A category error

Linn of Dee circular, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

I chose this picture because a river is constantly changing its state, and physical state change is the ultimate answer in this piece.

The day before going to my first singing group I had listened to a guided meditation by Jeff Warren from his 'Ease Your Social Anxiety' series.  His podcasts are a mindfulness version of "Thought For The Day" (a long-standing spot on BBC Radio 4 where faith leaders reflect on issues of the day), which leads into a few minutes of meditation. It's an easy route in to meditation or for when you just don't have much time or when you fancy a snack from the  world of wellbeing.

Jeff says to focus on the person, the focus of your anxiety, in front of you as someone with their own history, their own troubles. In the singing group, faced with the two people in my threat categories, I tried.  Spot the difference. It wasn't remotely helpful.  Actually, I'd had that presentiment at the time I listened: I don't think this is gonna work. My threat antennae were working at another frequency. There comes a point where your nervous system is so close to panic that trying to relate cognitively to the other person doesn't do any good at all.

I tried another of Jeff's meditations in the same series. It was a similar idea: think of the people around you as “Buddha” or “ a fairy godmother” - “secretly wise and kind”. It “puts him in a good mood” and makes him feel more comfortable.

Those techniques belong to a different world than mine. As such they're another cue that I don’t have “social anxiety” but maybe they work for people who do.

I have specific threat-based responses based on my system developing patterns of threat at a subconscious level.  Incoming sensory data is compared against learned threat-related templates stored at a largely subconscious level. The brain estimates the likelihood of the current situation being a threat and if so initiates the corresponding response: OK or RUN/FREEZE/FIGHT. 

 Trauma biases those predictions toward false positives for specific classes of situation. So while the smell of candy floss may trigger no freeze response, in my case seeing / hearing a heavy Scottish woman of working age specifically in my town is flagged as dangerous because there was a past danger, even though that danger has not been active for the best part of 6 months.

The system is actually doing what it's supposed to do, the stored threat templates just got overloaded by trauma. The traumatic experience(s) didn't discharge the way animals, and some people, discharge them, so the body keeps looking for patterns of similar threat.

The most purpose Jeff's meditations served me were as a faint reminder that not everyone is a threat but again - it's the body that needs to know, not the mind.

My curiosity that Jeff's techniques might help me usefully shows a category error: mild cognitive therapy versus somatic regulation.  Jeff's meditation was top-down, cognitive–imaginative regulation to soften mild anticipatory discomfort.  That could well work within the specific terrain of mild, generalised social anxiety within a broader general sensed frame of safety. 

On the other hand, a nervous system in an active threat state is only going to respond well from the body, through sensory, rhythmic and relational cues. It's a difficult thing to explain in words but you know it when you feel it. You know when you are being met with or finding or using a stimulus that works to change your physiological state.  It might be how a person relates or you, or birdsong, ambient music, watching a cat move or being aware of your own footsteps.  It will be something physical in the immediate environment.    Or it might be medication.

So while it might be interesting to think, before meeting the threat: Oh, everyone has their story, let's meet them with empathy, when actually faced with someone you feel as a threat, that thought is going to go right out the window. You might even beat yourself up about it later:

Mind: Oh, I could have been more tolerant / empathetic / understanding.

Body: Yeah, buddy, you're lucky you got me. Right or wrong, at the time it was a threat!

My first response on hearing this meditation was, this isn't going to work and, when faced with the treat, I (very briefly) tested it out. It didn't work. So why test it at all?  We consciously work all the time with language and reasoning.  The mind is constantly trying to persuade, rationalise and make meaning. In this case, persuade that a cognitive technique might solve a problem. Whereas the body is repeatedly demonstrating, that faced with a threat, it won't. This distinction is something I've been aware of for a few months and I am tripped up by it over and over. It is the same category error mistake in different guises that I keep making over and over. But the more you do see it, the easier it becomes to see. 

You don't reason your way out of threat states: you change state.

Singing and safety?

I picked up the lantern made form the glass panels today and am really pleased with it.  Perhaps it could be a symbol of safety, at least for this post which is about singing and safety.

I had been looking for a very simple singing group for a long time. I missed singing with dad. Music is a big part of my life and song, was one of the things I found myself reaching for, like fire, drumming, ritual etc a year ago. I thought it would be another way to practice relational safety - to show my system I can be around other people and nothing bad happens.

A singing group, but not a choir, nothing performative, nor for entertainment and not traditional in the sense of what traditional choirs mean in Britain, but probably something more like world music. It might be along the lines of the commmunity singing, or the healing or philosophical kind of singing about yourself, your emotions and experiences that I'd heard in the coplas, bagualas and vidalas of Argentina.

