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.