Cautionary tales

I heard two stories recently that brought me up short.

I was talking to someone who runs an art and craft class, very easygoing, light-hearted, joking, banter up and down the class constantly, mostly between him and a long term attendee, I think mostly for the entertainment of themselves and the rest of us.

In class there was discussion about a stabbing that had happened a few streets from my house, where I walk every day. Just a few months before my husband had berated me for saying his name near an odd character who was hanging about oddly on that same street. I thought he was over-reacting.  

Can't you see that guy's involved in drugs? he said.

No, I replied.

Apparently the stabbing was drug related.  The teacher was sure the long term attendee would know more about it and, being a small town, he had narrowed it down and claimed to know, by some opaque process of elimination, whodunnit.

The conversation moved on to drugs. The teacher had a surprisingly wide knowledge of the different drugs in the city and how they affected the way people walked.

 - How do you know? 

- Because they've staggered past my door all day for years.

I paid differently to most of the others and we sometimes had an opportunity to chat.  

He said that the class had helped many people with mental health issues over the years.

- How do you know about them?

- Some of them talk about it, some of them don't. 

He was observant, seemed to have learned to pick up on cues over many years.

Why do they come?

- As it's an afternoon class people often come with chronic health conditions, and maybe can't hold down a job.

I supposed the art and craft is a kind of therapy for them.

- How does it help?

- The class is small, friendly.

 He didn't mention the art material or process at all. 

I soon realised the teacher had an astonishing amount of insight and experience around people with mental health conditions. I began to see the level of perception in the guy, who was, after all an artist. Several times he'd commented on my fear in class of the artistic process. You look traumatised! he had said, lightly, one day, referring to my fear of making, or so I imagined.

I wasn't surprised when he said the class had helped many people.  It's what you would expect from a business owner, especially someone in the art business running classes with an undercurrent of informal art therapy.  But I was surprised when he said a number of people who had come to class had taken their own life. 

- Isn't that contradictory, if you say class also helps?

 He said sometimes they've been coming, they're stable, then they miss a class and they go back down some rabbit hole of mental health problems and then he gets the news that they've taken their life.

Apparently the evening class had no or fewer suicides. The people who come to that one tend to hold down jobs.  

He said one of the worst things that happens is when people come off their meds voluntarily or because their body has learned to tolerate it and they need new medication. When they're off their meds they go haywire and then they go on to new meds or back and then there are all the side effects to work through. He said for a year their lives can be a train crash because of this and that it was an awful thing to witness.

 He had done a suicide prevention course to see if there were things he was already doing that were helping and if there was more he could do to help the people who came through his doors.

He talked about somebody who came to class with a great sense of humour, a  joker, a big character but who came when he was in a dark place. 

- He was a larger than life, jokey character but in a dark place?

- Oh yes, those characters can often be the most troubled he said with experience.

The joker would ask if there was a space and the teacher always made space for him.

Or somebody would just die, suddenly. He mentioned a parent who choked and died one Christmas. 

He said how difficult it was to then tell the class, do his normal work, go to the funeral and then people from maybe a year past who don't come to class anymore had seen something about the death, would contact him to ask about it, and so on.

How do you do all this, run classes, your other work?  Do colleagues in your business have the same stories?

He thought it depended on the level of empathy.   

Some days, when he had three classes, he said he would go home and barely be able to hold a conversation.  I imagined he was probably carrying a fair amount of secondary trauma from all he had experienced.

But just then, it was he who talked and talked. I had barely said a word bar ask a few questions. I wondered vaguely who was helping who.  The question didn't seem relevant.  I appreciated the lack of presumption.

He had done the classes for years, and was taking advantage of a change in circumstance to stop them and run weekend workshops instead.  I wasn't surprised. 

How do you know if people had got these problems?

He said often, they hang around after class. I shifted uncomfortably, but he was still doing the talking.  

- And then what?

- Well, it's clear they want to talk, he said, so I offer to make them a coffee while I tidy up, prepare for the next class.

I should say at this point, with some relief, I had never been offered a coffee.

I was struck that you would never think, to see him in his professional life, that this fun, sensitive man, carried the weight of this experience and sense of responsibility towards the steady stream of broken people who walked through his doors.  That he didn't judge, moralise, analyze, theorise.  He just did what he could to help.

Then he mentioned, let's call her Marie, who had come to class and who would apparently swear a lot.  She had some kind of mental health issue and was possibly delusional. The class would be talking about, I don't know, surgery and she'd say one week that she'd, you know, she'd been a surgeon and they'd say, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Marie, that, is that right? And then she talked about land the family had, but how she, the brother had got everything and she'd been left without. She'd be effing and blinding about that. And then another week they'd be talking about, say, teaching and she'd say, Oh yeah, I was a primary teacher once and they'd say, Yeah, yeah, okay, Marie. Then another week they'd be talking about the news, and she'd say, Yeah, I was a journalist once. And they said, Yep, sure, of course you were, thinking there was no way you taught children cursing the way you do.

One day mid-August she turned up and gave the teacher a Christmas present and a card. Then she turned up to a colleague's class soaking wet and half an hour late and with a belief that her house was being sunk in the river by the council. She lived alone. The teacher was worried about her, so he phoned a mate who was a paramedic.  The mate said, contact NHS 24.  Give them the contact details you've got, they'll look her up and someone will do a wellness check but you won't hear what happens.  After that she disappeared. It turned out she had been sectioned. She turned up three months later to class. About eight months after that, they found out that she had taken her own life.

So they went to the funeral, the teacher and the long-term class attendee. It turned out she was from a famous family. Someone who knew her spoke about her life, how she'd grown up in Africa and trained to be a surgeon. She did that for a while and then she got fed up with the misogyny of the industry and retrained to become a journalist at one of the national papers. After some time there, she decided her true calling was to become a primary school teacher. So she did that. And then eventually the weight of her condition overcame her.

 He made no other comment beyond that.

A few days later, I suddenly heard from someone I hadn't heard from in nearly a year. I had met her by chance a couple of years before. She was almost overpoweringly religious and had increasingly been encouraging me to go to Christian concerts in Glasgow, which I wasn't interested in. Then I received an intense rant against a local pub and all the things she was going to say about them in a review. I was beginning to think it might be wise to step back a bit.

Then in early April last year, she said she had been accepted at a local university to study in the autumn. I sent her another message at the end of April to, because we had a long-standing dinner reservation. I hadn't heard from her, so I thought she'd just decided to cool off the relationship. And I didn't hear back about the dinner. I assumed the brief friendship was over or other things had taken over in her life.

The rest of the year passed. It was perhaps towards the end of last year that I bumped into her in the street with her husband, holding on to him. I barely recognised her. I thought she had had a stroke or some similarly grave medical problem. She couldn't speak properly and was obviously very fragile. We said hello, exchanged some pleasantries, said it was nice to see them. They didn't say what had happened and I didn't want to pry.

