This took me a long time to write. This is not a container for things Pigface did or feelings of damage on specific topics that I don't want to revisit now they are contained. This is an account of trying to fix something.
I realised while writing this, as I have also realised in the past, that I was constantly being pulled down rabbit holes about things Pigface did and had to setup numerous containers for these, so that I can point to them rather than keep revisiting them.
I understood, I thought, the medically approved process of how to move a triggering memory into the past.
1. You have to be activated, "triggered" in the common parlance, by the traumatic memory, but not so much that you colllapse, shut down or spiral into panic.
2. You have to stay present and aware of your environment in the here and now.
3. The critical thing is that that memory needs to shift into the past, to have a kind of time-stamp. I wasn't sure how to do that.
On that point, if this works and there are so many people in need why isn't this practice common knowledge, part of society's toolkit?
Passport
When the concept of a passport came up, randomly this week, for me now the first association is of travel or of past trips. It is now of mum's passport being taken or put out of reach by Pigface meaning she could not go on a trip that wasn't organised or authorised by him. This causes the pang and the miasma both to rise.
In my mind the passport was, perhaps vaguely, the burgundy ones that we used to have before Brexit. When we travelled as a family, in the old days, the passports were like that. Mum, latterly, probably had a blue passport, in fact, I'm almost sure she did. But when I thought of the passport I think I was associating mum more with a burgundy passport - pre Alzheimer's.
What was true at the time of not having access to the passport?
A key part of this process of moving memories, as I understand it, is to think about what was was true at that time:
- I was illegally disempowered of key information and documents. I couldn't get access to the passport
- Pigface had ensured I was constantly afraid of him. I would have been too afraid to ask for the passport
- There would have been no point asking for it anyway because Pigface wouldn't have given it to me. He gave nothing, he just took, deliberately and systematically.
Had I tried, he would have just used his standard control mechanism to refuse and simultaneously consolidate assumed unilateral authority, not to mention his visible, audible and long-experienced enjoyment at my disempowerment.
So what was true then was fear, powerlessness, loss of the agency I was entitled to through the legal powers Dad had given me.
Shifting the trigger
What I actually did was hold the passport lightly in my mind. I felt a brief but unpleasant sensation in my throat. I held it lightly in my mind again and that sensation came again this time from my chest, where I feel most fear pangs, and moved into my throat. Apparently this is activation of the trigger and it sure feels like it.
The chest is typically associated with autonomic arousal, threat, injustice, loss, with fear and anger and grief and with protection of the heart area. Grief is referred to as a broken heart. The heartrate rises with fear, the heart palpates, the chest and the throat constrict. The throat is associated, unsurprisingly, with expression, with being silenced and blocked, speaking or not speaking, swallowing back words. I couldn't act, I couldn't say. Control was taken from me. I was constrained. I feared accusation. I couldn't speak freely without consequences. When I look at it now there is a clear mapping.
What is true now?
This is where the cognition compares what is true now with what is true then. If this happens when the body is in a state of "activation" from the trauma trigger and the person remains grounded in the present moment and there is enough difference between then and now and the person is not still actively suffering the trauma in daily life, then, apparently the trauma trigger can be refiled from "present threat" to "past threat".
Yes, together they had ripped mum away from where they had all heard her say she wanted to be, where she was living a wonderful life at virtually no cost to her beyond a tiny contribution for food and bills. But since then, the attacks had stopped.
All the things I mentioned before in relation to the passport were true then, and most of them are still true now. Pigface still
controls everything. He still has the passport. I still can't take mum away, now because I'm constrained by the illness he and his proxies brought about, I would still be too afraid anyway, I
renounced Power of Attorney and even if he did "permit" a trip, which he never would, he has
polluted that relationship now, which is one of several possible of his control
endgames.
The only thing that wasn't true was that I was no longer being attacked, by Pigface or by social services for eight months. His other proxies had left us alone too: the cousin and her policeman husband who had never visited my parents until mum came to live with us didn't reappear, the two control-freak friends he persuaded to his side, my uncle and aunt that he'd made sure to manipulate from the get-go. They had all left us alone since Pigface locked mum up again. If it wasn't so tragic it might almost make me laugh how utterly back to front it all is: Pigface locks mum up, destroys me and they're all happy.
I should rephrase. I hadn't been
directly attacked. Yes, he'd
stolen not just things of mum's but things at mum's house that belonged to me, and the portrait of me at eighteen, which I would have loved mum to have in her room at the Rothouse. That was malicious, painful, as intended.
What had also changed was that by
renouncing power of attorney and executorship of dad's will I had removed myself as much as I could possibly do to reduce the risk of being attacked again by him and social services for whatever else they wanted to invent.
I felt destroyed, just as he designed, so there wasn't much left to attack anyway.
But I have not been directly attacked since being destroyed, if that makes much sense. Not in the real world. In my mind, yes, I am daily
assailed by the architecture of trauma Pigface and social services and all the organisations who sided with them or didn't help us, installed in me and that is still running.
But in the actual world, neither Pigface, Pigwife, nor their web of allies, nor social services have come for me since they took mum. That difference, then and now is something I've thought about often and for a long time.
A shift
While I held that passport in my mind and felt those unpleasant sensations, that passport somehow became clearly my passport, a blue passport. Or at least, I identified it more with me. Or perhaps I had a sense of these two realities, these two passports, coexisting, but that the focus shifted distinctly from mum's passport to this blue passport that was mine. Whatever it was, I had a clear sense of this new, present day, blue passport as mine, representing travel, that I could travel and and that my world could expand instead of constantly shrinking or threatening to shrink, which is what trauma does.
I felt my shoulders drop and I suddenly sighed and then came yawn after yawn after yawn. I felt relief. All of these are physical signs of a shift into parasympathetic, rest and digest mode.
I was immensely surprised. Yes, I had wished for a change, but we wish for many things and nothing happens. It was just an idle version of a thought experiment. But I do think something really shifted. And it's not surprising. I followed - I think - a method, though 'spell' might be a better word, well known for filing trauma memories into the past.
More of my memories are abstract because much of the traumatisation was done by letter, email, phone, report, emails which lied and manipulated reality or by manipulating and using other people to refuse or demand. They aren't so much memories of discrete events that happened in front of my eyes. They are a instead a history of machination. That's why I didn't expect this technique, which I thought was used more to shift visual memories of events, would work on something more abstract like the withheld passport.
There sure are a lot of other similarly "abstract memories" to try it on. There are just so many and I don't know if I have to shift them all, individually.
Although the passport shift, sounds optimistic, maybe is reason for optimism, the reality is I am too afraid to travel now. My health has been so affected that I am now afraid of worse things happening if I travel, even within my own country.
I can't go far.
Yet.