Recently, someone told me about a possible group, so I went, last week.

Because it took place in my town, even though it was in the morning, during office working hours, the anxiety kicked in: who would be there? This is always my worry now, here: who is going to be there? Will social services be there, pretending to be human? Or people who act like that. That is always the thought. And that adjunct at the end, unhelpfully means "could be anyone", at least to a system that no longer differentiates very well what threat is.

The event was in her house with normal signals of family life - pictures children had made a friendly dog. That was all reassuring, The hostess was lovely. There was another woman present, but it was all a bit too much to absorb. Female/ dress registered.  Anxiety can do that to your system: tunnel vision to a greater or lesser degree. The sunglasses stayed resolutely on, which was weird, but that’s just how it is sometimes now.

Another two people arrived: immediately and definitively they were in the threat category. Suddenly, in comparison the first participant, who by now I had realised was the oldest of the group, shrank into a "probably harmless" category.

So it was going to be difficult. But I kept reminding myself, that nothing bad was happening or was likely to happen. You can tell yourself that, but the much more primal part of you that is scanning for threat and feeling threat I don't think gives two hoots about the rational voice - the whole point is to override it: DANGER! RUN!

I didn't run but throughout the session, felt a constant, almost overwhelming sense of threat from these two people. Thank god, for the sunglasses.  Perhaps that is what they are for in this context - to keep threat at bay in some strange, nervous system way I don’t really understand.  

I told myself the threat-women were probably too old to fit into the main threat category which directly maps on to "women in social services" and yet nevertheless they did fit into it. Part of me was perhaps rationalising "yes, but they could be retired". But all of that is again just noise, all that rationalising part.

What characteristics did they have to fit the threat category put them in it? It was something to do with accent, personality, attitude, physical presence.

Until there was more evidence to the contrary, they were going to stay in that category.  I’m not even sure it works on evidence, because again that’s a cognitive thing.  All this works seems to work on subconscious pattern matching. 

The likelihood was they did not nor had not worked for social services More plausibly in this small town they might have connections to that heinous organisation and they might not be like those fiends, even though my sense was overwhelmingly that they were. I told myself that they were people with their own battles but knew that none of that would have any affect on the sense of threat.

All of that - likelihood, plausibility, reasoning, it's all irrelevant when someone is in that state. It is simply cognitive habit I suppose that keeps us trying to tell ourselves a story even while a much older and instinctual part is going by input > pattern match to threat or safety > response. It would make more sense to shut down those thoughts by listening to the body, grounding it with safety cues like longer breathing, orientating to the room, to sounds etc.

But fear precisely does blindside you to the sensible response. I would have been better off walking in, as I often do, to stressful situation, holding my stones for a grounding effect which would have triggered a reminder to breathe more consciously, to listen for sounds, widen my gaze around the room, deliberately taking things in.

Since I hadn't done those things the effect was that my whole being wanted to swerve away from them, something they must have picked up on, because the most that any of the participants  - one of the threat women - asked was my name at the end of the session. Just as in the lantern session, people get the vibe. I followed the host to the kitchen area in the break, practically tied myself to her apron strings to avoid the others. Yes, I would definitely like another cup of tea, chat chat chat.

But during the singing, the music was like a thread pulling me through.

They were short simple, reassuring songs: a warm up song about the breath and being in the moment, then I am a Tower of Strength (within and without) which was cheesy but that seemed rather beside the point.  

We did Koleoko (Cock-a-doodle-do, Wake up mama) a song from Liberia and Oh River.  The more the songs were repeated, the easier I found it. The songs became easier to sing as they became more familiar but it was simply that the momentum of the song and particularly the repetition pulled me through what, for me, was a difficult environment. It was a bit like those Russian dolls - the house/host felt like a safe container, but there was threat inside the house and deeper still the songs were another container but a safe one. How much they cancelled out I'm not sure.

I was reminded of a conversation with a Colombian musician about percussion. The first salsa track he gave me to listen to was Eddie Palmieri's Azúcar. The length of the track was groundbreaking at the time. I was strict instructions to do nothing but listen to that track - no cooking, he said, no other jobs. So I lay down and listened and felt the world tip and slide, as I started to enter another dimension through sound. Percussion in indigenous music and even in salsa music can be used to induce a almost or partly altered state of consciousness, as I started to experience that day and have since for a few seconds at a time. He said western patterns of thought are not so open to or familiar with that concept of percussion. But something like that was what was happening when I navigated threat through song. I seemed to be able to transcend the danger through the vocalisation and the little movements that accompanied the songs.