The other day, out of the blue she invited me to have coffee with another friend I didn't know. She said she had discovered in 2021 that she had bipolar disorder but that had been living fine, without medication as far as I could gather. When I knew her, she seemed entirely normal. She painted my mum's nails. She was kind. She was smiley. She was enthusiastic. It had not for a minute occurred to me that she was bipolar.  Around the time of the pub review I did see clear streaks of aggression, a desire to punish, even what I thought was a kind of superiority complex. Certainly, I decided to be more careful in the relationship. 

Apparently she had been out visiting somewhere with her husband. Something had happened. She had to go to at least two maybe three hospitals and she was admitted at one of these for three months. She was now able to walk in the street on her own.  She still had some trouble with her speech due to the side effects of the medication. We were speaking in neither of our own native languages and I noticed that she mixed up this language with her own, which were admittedly similar, but in a way that she had not done before. She wanted to restart work, but just one day a week.  She was worried that the course she wanted to do might not accept her this year. I could see that she was becoming slightly stressed, and also tired after about 40 minutes of conversation. The other friend and I both suggested to her, one step at a time. Then I had to go to another appointment

I thought about Marie, and I wondered when she became the way that she did. Was it  harm from brother that tipped her over the edge? Was it the misogyny at work? Was it in the family? Did people have a role in what happened to her? Could she have been saved? What might have saved her? Or was it an inevitable path of neurobiology, genetic vulnerability, sleep disruption, medication effects and psychosocial stress?  Or was it these plus life events and the relationships she had with people in her life?  Or something else altogether.  I wondered if the teacher dwelt on those questions.

When I was about thirteen, someone my parents knew came to stay with us briefly for a night or two.  Her husband, an army officer, had left her and she was in a bad way. I remember a general vibe of unsettledness and unhappiness and angst.  The next day her room stank of cigarettes.  This was the most disturbing thing maybe because although everyone smoked then, people like my parents didn't stink out the guest room with smoke, when we stayed with friends. And manners were everything in those circles.  The cigarette smoke was somehow symbolic that she had already, in a some way, gone beyond the pale.  Not long after we heard she had taken her own life. I was shocked but part of me was not surprised.

I thought about my friend, who had been struck by bipolar disorder apparently in her early 40s. What was it that tipped her over the edge in 2021 then and what was it that did it again in 2025? Was it the stress of visiting the university? Did something in particular happen? Was she becoming more stressed generally or did it just come out of nowhere?

Certainly I felt a strong push from the stories: look after yourself. Stay on an even keel. Don't get upset or angry, don't let things get to you. Take care of yourself. Beware what you become attached to.  

An attempt at moving a trauma trigger

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.  

I don't know for sure if it has worked.  Few of my memories are clear traumatic, visual memories, the kind that EMDR therapy works on to file 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.

Vividly bad memories

This is a container.

Few of my bad memories during the traumatising time, are clear, one off, visual memories, the kind that EMDR therapy works on to file into the past. 

Most of them are more amorphous, like the miasma because they relate to control mechanisms: emails, lies, things we found out from other people, things I discovered but wasn't physically present for: Pigfaces announcement on Whatsappp three days after dad died, that he was getting married that month; leaving mum behind while he went abroad to get married a couple of weeks after the funeral; the discoveries of all the things he took; receiving not one response to the ten emails I wrote to social services.  How can you have a trauma memory to work with, to move,  about an absence yet know simultaneously you were ignored then traumatised by that same organisation that is supposed to protect? 

 I have some: 

- The discovery he'd deleted key financial instruction documents from dad's computer because I was there in dad's study, on his computer, having finally got the password, when I discovered that & can still remember the shock & disbelief which were to become familiar feelings.

- The way he dominated the funeral, having organised it, having already discredited me to my parents' friends, while I was sick after two months looking after my dying father and sick mother without proper support, while his wife padded around the house in her bare feet and played on her laptop. 

- The way he appropriated that narrative of care, as though it had been him along along. The way it was apparent he had already lied about me and allied with my uncle's family, they way they were all together at the funeral, he sat with mum,  when he hadn't even been there the last three weeks  of dad's life in hospital, or most of the rest of the time.  Me and my family all sat on the back pew because I couldn't bear to be near him. 

- Of Pigface making us abandon my birthday celebrations in 2024 by announcing on my birthday he was taking mum away (supposedly temporarily) for a month, putting her in a care home and if we wanted to see her, we all had to come right then.  Yes, we could take her out.  When we got there, he refused to let us take her out and then wrote an "official" version of what he did, copying I think social services, where he lied saying he'd said we could take her out. That was the last day mum lived in her house.  The contrast in the photos taken at lunchtime and the photos that afternoon is brutal.  

- Pigface being here at our house and harassing mum and me, forcing us to let him see mum who he's just abducted for four months, by withholding her medication unless we do.  Trying to manipulate mum to go away with him.  Yes, I know you want to stay here, mum, but wouldn't you like to stay in your own nice, warm, bed in your own house (the one he'd abducted her from) tonight - and if you still feel the same tomorrow...I'll bring you back. Mum was shaking.  He was wheedling, conning her, filming me, saying I couldn't take 84 year old mum, inside from the freezing January night air that he'd kept her standing out in for an hour.   Then he grinned at me and I received that silent, sadistic message he's been able to send since childhood: Yeah, I'm manipulating you all and I'm loving it. I don't care that mum's cold and shaking and upset and confused.  I'm king and that's what counts and I know you hate that I'm like this but I love that you hate it, I enjoy it, because it just tells me even more that I'm in control.   

- Of Pigface manipulating, mocking and abusing me through the cameras at mum's house - I have a recording I have not replayed.  

- The phone calls of between mum and me he suddenly ambushed so I realised he'd been eavesdropping, and then manipulated the conversation, dropping in only ever partial information to keep me on the line, to toy with me.  "I'm bringing mum coming up", but not when and of course, we didn't see her when he did.  Those are more audio memories but I had 2 shutdowns right after two of these and I remember those in mostly silent, graphic detail. The paramedics coming.  One of them resembling Pigface and not being able to approach.

- Of my utter disbelief when the social services team leader stood in my kitchen after hearing mum say to her how happy she was to be living with us, having seen her spotless room and her cosy corner in the living room, saying she wasn't going to investigate Pigface because "the past is the past".  

- Of being told in a grey windowless room, by the senior mental health nurse that they couldn't help me because yes, I was currently being traumatised but no they weren't allowed to officially diagnose, so they could only help me when Pigface and social services had finished traumatising me.  And meanwhile he had to - it was the process - turn me over as someone who passed the test for a Vulnerable Adult to the very social work team who was traumatising me because they happened to be the ones who dealt with vulnerable adults. 

