puff of smoke.

From a duty of protection to complicit abuse

Once the Social services visiting mum in my house, seeing how happy she was, said they weren't going to "investigate the past" (i.e. the abuse) I was stunned into shock. Then I knew they had taken the abuser's part when they kept insisting we let him take mum out even though they knew he could abduct mum back to his country again. While Pigface had locked mum up, he and Pigwife spent her money in supermarkets. They went out for family meals. He'd taken his family swimming at a luxury hotel at mum's expense. I saw the bank statements. Social work were told and did nothing. He'd abducted mum once and tried to do it a second time against her will. The police heard her say she wanted to say with us. It is why they sent him away.

Instead, social services took over harassing us for him. From what I told them and from the NHS whose door we banged on for protection, that they were traumatising me with panic attacks and shutdowns, terrible hypervigilance and spiralling thoughts. I couldn't walk in the street without hypervigilance. I couldn't go to the supermarket without getting stuck in my car. They didn't just now care. I think they wanted to do it. It was in their interests. They knew that if they made me sick enough, I would be too sick and too scared to fight and none of it would stick to them unless I got lawyers, which I hadn't done so far. I had been completely submissive at every stage. This was the behaviour of someone the abuser had constantly branded a "troublemaker". Social services bet on the right horse. I did become too sick and too scared to fight back. I wanted it all to stop. I wanted to die. I wanted his family to die. All of them so it would all stop and so that that evil could never continue.

Complain?

I didn't complain to the council because I had had plenty of experience and knew the council didn't investigate complaints. Their complaints team were lawyers whose job was to contain and if possible make the complainant the problem. I'd seen it happen twice to me and to friends. It's also a well known strategy within certain local authorities. You can't go to the Ombudsman unless you've been through council and if it's too messy you're liable to be called a "vexatious complainant" anyway at either the council or the Ombudsman. It's a tool to discredit people they don't want to deal with. My experience was, that was probably going to be me. When it gets too complex it's almost automatically vexatious because things that take up time are vexatious.

The police 

The bar wasn't high enough for the police to investigate. We went with a story, not evidence because we had blocked the emails, and the ones we had were too distressing for me to go over. We didn't go with the recordings of his phone calls when he hijacked mum's phone. When the abuser realised I'd hang up as soon as he hijacked her conversation he stopped letting her call. We thought telling the police I'd had complete shutdowns after two of these calls would be enough. My husband had had to get the paramedics. It wasn't enough. We went in desperation without the emails and the recordings. I was deeply traumatised. I just needed help and support. We were naive. The police were sympathetic but said in any case, coercion and control only applied in cases of domestic abuse. We tried again in England where the law is different. The police there got the wrong end of the stick, went to the care home who were paid by the abuser using mum's money. He had clearly got in early and told lies and distortions because the police got them from the care home and just parroted them back to me. I felt that I was the one on the stand after that. So we gave up. 

Later I ended up in the hospital seemed to be quite shocked to see me so traumatised as to be practically catatonic and could only unlock me with diazepam. None of it counted. Stress responses don't seem to count as "harm" by one person on another. Even suicide almost never

The one thing the police did do was get him off the property after he tried to manipulate mum into going away with him a second time. Even then they allowed him into our house "to say goodbye" even though he'd been "saying goodbye" keeping mum out in the cold on a January night for ninety minutes. 

Social work knowingly helped engineer trauma 

The next time mum and my abuser came to my house to take mum on a day out after social services insisted on it, they organised for the person they knew was causing trauma to actually come to the house to get mum.  It was a manipulation: "It will be best for mum, won't it". As soon as he came to the door and took mum I had another total involuntary shutdown. After that when social services took over the abuse for him, phoned, called, turned up, I had shutdowns or panic attacks every day always while mum with Alzheimers was at daycare. The rest of the time I was looking after her and trying to reverse some of the damage to her health that had been done by 4 months incarceration in the rothouse in England.

The first rothouse phase

The abuser dumped her there, unilaterally, of course having sneakily set it all up in advance. Everything he did was sneaky. He arranged to get married (after 17 years) when he knew dad might die so that he might get a handout. He made sure to take the money just before dad died. He announced the (obviously) secret marriage three days after dad died. Went off abroad to get married on that money when dad wasn't even cold in the grave. Left mum behind. Left me to look after mum as I'd looked after them both before dad died.

Mum phoned and begged me to take her away the first night he left her literally wandering the corridors in that place. "Oh that's normal here" the orderly told me as if it was fine to leave elderly newly arrived people alone distressed and completely confused in corridors. The con of it was that this place was apparently 5 stars.

I had a professional commitment that week, mum was 5 hours away. I didn't go and regretted it. I was also ill, terrified of the abuser and all social services had let him get away with abducting mum like that. It was also supposed to be "temporary", so he'd promised - another lie.

The lack of empathy and professionalism in that "care" home with stunning. They "lost" key letters. When I complained about how they had left mum that first night and tried to find out in what conditions she was being kept, the staff member I spoke to treated like a leper. Well it was her fault it we had no information. She didn't have to tell me. They'd gone through it all with the son. They didn't have any obligation to me, co Power of Attorney or not. I was given no information nor financial information. Already well traumatised, I became too afraid to phone. My husband had to try and get through to mum for me, which was a hit and miss operation at best. They didn't tell me they put mum on antidepressants. Alongside the abuser they tried to blame my sending cards to mum as the cause of her depression, rather than being locked up somewhere she never wanted to be, tricked into being told it was temporary, isolated from her family, her phone controlled, her cards confiscated - so how she was made sick when she didn't receive the cards I don't know. Oh and also the cards arrived after she was put on the antidepressants. That really shows the level of complicity in the abuse of both mum and me.

The second rothouse

We weren't told where social services dumped mum after they took her away.  It was one more in the endless promises they made and broke.  My husband had to keep trying til he found out. The associations between care homes and the abuser and how mum and I were treated are so bad that I now can't go to new rot house social services and the abuser put her in.  mum still doesn't have her hearing aids.  The rothouse ignores the requests to give them to her because apparently the son's instructions not to give them to her are more important.  After 6 months the fitness she regained with us has completely gone.  Her hair is unkempt. We have no idea what she does.  

I get panic attacks if I go there. My husband has to go and get her. We take her out for coffee. I'm too afraid to do anything else.