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.

-   His wife padding around my parents house in her bare feet while I cooked, cleaned & cared for my parents - something mum hated - and played on her laptop. 

At the funeral, it was apparent he had already discredited me to my parents' friends, while I was sick after two months looking after my dying father and sick mother & allied with my uncle's family. My family were shepherded by a funeral official to a room at the back of the church. When I went in I was shocked to see Pigface's family and my uncle's family all standing staring at us, huge, dominating. Pigface is well over 6'. Our cousin about 6'6. I was horrified to be suddenly in the same room as people, PigFace, Pigwife whose behaviour had horrified me and my uncle who it was clear had been manipulated. I said hello to my cousins and left the room. I also felt like we were the publicly "legitimate" family PigFace had already organised the funeral while I was ill just after dad's death. While recovering and phoning the closest of my parents friend to tell them I found he had already been there. By organising the funeral and being the public face he had already made it look as though he was the competent present person and I was irrelevant when in fact I have been caring for both my parents for most of the last two months well he took that to England for his operation over three days & made that small journey into heroics. He appropriated mum & a false narrative of care, sat with her,l  & my uncle's family in the legitimate family section.  I couldn't bear to be near them. I sat with my family in the back pew. We didn't leave till everyone else had left & they all stated at us as they filed out. But mum sat with us at the wake. 

- 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.  

- Of discovering in 2024 at mums house that he had taken the photo albums of our time as a family in Africa in the 1970s & cherry picked his way through of rest of my parents' photo albums.

- Pigface being here at our house and harassing mum and me, forcing us to let him see mum (who he had just abducted for four months), by withholding her medication unless we did.  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 a mental health hone support team coming to visit and having a panic attack while they were in the room and while hearing them talking to me about breathing and where was my medication, realising how far away they were, observing me, detached, without humanity. Realising this was nothing like the human touch of a student nurse from Africa, in A&E, who had come down to my level, touched me & steadied me with her eyes, and that the behaviour of these MH nurses, which included the team leader, was nothing like the description by trauma trailblazer Peter Levine of someone's relational presence, holding his hand right after a car accident that stopped the event becoming traumatising. That they were just assessing not helping, not caring.

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. Sometimes, 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 England 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.

- 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 suddenly, horrifically, involuntarily, with social services outside at the back door again came to investigate whether mum was being harmed having already written in a report that she was. Of my husband taking matters into his own hands, furious, marching out, finally telling them could they hear what they had gone to me. Telling them they had traumatised his wife do thoroughly that she was no longer able to take care of her mother and that they would take her, which is what they were obviously trying to do, by the end of the week. And of feeling anger that they had engineered thus result, and guilt and relief and total exhaustion. 

- Of going to see mum, about a week after she was taken for the second time and getting stuck in the car in the carpark. Then, having a panic attack  outside the door of the Rothouse because it was a place that has been organised by PigFace/ SS and knowing he would have lied about me, manipulated his contacts there and distorted the narrative as I had experienced with all the other organisations he had been in contact with.

- Of discovering on my only visit there, the sad dark little room mum was in, how no-one had opened the boxes with the dementia music toys. How PigFace had brought no pictures from her house to make it more familiar, and never did, but later took the same for himself & just plastered the room with pictures & drawings of himself & his family. The feeling of the outsider I was, that PigFace and everyone he has recruited had appropriated her life, and that despite having legal Power of Attorney and bring mum's daughter, I might as well have been on the moon.

- Of being at a dance and hearing from someone much younger, far too young,  having to take responsibility for likely end of life illness of family members alone and suddenly sobbing uncontrollably at the worry for this person and being mortified that this was happening in public and that this poor person on top of all their troubles was having to deal with the state of me.  

- Of craft or singing events I have been in late 2025 / early 2026, mostly outside my town, trying to build relational safety, but having to wear dark glasses, or having panic attacks, or shutting down, or dissociating. 

- Arriving at mum's house in early 2026 and feeling sickened & shocked but not surprised seeing how much he'd taken of the contents and the portrait of me at 18 gone from my parents dining room.

Mid Feb 2026: watching Small Prophets where the main protagonist has a warm relationship with the staff at his father's care home, where he can walk in, whenever he likes, where his father, though suffering memory loss, has a room that looks homely, personal and knowing this was what "normal" was portrayed as and that my experience of Rothouses, because of PigFace domination, could not have been more different.

Late Feb 2026 Of looking at a photo of mum's wall calender in the Rothouse and feeling sickened & shocked but not surprised seeing he had renamed or encouraged the renaming over the toy cat we had give mum just before we left. There are many things like this that lie, forgotten in notes or memos that I have not returned to.

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