- Of social services turning up on my doorstep.  

- Of social services lurking in the back garden about to attack. 

- Of running away from social services in the back garden only to nearly run into them coming round the corner down the street. 

- Of wailing horrifically, involuntarily, when social services came to investigate whether mum was being harmed having already written in a report that she was

- Of collapsing, once in A&E and then going catatonic-like.  Of being catatonic-like, locked up, another time in A&E for ages, making horrible noises again, until someone gave me Diazepam. Sometims, not being able to walk because my feet had scrunched up and frozen.

- Of getting stuck in my car in Tesco car park, frozen.

- Of seeing someone that day with a lanyard in Tesco, thinking they were social services.

- Of seeing a bin man in the street that day or week and thinking it was Pigface. 

- Of a panic attack in a public garden.

- Of receiving an email from social services saying they were having a meeting about mum the next day when I was driving back from Devon and I could come (I couldn't, because I was traumatised and because I was in England) but not saying what it was about. Turned out to the presentation of a report claiming I was harming mum by not letting her see (stopping her being re-abducted) by the son who had already physically, emotionally, psychologically and  financially abused her.

- Receiving an email, while still driving the next day, minutes before that meeting with the shocking contents of that horrific report and feeling completely ambushed, blindsided, betrayed.

- Arriving at the house to find how much he'd taken and the portrait of me at 18 gone.

I'll stop there because there's more than I thought and they're not fun.

Triggers

From: "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..."

... :intrusive thoughts and my body surging with cortisol spikes by the hour. 

I am constantly triggered by things particularly related to social services or to reminders of Pigface.

The doorbell ringing at 6.30PM this week that sent me into a terrible spiral. We don't expect people to ring the door at that time. The mail has already been, deliveries have already been, and I don't want to answer the door because I just don't want to take the risk that it's Pigface or Social Services, or the police, with some new accusation against me.  Cognitively, I know that likelihood is vanishingly small, but the rest of me reacts as though they're all outside the door.

So I sent calmly, to my 6'1 son to open the door, though that would be nothing to his even taller, much heavier uncle, 100 times more aggressive and demanding. 

There's nobody there, he said. 

I sent him to the back door. There's nobody there. 

But it bothered me.  I wanted to know whether the person had been at the back or the front door.  That's classic threat scanning: if you can predict where the threat might come from you might be safer. None of it's true, it's all hypervigilance. Because there was historical threat at the door.  Pigface at both doors.  Social services at both doors.   It suddenly became incredibly important to know which door had been rung.

I phoned my husband to ask if he could work out which door the person had been at. He doesn't seem to understand me and keeps talking about fixing the door cameras.  Five minutes go by with my saying I don't care about the cameras or fixing them, I just want to know if he can tell which doorbell it was I heard.  But he keeps saying the same thing.  Eventually, he hangs up.

Eventually I realise (I think, though I never did get it completely clear) and not from him explicitly saying anything that the reason I heard the doorbell was because he was fixing the camera. So there was no one at the door. And he seems to think it's funny. Whereas I just was super, super, stressed, through something inadvertently caused by my husband. 

Being triggered, made afraid isn't good.  Being triggered by someone who is supposed to be an ally isn't good. Being abandoned having been triggered by that person is worse.  Being laughed at doesn't help. By the time that was all over I was in a real state. 

So I send him messages saying, explaining how this stresses me, and that he shouldn't hang up or laugh and make it worse, and please not to make the fucking doorbell ring at night because with this kind of concatenation of stress I was never going to recover.  And in my head, I see Pigface laughing, loving all the chaos he has caused.

And do you see - nothing had happened.  To the world, nothing is happening.  To Social Services, nothing wrong, relating to Pigface ever did happen. In that programme I mentioned, Waiting for the Out, one of the characters says it's that splitting of you that really does for you.  It's that split reality, in this case: what you know to be true and what the rest of the world says is true.

It was a trauma reaction to social services who had so harmed me, coming to my door in the past, that was activated eight months later.  That one actually activates pretty often: most times someone comes to the door.

The other week, an unknown mobile number came up on my phone.  I didn't used to be able to answer my phone at all, post-trauma. Now I can answer it if I know who it is.  I don't allow voicemails  - too threatening.  For the first time, I answered this call.  No resposnse.  I went into immediate spiral / threat scan mode.

This morning, I saw someone fat and barrel-chested with spiky hair in the street staring at our house who I thought, momentarily was him 

 A couple of days ago: His insane, cackly laugh  heard in the character of  Brigham on the TV series "Small Prophets" 

Last week: a photo of myself with short hair, reminds me of a vile family resemblance. 

Last week: the thought of a passport, earlier this week, a symbol triggering reminders of everything he took from me, rendering me powerless as Power of Attorney, stopping me doing things with mum she would have liked, interfering with, trammelling our relationship.

Last week: social dynamics at singing groups make me perceive social threat. I completely shut down, socially. 

All the time, I second guess people's reactions.  Mild power dynamics make me feel targeted.  I feel judged, criticised, manipulated, expelled, erased, all the time, when I know very well it may not be warranted. I know that, I tell myself that and my system doesn't care.   

I hadn't realised how many triggers, but there is something at least every day, sometimes multiple times a day, and those are just the ones I'm conscious of, not the bracing I've now normalised. 

 It is exhausting, depressing and frustrating

There are a lot to shift.

Sadism / Living in fear

Despite having renounced everything I still live in fear that Pigface and Social Services will come after me, will invent some other false claim to accuse me of.  

They could have and may yet carry on with their attacks to force my suicide and then blamed it on "her own poor mental health" or to drive me to such ill health that they end me anyway.  My sense is that that is the kind of endgame both parties love: the perfect result: the one they wanted, but have no responsibility for.  "She did it to herself" + not-sorrowful head-shaking. 

That's what he loves, I think: the fact that the fear of the abuser still doesn't allow me to be completely free of him; that I worry that he could click his fingers in some diabolic way to start it all up again and push me over the edge. 

Twisted minds love that kind of power. I can see in my mind's eye that sick grin he gets from the love of manipulation and the calculated abuse of power, that private communication from him to me that I was reminded a year ago, he used to do as a very small child. 

He would lie about something he'd claim I'd done to my mum, to get me into trouble. I would get into trouble. I would be outraged at the injustice and as I was being told off he would be there watching, from the sidelines, jabbing his finger at me in sadistic glee, delighted: I've got you, I'm pulling all the strings; I can control everyone, they don't know it, but you can see it and there's nothing you can do and I'm loving it.  

I thought that kind of behaviour was normal. Awful, but normal, because I told my mother the truth and was disbelieved.   Now I realise it was the birth of insanity.

Why I gave up Power Of Attorney of mum and executorship of dad's will

This is another container on the topic of renouncing my rights.