It fell apart rather when we were asked to do a round. There were still only four of us, plus the host so it was two and two which was perhaps ambitious for a very small, brand new group.

I don't have much or recent group singing experience, besides this, from June. It was a wonderful, spontaneous song in a forest circle at the end of a drumming event that came about in a few minutes after I chatted with the drum leader who happened to be a sound and singing professional.

So, these simple songs are manageable. And yet, when put with one of the women in the threat category, it was immensely difficult. Because, as a beginner, you rely on the other person and tune into them, to sing with them. They are your ally, your partner.  But how can you do that with someone you can't help but perceive as a threat, even if they didn't know it? Yet for a few seconds at a time, the music took over and seemed to dominate more than the sense of threat.

Should I have shared this problem with the leader? I wondered, later. But it was only her second time leading - this was a practice session, part of her training. Still, she probably would have found it useful. Wouldn't you, if you had been in her position? In the break she had shared that she had had had her own struggles, which surprised me in such an upbeat and energetic person. Experience of neurodivergence featured in her conversation too.  Still, I decided against it. I wanted to go back and didn't want to risk being seen as a problem (cue: conditioned response) so I hid the reason my feelings (another pattern) and only the outward behaviour showed - the sunglasses kept resolutely on my face, the way the fingers of one hand pressed the ends of the fingers on the other hand, the gaze averted from the other participants, concentrating on the ethnic shoe of the least threatening participant.  It was necessarily shut down, avoidant behaviour. That would have told its own story.

Later, I read that the leader of the sister group  had had different mental health struggles. 

But it is one thing for people to clock a struggle and another to know what to do about it - for that you may need more information. Had I shared and she understood what, specifically, this particular participant found difficult, she might have adjusted who she paired me with. But it is that next play, when the ball is in the court of the organiser who has spotted a problem, but doesn't know what it is, that is the skilful move. More of that another time.

People who run groups like this do get training which presumably covers inclusivity and different participant needs. It is something people are so much more aware of nowadays. Certainly, during teacher training we were trained to make those sorts of adjustments for differentiated and inclusive education.  

But the skill is not so much in the training, nor even necessarily in the experience, so much as in the personality, the character.  I can tell that simply from the many red flags around the trained and experienced therapist I started to see last week compared to say, the sensitive young man who works in the local cafe.  

Our singing leader was sending plenty of "safe" signals but safety takes time and sharing your difficulty to remove obstacles in your path forward, that is to say, making yourself more vulnerable when you’re already in an especially hypervigilant state, probably isn’t wise or realistic.

Overwhelm vs growth: when is practicing relational safety not worth doing?

Meconopsis, Branklyn Garden

I am going to try to answer this in relation to the glass workshop.

Was it worth doing the glass workshop? Were the gains greater than the losses? 

It was very stressful, especially at the start, but I stayed, I managed the panic, nothing really bad did happen, I did copy as I had wanted and I made something. 

But my body would have been flooded with cortisol yet again which is really bad for it and I think accounts for a lot of the physical problems I have been having since July, the month after mum left. 

So should I have stayed home instead?

I have come to understand that practising relational safety sometimes involves deliberate, time-limited doses of discomfort. The gain comes not from feeling safe, but from discovering that the body can survive the activation and return to baseline.

The cost–benefit (too much stress/cortisol for the gains) shifts when the exposure overwhelms rather than stretches the system.

So the question is rather:

Was this within the zone where growth is possible without retraumatising?

But how do you know when you are in overwhelm rather than growth? Because I did feel pretty overwhelmed. 

Overwhelm removes choice. 

I did freeze, not to the point of not being able to move or speak,  I was in a “functional freeze” state - minimal movements, minimal speech.  

I did lose speech / eye contact

I did go into panic / flee mode at “be inspired” - the rush to the toilet, bolting food and getting out. 

These are all signs of overwhelm.

I did feel this was a dreadful situation at the start and that it was a mistake and I did feel trapped.  But would I never want to be in that situation again?  That would be a sign of overwhelm.  If that teacher was doing something different I might go because I know what to expect.  That is growth.

Did I feel as though I couldn’t stop what was happening or remove myself.  Nearly.  But I did manage to remove myself - to go to the loo to calm down and take medication and to get out for a break at lunchtime. That is also growth

Other signs of growth:

• I did feel “activated” but after I took medication I was able to slow my stress responses, calm down, breathe, orientate myself in the room etc. 

• I could respond minimally, and increasingly initiate questions privately with the teacher and engage in small conversations with her.

