Stories, trauma and witness

 I've decided to process the stuff that happened to me and especially the lessons I've learned through this blog, the one I don't use very often, the non-tango one for weird stuff.

I tried to do it before, but it was just too overwhelming. 

I thought fragments was the way to go because two years of trauma is too intricate and too sprawling.

Writing down what happened to you is supposed to be very important in recovery from trauma. 

Being witnessed is also meant to be important.

I have told my story many times to various professionals or volunteers:

1. To social services, in ten letters and countless phone calls, mostly about what Pigface was doing to Mum, and a bit about what he was doing to me, because it was stopping me being a power of attorney. 
2. Tiny fragments of it to Mum's doctors
3. Parts of it to a psychologist at the memory clinic she attended Most recently to the private health assessment and then the therapist I've started seeing
4. To the Alzheimer's Society in England and in Scotland 
5. To various charities for older people
6. To organisations for people suffering trauma,
7. A little bit to my GP
8. To a community mental health nurse, 
9. To a team of community mental health nurses who came out for a bit.
10. To various suicide prevention organisations
11. To many lawyers I contacted for help and to their gatekeepers and admin people.
12. To a trauma counsellor I saw for a bit 
13. Bits and pieces to a few friends
14. Twice to the Office of the Public Guardian who oversee Power of Attorney
15. To John Swinney, our MSP
16. To an independent advocate who wasn't independent 
17. Different bits of it to the police three times

I didn't bother complaining to the council because I know that the complaints team are lawyers whose aim is not to resolve your complaint but to fob you off and threaten you and protect the council. I have long experience of how the council operates. So did my father and many people I know. A more corrupt and morally bankrupt organisation neither he had nor I have ever personally come across. 

There are probably more I've forgotten.

Mostly it was re-traumatizing even before I knew I was living through trauma. If you tell a story while you are being traumatized,  you are biologically still in survival mode.  I was trying to get help, not tell a story.  The story will never get processed that way, but it wasn't the intention.

I discover now that re-telling a trauma aloud often reactivates the nervous system because the brain hasn’t yet encoded the event as past. Writing shifts the memory pathway from amygdala-driven threat loops to hippocampal narrative processing.

I found the same thing happened when I retold the story of the stalker to people. Telling the story just gave me chest pain all over again. That stalker episode landed me in hospital where my stats indicated a heart attack.  But I see that I wrote up that story a month after the events that put me in hospital.  It was like a need to exorcise the horror of it. 

I wrote many posts on different subjects after the stalker episode. Eventually, i think it was processed, certainly more than it was.  Not gone, not erased. A horrible thing happened.  But it was in the past.  It only got reactivated when I saw the stalker again, so I tried and still try to avoid them and things connected to them. What bothers me if I see them is yes, the damage, theft, betrayal and particularly the dissembling manipulation, but it also bothers me that they are still able to cause so much harm to others under a very convincing mask - even this short paragraph reactivates that chest pain. I do wonder when "processed" really means "processed". 

Perhaps you can get to a point of distance where you can say:  I lived through that.  It's happened, it's finished.  Now I can narrate it. This is what I learned.

Because you can learn from all horrible experiences.  You can get something positive from them. The learning may be hard, but it's something and it's often useful for the future.

In contrast, it's taken me almost two years to write anything about the events of the last two years. Trauma does get stuck inside you, in different ways.

For a long time I have felt that the way to process what's happened to me in 2024 and 2025 has been through writing.

When you tell people your story, you are the source of a report, people can think: well there's always two sides. Actually, just everyone I have told this story to has sounded appalled and horrified or at least shocked.  

Writing it down, you are the author of your own record. That's a tiny identity shift but a key one.  I think it might be to do with someone who tells someone a verbal account, might be disbelieved. But when someone writes down their account, it is more likely to be taken as a true record, or as their record of truth.  That can't be taken away from them.  You can claim it's not true, but you can't get them to say - without torture or manipulation or gaslighting that their own account is not what they believe.  You can try and discredit them, you can try to shut them up but you can't take that story away once it has been voiced.  This point is particularly important in a history that is about lies and manipulation and discrediting and gaslighting.

I did write privately, but more to try to log what happened, partly for myself but also as evidence to try and get Pigface removed as power of attorney.  Ultimately I couldn't do it because I was too ill to go through the process, sifting through the immense amount of evidence was too re-traumatizing and still is. 

None of those logs and diaries felt healing. They just felt like a huge pile of unsorted horror And even when I tried to put it in some sort of order, it still wasn't doing the job of exorcising what happened. 

I felt there was something about putting it in the blog and making it public that seemed to be pulling at me that getting this vile, dirty,  awful thing that happened into the light would exorcise it, disinfect it.  

There was also a sense that it would be witnessed by me in the future perhaps, by some descendants, by some people on the other side of the world I would never meet. A different kind of witnessing, not a plea for help from people who couldn't or wouldn't, no matter how sympathetic they might be. I felt I would tell my own story and telling means listeners, readers. It's got two sides: the telling and the receiving.  It doesn't seem to matter to me much, who or when or where those receivers are, but the idea of them is important and that I have taken a step to reach them. I don't want Facebook or Instagram, an anonymous page on am unpublicised blog seems to work just fine.

When Pigface abruptly stole mum away from her home and church, community and family and her memories, and locked in a rothouse in another country and when she begged me to take her away, that's when it all really started to hit me. That was five months after dad's death, when the Pigface campaigns against me had really ramped up as he secretly prepared to abduct mum away and then did. At that point I felt a desperate urge, a craving for fire and ritual and drumming. Testimony to the fire is a common element in shamanic traditions: containment by ritual.  I wonder if that was when I was supposed to start telling my story, to look for healing. I suspect it was, but we don't have that kind of community and that kind of healing or even those kinds of concepts generally to hand anymore. I didn't find it and about a month later I'd become suicidal.

In stories like this, the body has to be perceived for safety first, and story second. Because without that down-regulation, the narrative just becomes reactivating, a threat rehearsal. That's why I don't really want to talk about the things the specific things he did to me. I find it easier to talk about what he did to Mum. Although, frankly, I find it all difficult.

I find it much easier to talk about the lessons, the things I've learned about trauma at this point. Because I don't have yet that level of safety.  I completed two questionnaires that the therapist sent me today. You can find them at Online CBT Resources under Impact of Events and the PTSD questionnaire but there are a whole catalogue of mental health resources there.

 I have an IES-R total of 52, well above the 33 PTSD threshold indicating significant post-traumatic stress symptoms.

My PCL-5 total is 56, which is considered a high score, so very high intrusion, very high hyper-arousal. Threat-scanning, cortisol through the system all the time. Little wonder I have all the physical problems I do just now.

I still don't know whether writing, posting will help, whether my intuition is right. I just feel it's the next thing to try that it has been pulling at me for a long time.  

Plus there's the advantage that anyone who asks can be sent here instead which I'm sure in most cases will quickly put an end to further enquiry.

The curious thing though about having started this blog writing process this week is that I finally had a dream about Pigface and the organisations that enabled and abetted him. I finally had a dream full stop. It didn't tell me anything I didn't know and I'd rather not wake from nightmares like that or have my head filled with anything to do with monstrous things, but maybe something is shifting.