Why I renounced my right as joint power of attorney for mum's finances and wellbeing

- to avoid being responsible for his decisions while having always being prevented by him from making any myself

- to reduce the risk of being attacked again by him and social services for whatever else they wanted to invent. He had already got social services to try to harass me into giving up power of attorney after mum left. They had also allegedly reported me to the Office of the Public Guardian anyway, who had done nothing.

Why I renounced executorship of dad’s will

Because Pigface persuaded dad’s lawyer not to investigate the huge sum he took from dad's account, just before dad died when he was delirious in hospital, claiming it was a deathbed "gift". As a result I felt the whole process was prejudiced

I didn't agree with contents valuation which massively devalued many items.

I was being forced to agree to and sign off on things I didn't agree with,

I was being threatened by the lawyer with witholding the process and thereby, wait for it... harming mum. It's all too easy to imagine Pigface whispering in the lawyer's ear, the same way he convinced Social Services: can't we claim she's harming mum if she does X?

I was disgusted at how he took items from mum's house before and especially after the contents valuation.

I was disgusted at seeing in the seven year “listing of gifts” legal process how he had shamelessly described the gifts dad gave him as handouts as though, he a high earning professional with a wife similarly employed. It was there in black and white: he had gone asking for handouts for repairs to his house, to support his wife when redundant. In contrast, only one of us was in paid employment, our much older, larger house was in far greater need of repairs yet we never once asked for handouts, even when dad saw I often struggled to complete repairs myself, we never went on family holidays, almost never ate out as a family. I think the last time we did, Pigface, a guest, ruined a birthday meal for one of my kids attacking me again forcing me to leave my own child's birthday. I realise just now it was another of his double bind techniques I came to experience far too often: a way of asserting dominance.

I was always surprised at how financial gifts varied year to year. I never, even once I had the balance sheet, compared the totals year on year, not wanting to see my father in any worse light after his death. But those surprising handouts I occasionally received were probably simple parity with whatever Pigface was demanding that year. As far as I know, Dad was even-handed.

Overall, I renounced both my rights, and probably my inheritance, to rid myself of being harnessed to him. With no oversight, all the control and a history of greed and taking for himself, though mum's allowance probably covers her care home fees, I am almost certain he will make sure that, nonetheless, come the end of mum's life, nothing remains of her other assets. It will all have "disappeared".

I was just generally disgusted at how vile and grubby Pigface made everything related to my parents after dad’s death, especially everything to do with money. I preferred just to walk away, let him have it all, embezzle whatever he could get away with and not be embroiled in his filth.

Everyone has said I am making a mistake. That I should fight to protect the rights that my parents setup for me, to protect them and make decisions in their interest with the expectation that I exercise those rights. But they didn't set up the POA in the right way. I have been systematically prevented from exercising those rights.

The great flaw in this process is that where power of attorney is joint, the parties should never be allowed to take information pertaining to that person's affairs, nor make decisions independently. That is handing someone a lever for abuse. Just watching, as an example, the mess Nicola Sturgeon's husband is in for embezzlement, we know that it is common; that temptation to steal and to over-control is common even among people in whom we place all our trust, not just in families but in running the country. We know it, if nothing else from the expenses scandal that showed virtually every MP was on the take and from the weekly corruption news stories about politicians.

The number of stories of abusive, embezzling relatives I have heard since this happened is shocking.  It seems to touch almost every family and yet society ignores this problem.  The Office of the Public Guardian, tasked with ensuring Power of Attorney and Guardianships are not abused, investigate only a tiny percentage of reported abuse.  I should think most of those are not "family conflict" which will invariably by messy and time consuming, but alerts from "valid" sources: social services, care homes, banks.

People are baffled. They say I should fight to protect my inheritance. But Pigface has been so extraordinarily successful in persuading many organisations and people not just of innocence in the face of serious allegations, but, "deny and deflect", a classic council strategy, that I am the problem. My only expectation is that he would continue in that success. I do not want to throw money we don't have at a lawyer who would fail me as everyone has failed me. I looked into asking if we could use mum's money to try to get the information and decision making power that I should have as Power of Attorney but he acted quickly and consolidated all his power. Decisions have already been taken, much money has already gone and the lawyers said at best we would have to pay the fees ourselves and try to reclaim them after, which I wasn't willing to do.

At least ten times I wrote to Social Services to tell them about what Pigface was doing to mum: taking money, isolating her, taking her hearing aids, and to me. 

I wrote to the Office of the Public Guardian three times to no avail. When they acknowledged my letter asking for my POA to be removed I had to write again to ask if they were confirming it. They granted it.  At that point, independently, I had realised I should have sent a form, which I believe is a legal requirement, signed by a doctor or lawyer saying that this person understands what they are doing nor is being coerced. In that letter to the Office of the Public Guardian I had said I was so afraid of the co-executor that I was afraid to die, in case I was pursued by him in death. It was safer to stay alive where I could try to keep him at a distance. That is not the letter of a well-balanced individual. That is the kind of thing someone indeed terrified and coerced might say. What did they do? They waived the requirement for an assessment by a lawyer or doctor.

Most of all, I renounced to try and help my health. It's all you've really got and having watched one parent die, one terminally ill, and struggle with my own health since those events and the Pigface abuse, the value of health can't be overestimated.

My relationship with mum now

This is a container about how my relationship with mum has changed since being traumatised by her son and his allies. 

My relationship with mum now is nothing like what it was when she lived here, when she lived, briefly, in her house with carers or before dad died.

I used to see mum all the time, every week at least, often several times a week. For years, my parents ate here regularly, or dropped in for a drink, or a cup of tea.  Occasionally we ate there.  Increasingly, I took food there to relieve the burden on dad as mum's ageing carer.  I took them out, for walks often. Then I took mum out, for walks, to gardens, concerts, to places I thought she'd have fun.   

I am now too afraid to spend time with mum as I would otherwise choose. I am unable to take her for days out and activities as previously.

I am also too afraid to use mum’s money to take her out, even though I had Power of Attorney until last month and even though she is, despite the thousands disappearing into the Pigfamily bank account, very comfortably off. Meanwhile, I saw on the bank statements that Pigface regales his obese self at restaurants, apparently also with similarly obese Pigwife at mum's expense and sends himself large sums in "expenses" while mum is in full time care. 

When mum lived with me, for months I was terrified of spending her money.  Pigfaces's accusations and intimidations had made me a shell of my previous self.  So we didn't pay ourselves initially for her food, and of course not rent or care.  We used to go to church soup lunches where they only wanted £5 for both of us. It was OK, we ended up going to their services because mum liked to go to church each Sunday - a lifelong practice that has also been taken away from her.  

