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.