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.