Those church lunch trips meant mum could go out, perhaps between a morning and afternoon activity with me, but spend next to none of her money and I wouldn't be accused. She didn't like sitting with what is euphemistically and unsubtly called in Scotland the "poor souls": people in poverty, on benefits, with drug and mental health problems who made up the majority of attendees at these city centre lunches.

But going there was better than going nowhere and she got exercise on the walks to the various venues but I could tell she would much rather be in a restaurant. Mum had a good, very middle class life with dad. They ate out, went to concerts, talks, dad played golf.  They met friends for sherry or gin and tonic once a week.  I did take her to concerts because as her carer, my place was free. 

After Pigface and Social Services locked mum up in the second Rothouse, I wanted to take mum to her house for privacy, familiarity and comfort and to get some pictures from there to put up in her Rothouse room that the supposedly devoted son hadn't bothered to do, busy feathering his own nest with them instead. But we never did because I knew taking mum to her own house, even for a visit, would be against his "policy" because my husband had seen my uncle and aunt, who were allied with him, at mum's house and they had told him they didn't want to "distress" mum by brining her there.  

In any case, I have long been too afraid to go to mum's house because of trauma memories associated with the cameras Pigface installed and being mocked, manipulated and abused there. After sorting through mum's clothes, shoes, and bathroom, I almost never went there, realising Pigface was spying on us via an alarm on his phone that activated on his phone as soon as the door opened.  

Now I see mum about once a month. We planned to see her every two weeks, but it is too emotionally draining on me and therefore on my husband to put ourselves through that more often.

He has permanently damaged my relationship with mum

I realised that even if I could take mum on a trip, I probably don't even have the right anymore, having renounced power of attorney last month to escape Pigface. If I wanted to I would probably have to seek permission from him, just as he always wanted. He knows I'd never do that, thus, he still constrains my current relationship with mum. 

 It's more than that though. He has polluted what we had. If mum and my relationship were a clear pool in a quiet place, with laughter, fun and care, it's as though he's come there, stamped over the flowers, taken a great shit in the water, laughed and walked off. So now the weather is permanently overcast, the whole place mostly shrivelled, barren, with no colour in it as though some great evil has come over that land and poisoned it. 

This is partly because of the invented accusations from Pigface, which is consistent with his behaviour over the last two years. Because of those accusations, even though nothing "beyond" losing mum, was done specifically to me, those accusations and the confirmation of them in effectively forcing us to give up mum trammelled and killed really our previously free and easy relationship. Now I see myself as a person not who harms mum but a person accused  by the State of doing so, due to his lies and manipulations and I am therefore always in danger of being harmed by him and by the State.  I am exactly where they want me and where all authoritarian regimens and individuals want people: squashed and terrified. Too afraid to oppose, too afraid to be a threat. 

When I see mum, I get upset if she mentions the past, or the future, because it has been so sullied. Then I get afraid of getting upset in case they find out and say my getting upset is harming mum.  I can see how easily it could start to  tip into paranoia if I am not careful:  what if they put a recording device on mum to see what we are saying?  But that's not paranoia, that's a legitimate reaction to sustained coercion, control and surveillance.  

Pigface did put me under surveillance: by using cameras to scare and manipulate me at mum's house, by reading the messages I sent mum, confiscating the cards and gifts I sent, eavesdropping on and ambushing mum's phone calls to me, sending proxies he had manipulated to my house or to demand interviews with mum that I tried to arrange and then was still accused, in at least once case, of witholding access despite having done the very opposite. Social services kept trying to come round and check on mum, despite having seen her visibly happy, content, and comfortable and spoken on the phone numerous times to her and having heard her and seen her speak her happiness with us. Constant monitoring, constantly jumping through all the right hoops and still being disbelieved through manipulation of a third party will eventually cause paranoia. 

Nowadays mum and I stay in this blighted present.  I try to make it as enjoyable as I am able. I bring my family. I bring roses in the summer through the autumn.  In the winter I bring photographs, often of things we did with dad although that's probably "against Pigface policy" too. But mum loves seeing photos of dad, or hearing my recordings of him. 

  We went through a sequence taken on a walk I took them on a few years ago.  Dad must have had a dozen different expressions and she could recognised, identify and laugh at them all.  Those few moments were just like old times. You wouldn't have known mum was terminally ill, or that we were sheltering in a crater made from our love, in a dead, bombed out, songless landscape. It was as though for just those few minutes, a ray of sunlight shone on the two of us and I could forget where we really were: in an over-expensive pub with arrogant staff a few minutes away from the prison she had been put in, overseen by uncaring, arrogant staff, put there by a monster and the faceless bureaucrats abetting him.      

I know that mum loves me and I love her. But third party harm means it can't be expressed as it was.

There is no way I can go to mum's funeral when the time comes, because Pigface will commandeer that, the way he now commandeers her Christmas, birthdays, mothers days and I couldn't go near any of Pigfamily ever again. I was relieved to hear today though about alternative or Quaker style funerals where people just sit in a circle and say what they remember about the person, maybe they play music or do other personal things to remember the person. So perhaps there is that option for us.  Or maybe my kids will go, though I doubt it. Maybe it will just be my husband and me.  Maybe it will just be me.

I was reminded also about practising non-attachment. Attachment due to care and especially from the hyper-responsibility that I suffer from, largely because of the way my parents brought me up, is responsible for all my suffering of the last two years. Perhaps I should be thinking that mum isn't just "my mum". Mum is primarily her own person first and foremost even though she would define herself in large part through her attachments to people, which makes it hard to practice non-attachment. One thing I know for sure is that mum wouldn't have wanted me to suffer the way I have suffered and she certainly wouldn't allow herself to suffer to anything like that extent.

Abusive control mechanisms

Control

Pigface had a habit, even before dad died, of applying conditions.  Dad had done this.  It was a power and control technique.  It was a double whammy technique of establishing control; if 1)  he "allowed" anything, any such authorisation, would come with a string of conditions.  These would mean little in themselves, but they were part of forcing the other person to accept his domination. 

Narrative distortion
He made people believe that he had total control and the Power of Attorney that was setup for me didn't apply, or could be stepped round, because he convinced people I wasn't up to it, or I'd left it all to him, or I was mentally ill or autistic or didn't care about mum, was incompetent / dangerous / ill / diseased.  He used whatever he thought at the time would best convince people. 

After dad died, he claimed I was undiagnosed autistic since birth and spoke about me as one of "those people" the way racists see black people: as permanent aberrations or diseased.  In his visible disgust it was plain he thought autists should be gassed or shot or locked up for life at best. 

To use mum's passport as an example: he took that.   That stopped from me to prevent me taking her abroad on a trip.  Why?  Pigface wouldn't have wanted me to have any pleasure in giving mum pleasure, especially if there was money involved. Also, too much independence for "someone like  me". If I could take mum abroad on a trip I might get the idea that I could try to have actual joint power of authority, just as my parents set it up.