• I could eat and go for a walk

• I could offer a compliment 

• I was able to complete the project and leave with a sense of achievement and agency

• By the time I went home I was already recovering

All of this was possible, even if the experience was hard so I think it was growth, even if the entrance was rough.

This was overwhelm that was metabolised in the moment which is different from overwhelm that imprints or spirals as it did under the Pigface and Social Services attacks when the trauma was ongoing.

Relational safety test: a glass workshop

In this post I try to work out what is happening during tests to practice relational safety.

 I attended a glass workshop in another town. I thought this would be a good way of spending time around people to gain relational safety because.  Nothing bad was likely to happen.  I would gain a skill and spend an enjoyable time crafting..

When I arrived I realised I was very anxious simply from not knowing who the people were.  Pre-Pigface attacks I would have breezed in and started easily chatting to everyone, the way I was brought up to chat to anyone and everyone in any situation. I’ve had a lifetime’s experience of it and am well known for that being a long-standing skill and strength.  

But I was so shut down I wasn't able to make eye contact nor speak to any of the attendees.

Luckily there were no introductions.  The teacher explained the material and said we could apply our own designs using them.  We were expected to just have an artistic inspiration. 

Faced with this "have inspiration" idea, I fled to the loo on the verge of tears and panic and took anxiety medication.  I thought about leaving but calmed down enough to return. 

Thereafter if it were possible I felt even more shut down and avoidant.  There is not really a choice about this. A sense of fear that comes from somewhere that isn’t your conscious mind, takes over your reactions. 

The teacher came round to see what we were doing and to see if we needed help. 

I think I said the word “copy” with a nod to the example next to me.  

Eventually I was able to ask her questions about the work when I was stuck. 

Over the next few hours, I did the project, was glad and felt a sense of achievement both from getting through the experience and especially from making my piece. 

At lunch, I bolted my food and went out for a walk.

A woman I thought was too forward with someone who obviously didn’t want to be spoken to,  asked where I was from at lunch but that was it.  

Towards the end I was able to compliment someone on their design.

Nothing bad happened.  I wasn't threatened by anybody. 

I didn’t feel able to do anything but copy, with, in the end, some variations of my own, but I learned 4 techniques doing that.  It was a sensible choice. 

Why nervous of people who posed no threat?

So why was I so nervous of the people in the lantern workshop when it wasn't in my town when there was little chance of anyone from social services there and if they had, I wouldn’t have known it.  Why was the event so stressful?

I think my system no longer trusts its own ability to spot predators, manipulators, or coercive personalities before it's too late so it feels threat everywhere.  

But sometimes it does function when I feel in a safe environment, which usually means some “anchor”, something familiar or safe.  

So why when I go into an unknown cafe is everything fine? I think it’s because, provided the anchor there is is the ritual set process of ordering etc which I know and it’s predictable and therefore safe.  It’s very unlikely that the server is going to step out of their role.  

The workshop had none of that - unknown people, undefined expectations, and no social template so my system defaulted to: “all threats possible.”

I couldn’t invoke a script of “threats possible but unlikely” because that  relies on a cognitive override, which only works when the nervous system is already within its tolerable range.

But I was above the threshold where reasoning can down-regulate fear for the reasons stated. Once the body crosses that line, the brain can’t access “unlikely”, it only registers possible.

Why did “be inspired” make everything worse?

I was nervous when I went in, so what made it worse when the teacher talked about us conjuring up designs out of thin air as though it was normal and easy? Why did I panic at that, especially since I had always intended to copy and I believed then and later that it was a good choice? 

“Have inspiration now” is, neurologically, the exact opposite of safety: it requires openness, play, and social ease - states that trauma temporarily shuts down. Both the expectation to have a design and the complete absence of teaching you how to go about that means the system feels “I don’t know what’s required of me here.”

That implies exposure, visibility, and judgement at a moment when the system is already braced.

But I knew copying was OK, so why didn’t I just dodge that “have inspiration now” trigger?

The instruction implied: “Everyone here knows how to come up with a design, except you.” That hits the same circuitry as danger because it cues exposure, judgement, and the risk of getting something “wrong” in an unstructured space.  Again, the system was not able to cope with that in the state it was already in, that’s why it spiked panic even though rationally I knew copying was fine, a good option.

Relational safety - in theory

Lately, I've been trying to recover a sense of relational safety by doing small things with people where nothing bad happens.  It’s a way of training the nervous system that it is safe to lower its guard, stop scanning for threat. 

Your conscious mind knows you probably won't be handcuffed or carted away or put into some tribunal for something you're accused of but haven't done. But because of what has happened, your body or rather your brainstem that controls your body's responses doesn't know that.