Control mechanism 1: consolidating unilateral authority

Mostly, though, having the passport meant it could be used as part of a control mechanism.

Probably if I'd asked him for it, his justification would have been I wasn't "safe" enough to take mum away.  Therefore, he might "allow" it with "conditions".  

There is a clear mechanism at work that is very consistent with his modus operandi:

1.  Take key things / information.  That was the first thing he actually did: took money / access/ information / paperwork. 

2. Control access.

3. Force requests for access.

4. Give reasons why such access is or should probably denied: e.g. simply assert I was unsafe / incompetent, thereby establishing a distorted narrative and power supremacy at one go. 5. Possibly allow X given conditions Y. If X did not inconvenience Pigface, 5. was worth doing simply on the basis that it consolidated the victim and / or other people of his supposed unilateral authority. 

Control mechanism 2: Accusations and discrediting 

These were a huge part of his control strategy. If he made a disparaging assertion, the suspicion was raised in the minds of others.  It puts the burden, not logically, or legally but psychologically on the other person to disprove it.  So he manipulates both ends: the person about whom he wants to raise suspicions and the people in whom he wants to raise them. If I were to try to validate myself I was automatically confirming the suspicions by playing on that pitch. I was automatically defending.

And he knew I wasn't an attacker, for all that he endlessly called me conflict-seeking. It was the same ploy.  Accuse someone of seeking conflict and when they say they're not, use that as evidence.  He just didn't want to be challenged.  It was all strategy.

Control mechanism 3: bossing about

If mum and I went to her house to sort through her enormous wardrobe, an alarm would ring on Pigface's phone, alerting him the door had been opened, and he would then spy on us through the house cameras, knowing we couldn't see him, then mock and manipulate me audibly, through speakers on those same cameras, knowing  that I knew he couldn't hear anything we said.  So I was mute, but visible.  He would ring then ring the house phone to distress mum, abuse me to mum, accuse me of things to mum, who wasn't going to remember but who felt distressed in the moment, leaving me to manage that distress afterwards.  He would also make practical demands to mum about mum, which was his way of bossing me around.  It wasn't that any of the things he said were important.  The primary reason was to make me do what he wanted because if he managed that, it was another way of asserting control and if I didn't do it he could accuse me of neglect of the house or similar.   

Control mechanism 4

The double bind.  There were endless variations of these and they were one of the worst of all the control strategies.  The example at the end of the previous entry is one example of such a double bind. 

Sirens

 

Sometime in the last week I saw a post on Instagram, one of those mental health and wellbeing claims that is instantly dismissible, giving no proper reference to the study claimed, spuriously to give it credence, or so distorted to fit the aims of the poster that any possible connection is broken. It was a claim that a Native American grief ritual from the 1400s was studied by John Hopkins University and shown to process trauma 6* faster than western methods.

This grief ritual involved associating specific memories with different stones and then letting them go, into a river.  On the surface, if you are interested in ritual and how western arrogance and colonial habits may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater then this may understandably make you pause with curiosity, especially if you are vulnerable and desperate for help or change. That's why such seductive posts are like the irresistible, deadly songs of the sirens that Odysseus encounters.

But if you are suffering from grief or trauma and you really want to get past things, then this is like offering a story to someone gasping for air, instead of oxygen; it is like leading someone in fog to follow a flickering light to a marsh, when what they need is a lighthouse.  

There is no study cited in the post and grief and trauma aren't the same anyway. It is just a hook to reel in vulnerable people and then feed on them to get algorithmic changes to benefit the poster.

But I wondered if there was any truth to the claim. Therapy still isn't working for me. In fact, after five sessions I still apparently haven't had any actual therapy yet.   

So yes, I am up for trying things especially self-directed; anything to escape the Russian roulette of "professional" competence.

Jaunts and jollies

Gourock, down the Clyde estuary

When mum came to us, one of the things she really wanted was to go on a trip. When dad was sick, with so much intense focus and time spent on him, many days I couldn't even go for a walk around the block.  I was worried mum was being ignored.  So I asked her what she would like. To see Andre Rieu, she said.  I never imagined it would be possible, but sure enough he was coming to Glasgow. Eventually I took her and she loved it.

Mum loved a trip out or better yet, away, more than anything.  She had and still has a great sense of fun and adventure. It is one of the greatest sorrows that I now feel unable to do any of those many trips we took. Mum's life has been largely limited to dad's preferences. 

She didn't mind where she went in the slightest, but the further the better. Seeing André Rieu abroad would have been a dream come true for her.

- What would you like to do, mum? 

We went to yoga etc but you could see it wasn't her favourite activity.  Sitting about in a class wasn't really her idea of fun.  

- Ooh, a jaunt! I think.  I can't think of anything nicer.

- Where would you like to go?

- Anywhere! 

- Anywhere in Scotland? 

- Yes, or abroad! 

Mum is a Scot, who was never that keen on Scotland.

You do love a jolly, don't you!

- Oh yes, a jolly!

- London?
- Yes! I would love to go to London.

But the furthest I took her was Gourock, down the Clyde, on the train.  It as a super day out, stunning views and beautiful sunshine. It was the nearest simulation of sub-tropical I could manage. 

I would have loved to have taken her further. I considered taking her down to London, which she loved and had visited with reasonable regularity. I thought we could try and see her friends while we were there. But it is also a big endeavour to take somebody with Alzheimer's out of their routine on a multi-day trip, never mind abroad. I was exhausted, ill and fighting constant attacks from Pigface and his allies and his emissaries and proxies. So we never did get to London.  

Had I been able to exercise Power of Attorney, as they had both set it up, without all the things dad's son did to prevent me, I would have taken mum on trips, and maybe even abroad.  Had Pigface not been, like his father, dogmatic and controlling, with an unshakeable, dictatorial belief in his own infallibility, if he had been out of the picture the way he pushed me out of the picture, I could have given mum such happy final years.  She doesn't have jaunts or jollies she longed for with that glint of fun, that sparkle in her eye, that yearning for pleasure. 

We didn't get abroad.  Pigface had taken her passport or put it in the loft and taken away the access to that to and controlled all the rest. He took so much. 

Therapy: in nature or an office?

In the last week the notion of a passport had come to me, inexplicably, as far as I remember.  But I did notice, because I'm more somatically aware these days, that I had felt a pang.  They are often, subtle, but I get them a lot.  They are usually in my chest, a kind of hidden startle-reflex the way a newborn jumps alarmingly at any noise before its system learns that noises aren't generally dangerous. 

Usually they indicate fear, but I am But if you start to normalise these physical responses to fear you may end up living with an unhealthily high baseline level of cortisol or live with or trying to shrink your life to avoid such triggers. 

That stone release ritual had given me an idea.  I didn't think that, for example, tying up a bunch of sticks and floating them down the river or dropping a stone off the bridge while visualising mum's passport was necessarily going to do the trick. A symbolic ritual, perhaps, but I thought it was going to need more than that to move these triggers. Were there any elements of it that might accord with scientifically proven ideas of making trauma triggers a thing of the past?  If the passport was an example of a problematic trigger could I use that to test it?  

Many indigenous practices have been shown to be effective at achieving their purpose. In the West they tend to be dismissed out of hand as "unscientific" but if an impartial observer were shown two different practices (say an indigenous practice to move someone out of trauma, or western EMDR therapy) and both worked as effectively as the other then the impartial observer could only say that two different methods led to the same result.

 Especially with the scientific data emerging in recent decades that community and nature benefit our health, why do we continue to give automatic credence to the idea that sitting in an office or online with a paid stranger who threatens to lock us up if what we say worries them, is more helpful than a therapy set in community and in nature? It's because we have put all our faith in the tag "professional". 

Memory, agency, preference

With Alzheimer's mum became vaguer, certainly less willing to make decisions. Her internal agency faded away but her enthusiasm for proposals remained strong.  While she might struggle to come up with ideas she still had clear preferences.  

One of the last things I took her to was about the worst public talk I have ever heard. It was by the Civic Trust on local churches, a topic, I was interested in, having given related talks myself.  

Mum was keen to come too.  Anywhere I went mum wanted to come along, anything rather than be left behind. That was fine. I enjoyed her company, her warm dry hands in mine, tracing the curves of her fingernails with the ends of my fingers. Mum loved to have nice nails. I have always "bitten my feelings", but made sure mum enjoyed manicures and pedicures while she lived with us. 

Mum's sense of inhibition was nowhere near as strong as it had been and she was inclined to be audibly outspoken in public settings about things she thought were problematic. This could be funny and slightly mortifying. Once, after coming to stay with me, I arranged for a checkup at a new surgery. Called in to see the obese  doctor, mum commented, probably truthfully, yet far too loudly about how that young woman needed to go on a diet. It could be extraordinary to hear the inner thoughts of someone who, would never have said anything remotely similar aloud and whose most wayward silent comment might have been an arch glance and a grin. 

So at the dreadful talk we rolled eyes at each other through the excruciating overlong experience and giggled, homeward, about how it was possible for anyone to give such a bad talk and for it to be received with such bizarre enthusiasm. If mum couldn't remember any of the details, she was certainly able to remember, for the next ten minutes at least, the sense of the general ordeal.

Rothouses

There is a lot to say about my experience of these.  But this will suffice for now. 

I would rather be dead than spend my final years locked up in an institution, run for profit and the convenience and pay packets of the in house guards and wardens. But that option is still sadistically withheld from those who wish it. 

I just wish mum hadn't been condemned to an eternal present in the Rothouse. A place that I have seen doesn't care for her properly, that doesn't give us a shred of information about her. 

 We have no idea what she does. My husband queried this recently. After eight months there they agreed to send us a "gazette" of what the inmates do. 

They act as though they own her. It's like school. At least in Scotland where the Scottish National Party policies show they view family as fundamentally dangerous, once the "professionals" take over, family counts for absolutely nothing. They have never once reached out to us to ask about mum's preferences, history, nothing. 

Knowing they were going to take her away, I made sure she had dementia cuddly toys filled with her favourite music. When, a week later, we were able to see her, they still lay in their boxes. No one had even bothered to unpack them

The precious present

This book, in another format, was given to me by very enlightened godmother, decades ago, probably around the time it was published in 1984. it looked mysterious, it looked precious. it was very different from any other cover I remember. It was a bit bigger than a normal book with a black cover and the title I think in gold lettering.

In philosophy, there is a view that memory is key to identity and identity is how me make sense of our lives. But I know now life isn't just memory. Enlightenment, in the Buddhist sense, doesn't seem to feature memory at all. It seems to be about a state of wider connection within the present moment.

Mum always lived, mostly in the preset that way. Now she does so all the more.

In the absence of a cure for diseases of the brain and the memory in particular, I wish society had processes in place so that immediately that becomes one's fate, one is given choices and the power to exercise them instead of just being left to rot and to be exploited by the "care" industry and unscrupulous, embezzling relatives. I don't think she knows how much has been taken from her and in his mind, that's all the justification he needs.

Miasma

This post is a container to describe the generalised sense of harm by association that I get when triggered by something specific connected to Pigface, his allies and proxies.

There is a subcontainer about his mechanism of control and narrative distortion.

The harm that Pigface wrought hangs in the air like a poisonous miasma around everything related to mum and therefore to him: the thefts, the isolation and deliberate neglect of mum under the official tag of "care"; the going against everything she wanted because he is a bulldozer and she is a daisy; the shocking announcement of his marriage days after dad died, then going away to get married a couple of weeks after dad's funeral, leaving mum, confused, still ill from a nasty virus and in grief. The obstruction, positioning, threats, coercion, manipulation, accusations, the narrative distortion, the lies and alliances, the control of everything.

It was like a lockdown of control on anything and everything connected to mum, except the actually important stuff like her health appointments: the doctor, physio, podiatry, dentist, opticians, audiologist.  All of what he must have seen as "nuisance dross" he left to me and I was glad to do it.  

I was profoundly afraid of Pigface, of the kind of person that would stoop to those depths: what he was patently willing to do for control and power and greed and what more he might be willing to do. I could see there were not brakes on him whatsoever.  It was as if he had sold his soul to the devil.  I don't think there is anything he would not do nor have done to get what he wanted. He was, is, completely and utterly ruthless.  

I knew I was not able to stand up to someone so dedicated to wrongdoing and so committed to twist the truth to make it fit the delusion that allowed all of that grabbing to happen. It wasn't just my body that kept freezing from the attacks, my mind froze at the sheer evil of it.

All of this was part of the backdrop that came and still comes to mind every time I am triggered by something related to him, or his allies or something they did.  

That chilly touch, the nausea rising from proximity to that miasma is the warning that the whirlpool is not far away and that it is time to shift.

Narrative containers

Safe "containers"

At one point, I thought it was helpful to list all of the things that Pigface had done to try and get my narrative truth out there. One of the big problems was that that narrative was taken, distorted and controlled by him. He put out a "record" to mum's family, friends, to all the organisations connected to mum and to social services, that can only have been made of distortions and lies. I know this from the way those organisations treated me: blanked me, dismissed me before I'd even said anything or just asked how mum was or for information about mum or when I raised a serious concern.