If practicing relational safety is effective, I shouldn’t feel the regular panic and freezing fear that have become normal since the attacks by Pigface and his allies and enablers in Social services.  My body should stop flooding with cortisol causing the physical problems that have arisen since July, the month after mum was taken.  

I try to do this in particular through craft - sewing in my case because there is something regulatory about the repeated in and out of the needle, the focus on the task, perhaps even in the other people around engaged in similar quiet things.  You hear the conversation around but there is no requirement to join in. You are vaguely part of something, but not a focus so you can't be target. You are just part of the background, the fabric, the context.

Sometimes I find a fire in some public place and the sound of it is reassuring, sometimes it's a cafe.

I thought I would find doing these activities easier outside of my own city because the whole area is a threat zone due to the constant presence of Social Services somewhere either on or off duty.

It would be unthinkable to meet someone from Social Services in a social situation - like a monster masquerading as a human.

The effects of trauma

Shades and headphones, Carnaby Street
(CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 - attribute: Images George Rex.)

I hadn't the faintest idea what trauma was before last year when it started happening to me and only started to understand what was happening to me early this year.  I didn't know anything about the consequences of it.  I thought this list might give an insight in to what trauma can do. 

Some of the ways my behaviour has changed and been affected since the attacks by Pigface and Social Services.

1. Trouble getting to sleep, waking up in the night, often as soon as I start to dream. Long awakenings / difficult getting back to sleep.  

2. Nightmares about PF (recent) 

3. Too afraid to spend time with mum as I would otherwise choose

4. Can't visit the care home (panic attacks because of Pigface connection).

5. Can't see mum on my own, my husband has to come with me, collect mum and bring her to the local pub where we have coffee and then she goes back.

6. Too afraid to use mum’s money to take her out 

7. (Previously too afraid to use mum’s money as dad had instructed: for rent when she was living with us, for improvements to the self-contained flat so mum could live there.  Also for first 3 months when mum was with us too afraid to pay ourselves for her food / utilities contribution although this was a tiny fraction of what Pigface spends on the care homes he put her in.

8. Too afraid to go to mum's house because of trauma memories associated with the cameras PF installed and being mocked, manipulated and abused there.

9. Too afraid to exercise POA (and in practical terms PF took all the control from the get go anyway, disempowering me in practice)

10. Constant sense of anxiety, of being hunted, walking in my city despite knowing nothing likely to happen. The closer I get to streets and shops near the council offices, the worse it is.
    
    

11. Afraid of people in cafes in my town and when people come into cafes. Now I stick mostly to one cafe where I feel safer but even there people coming and going makes it difficult.

12. Too afraid to join social / craft groups in my city, especially outside working hours

13. Now mostly avoid conversations with unknowns

14. Completely avoid eye contact and back out of conversation initiated by people in threat categories

15. Now have become mute at GP, need accompanying.  Now need hood, sunglasses, headphones in threatening situations like this & often walking in town 

16. Shut down / functional freeze: lantern group, nearby town

17. Shut down / functional freeze: singing group, my town

18. Now have difficulty opening mail

19. Now do not answer the door to unexpected calls

20. Now do not answer the phone to unknown callers.

21. Have turned off voicemail so people have to be channelled through safer routes like email.

22. Profound distrust of people in general
    
    

23. Now have profound fear of people in certain threat categories: 

- All heavy middle aged women w Scottish accents in my town

- Most women of working age with Scottish accents in my town

- People with lanyards 

- Males physically like PF

- Canadian women

- NHS Services especially Community Mental Health

- people working for the Council in general but especially in social services, or education - any social worker from anywhere 

- any other, faceless, process/ tickbox driven organisations that focus on protecting themselves not providing the service paid for.

Many other professionals, especially GPs, doctors, lawyers, police, school professionals

22 Certain other types:

• bullies, male & female

• belligerent, domineering, controlling, especially male

• ambitious 

• greed

• manipulative, mask-wearing. May be coy /simpering or earnest / persuasive or charming / professional / charismatic

• unkind / judgemental 
  
  
  The most obvious response to someone who has caused trauma in others would be straightforward victim-blaming and talking or lying about pre-existing "vulnerabilities". You make an alliance with your target, based on lies about the victim. That was always the strategy, reused in various ways. In the case of Social Services, if put on the spot they'd say something like well we we were legally obliged to do our job (investigate a complaint) - except when I complained ten times about PF, really serious allegations of financial misconduct, removing mum without notice from her home and country, and preventing me from exercising Power of Attorney - all of that was just ignored.
  
  
  It's one rule for some and one for another.