I never challenged that false narrative.  Initially it was because I didn't want to be pulled on to his territory, defending myself against lies.  What was the point of that?  I remember reading once, in an essay by AC Grayling, about how the best approach to deal with someone whose values are far below your own, is silence and it has always struck me as the best policy.  You see something similar sometimes in the dignity of people that politicians have thrown under a bus to save their own skins.  One never knows the truth behind these things but I am reminded of the recent Mandelson / Epstein scandal and the particular smugness of Keir Starmer at coming through that, bloodied but apparently victorious, bodies all around his feet.

Later, I wasn't able to challenge that narrative, even if I wanted to.  Pigface set up double bind after double bind. I was too ill due to that, the months of his intimidation, coercion and control, plus looking after mum when she eventually came back to us, was a 24 hour job. 

It was all part of much wider general deliberate process by him of erasing me as POA, my relationship with mum and erasing my agency.

I did write down the things that he did in many different places, at different times.  Eventually I was drowning in lists and records for later sifting. It was fragmented because it was so distressing revisiting all the things he did - the memories, the diary entries, the notes. I still haven't been able to bring myself to read the emails again or play the recordings.

Recently I began to think: do I want to make a public, coherent list of all the things he did, to "reclaim my narrative", or is that just draining and triggering and re-traumatizing? It felt like the latter. Or it does just now.

But every time I try to write a post on something specific and current, about recovery, I find myself pulled into the whirlpool horror of things it did, getting off the point.

It starts with something like...I don't know how he can live with what he's done to her.  Actually, I do, because I've heard the dismissive, arrogant and patronising way he talks about his own mother.  The whole attitude is "Ach, she can't remember anyway, so what would be the point?"  

People live with the awful things they have done by justifying, minimising or simply rewriting reality in their heads and, further, by what they tell people.  That's distortion of narrative and of reality.  Rewrite reality enough and eventually it disappears. That's why gaslighting is like a blowtorch wielded by a maniac.  

The reason, I think, the mind gets pulled again and again into contemplating, trying to make sense of the evil that were done, is that it is still trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. It circles and circles, can't settle, can't rest. Something in the current story will inevitably point back to past harm and there it is again: the mind pulled towards the whirlpool again. That whirlpool sucks you down to another world where the harms get replayed on a loop like a cinema of horrors where the audience of one is locked inside.

But maybe putting those horrors inside smaller, more manageable containers like "What Pigface stole" might help.   It doesn't have to be exhaustive, just a placeholder to point to when I feel the drag of the whirlpool so I don't have to keep drowning in it.

The hope with these containers, is they can be pointed to, rather than revisited, re-ruminated, when the tug of intrusive thoughts threatens to pull me back into them. 

Kintheft

 A placeholder for some of of the things Pigface took:

Mum, by taking her from her home, family, community, church, country (Scotland), and isolating her in a Rothouse ("care" home) near his home in another country (England) where he knew and where she repeatedly said she didn't want to be.  She had always begged never to be put there.  It was a fear she had, akin, in its intensity, to that of  her own mother, of being buried alive. 

Her hearing aids, telling both the Rothouses he put her in that she "refused" to wear them - a lie they found, and still find, convenient to repeat.  I had to get her more after he confiscated the first ones not long after dad died.  Mum always wore her hearing aids with us without ever any fuss.  It was never an issue. Some mornings she even remembered to put them in herself.

The new glasses I got for her and labelled as the new ones. Just didn't care whether she could see or not. 

Her medication.  He used this as a bargaining chip to force us to let him see mum so he could try to bamboozle and manipulate her away with him again.  And even though she said categorically she didn't want to go with him and she wanted to stay with us he refused to leave, causing mum to shake with distress and fear, so that we had to call the police to make him leave.  

My relationship with mum by damaging my mental and physical health, poisoning that relationship with fear by controlling everything connected to do with her.

My rights as Power of Attorney by removing key information to exercise those rights including financial and administrative information relating to mum's house and assets.  He deleted key documents about dad's finances from his computer that dad had left for both of us. 

He forced me to renounce Power of Attorney and executorship of dad's will by using social services to try to pressure me to renounce POA.  I became powerless because he had taken all the information needed to exercise POA anyway.  He was dogmatic, domineering, aggressive threatening.  In the face of all that, I couldn't have exercised POA even if he hadn't taken all the information. By the end, my agency had been taken from me.  I was left with responsibility for decisions he ensured only he was allowed to make.

My mental and physical health and wellbeing from behaviour that was intimidating, coercive, harassing, manipulative, by spreading lies to people and organisations he made into allies, distorting and controlling the narrative of what happened and about who I am.  He erased me, my rights as POA, my agency. He reduced me to a shell of who I had been.  In 2024 I passed the triple test for meeting the criteria of a "Vulnerable Adult": suffering a mental disorder, at risk of being harmed and unable to safeguard own interests.   

Thousands of pounds in money from my parents' accounts, first while dad was suffering delirium in hospital and secondly over a long period, from my mother, after dad died.

Paintings, photographs, objects belonging to my mum especially after the contents valuation. In contrast, he didn't put a single one of mum's pictures from her house in her Rothouse room.  The photo albums of us as a family in Africa when we were children. He cherry-picked his way through the rest of mum's albums. 

A photo album Christmas gift I sent Mum of her time with me and my family before and after dad died while before Pigface extracted her from her home. 

He intercepted and removed the photo cards I sent Mum saying I was causing her harm. 

Access to the loft where the papers and jewellery was kept

Access to the garage where he put, well, I don't know what. But dad's valueless car was and still is in my name simply because in his last months when the insurance fell due he got a better name with it in my name.  

Pigface obviously took dad's phone after he died.  There was a Spotify playlist I had setup when he was in hospital with music he asked for.  I would have liked to have listened again to the music that made his final days more bearable. 

Pigface deleted the voicemail message on my parent's ansaphone that had been there for decades and that I found immensely stabilising and reassuring.   Mum have felt the same. I'd bet he made sure to record it for himself first. He high-handedly deleted it, in his ironically, dad-like "I know best" way.  Replaced it with one of mum sounding shaky and scared.

Things of mine that I lent mum that were at her house.

Pigface took and we think, binned, the portrait of me at 18 that hung in my parents dining room for decades out, we can only surmise, of sheer malice because he had run out of other ways of trying to hurt me. Eventually, I would have liked my children to have it, which would have been the normal course of events. Taking that was an attempt to deliberately wound me further now that he couldn't contact to me directly or legitimately, at present at least, find a way to get social services or the other allies to do it for him. It was one of the only option, and an easy one. No-one else would see the cruelty but me and my "irrelevant" family.  

He has everything now: sole Power of Attorney, sole execution of dad's will, total control of mum, her money, assets, house, everything. I was only able to go once after the first panic attack.   

Pigface and Pigwife could do all this because they knew no one was checking up on them.  That was because social services, the police and the Office of the Public Guardian hadn't even so much as sniffed in their direction. That's how so many people get away with embezzlement and abuse.