Relational safety test: a glass workshop

In this post I try to work out what is happening during tests to practice relational safety.

 I attended a glass workshop in another town. I thought this would be a good way of spending time around people to gain relational safety because.  Nothing bad was likely to happen.  I would gain a skill and spend an enjoyable time crafting..

When I arrived I realised I was very anxious simply from not knowing who the people were.  Pre-Pigface attacks I would have breezed in and started easily chatting to everyone, the way I was brought up to chat to anyone and everyone in any situation. I’ve had a lifetime’s experience of it and am well known for that being a long-standing skill and strength.  

But I was so shut down I wasn't able to make eye contact nor speak to any of the attendees.

Luckily there were no introductions.  The teacher explained the material and said we could apply our own designs using them.  We were expected to just have an artistic inspiration. 

Faced with this "have inspiration" idea, I fled to the loo on the verge of tears and panic and took anxiety medication.  I thought about leaving but calmed down enough to return. 

Thereafter if it were possible I felt even more shut down and avoidant.  There is not really a choice about this. A sense of fear that comes from somewhere that isn’t your conscious mind, takes over your reactions. 

The teacher came round to see what we were doing and to see if we needed help. 

I think I said the word “copy” with a nod to the example next to me.  

Eventually I was able to ask her questions about the work when I was stuck. 

Over the next few hours, I did the project, was glad and felt a sense of achievement both from getting through the experience and especially from making my piece. 

At lunch, I bolted my food and went out for a walk.

A woman I thought was too forward with someone who obviously didn’t want to be spoken to,  asked where I was from at lunch but that was it.  

Towards the end I was able to compliment someone on their design.

Nothing bad happened.  I wasn't threatened by anybody. 

I didn’t feel able to do anything but copy, with, in the end, some variations of my own, but I learned 4 techniques doing that.  It was a sensible choice. 

Why nervous of people who posed no threat?

So why was I so nervous of the people in the lantern workshop when it wasn't in my town when there was little chance of anyone from social services there and if they had, I wouldn’t have known it.  Why was the event so stressful?

I think my system no longer trusts its own ability to spot predators, manipulators, or coercive personalities before it's too late so it feels threat everywhere.  

But sometimes it does function when I feel in a safe environment, which usually means some “anchor”, something familiar or safe.  

So why when I go into an unknown cafe is everything fine? I think it’s because, provided the anchor there is is the ritual set process of ordering etc which I know and it’s predictable and therefore safe.  It’s very unlikely that the server is going to step out of their role.  

The workshop had none of that - unknown people, undefined expectations, and no social template so my system defaulted to: “all threats possible.”

I couldn’t invoke a script of “threats possible but unlikely” because that  relies on a cognitive override, which only works when the nervous system is already within its tolerable range.

But I was above the threshold where reasoning can down-regulate fear for the reasons stated. Once the body crosses that line, the brain can’t access “unlikely”, it only registers possible.

Why did “be inspired” make everything worse?

I was nervous when I went in, so what made it worse when the teacher talked about us conjuring up designs out of thin air as though it was normal and easy? Why did I panic at that, especially since I had always intended to copy and I believed then and later that it was a good choice? 

“Have inspiration now” is, neurologically, the exact opposite of safety: it requires openness, play, and social ease - states that trauma temporarily shuts down. Both the expectation to have a design and the complete absence of teaching you how to go about that means the system feels “I don’t know what’s required of me here.”

That implies exposure, visibility, and judgement at a moment when the system is already braced.

But I knew copying was OK, so why didn’t I just dodge that “have inspiration now” trigger?

The instruction implied: “Everyone here knows how to come up with a design, except you.” That hits the same circuitry as danger because it cues exposure, judgement, and the risk of getting something “wrong” in an unstructured space.  Again, the system was not able to cope with that in the state it was already in, that’s why it spiked panic even though rationally I knew copying was fine, a good option.

Relational safety - in theory

Lately, I've been trying to recover a sense of relational safety by doing small things with people where nothing bad happens.  It’s a way of training the nervous system that it is safe to lower its guard, stop scanning for threat. 

Your conscious mind knows you probably won't be handcuffed or carted away or put into some tribunal for something you're accused of but haven't done. But because of what has happened, your body or rather your brainstem that controls your body's responses doesn't know that.

If practicing relational safety is effective, I shouldn’t feel the regular panic and freezing fear that have become normal since the attacks by Pigface and his allies and enablers in Social services.  My body should stop flooding with cortisol causing the physical problems that have arisen since July, the month after mum was taken.  

I try to do this in particular through craft - sewing in my case because there is something regulatory about the repeated in and out of the needle, the focus on the task, perhaps even in the other people around engaged in similar quiet things.  You hear the conversation around but there is no requirement to join in. You are vaguely part of something, but not a focus so you can't be target. You are just part of the background, the fabric, the context.

Sometimes I find a fire in some public place and the sound of it is reassuring, sometimes it's a cafe.

I thought I would find doing these activities easier outside of my own city because the whole area is a threat zone due to the constant presence of Social Services somewhere either on or off duty.

It would be unthinkable to meet someone from Social Services in a social situation - like a monster masquerading as a human.

Stories, trauma and witness

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

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

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

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

Being witnessed is also meant to be important.

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

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

There are probably more I've forgotten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Pigface abruptly stole mum away from her home and church, community and family and her memories, and locked her in a rothouse in another country and when she begged me to take her away, that's when it all really started to hit me. That was five months after dad's death in April 2024.  That was when the Pigface campaigns against me had really ramped up as he secretly prepared to abduct mum away and then acted on it.

At that point I felt a desperate urge, a craving for fire and ritual and drumming. Testimony to the fire is a common element in shamanic traditions: containment by ritual.  I wonder if that was when I was supposed to start telling my story, to look for healing. I suspect it was, but we don't have that kind of community and that kind of healing or even those kinds of concepts generally to hand anymore.  I didn't find what I seemed to be looking for and about a month later I'd become suicidal.

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

I find it much easier to talk about the lessons, the things I've learned about trauma at this point. Because I don't have yet that level of safety. 

I completed two questionnaires that the therapist sent me today. You can find them at Online CBT Resources under Impact of Events and the PTSD questionnaire but there are a whole catalogue of mental health resources there. I have an IES-R total of 52, well above the 33 PTSD threshold indicating significant post-traumatic stress symptoms.

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

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

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

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

Dreams and trauma

Charles Jencks dreamlike landscapes, Jupiter Artland

I had I think the only dream I've had about Pigface last night. 

I dream very little now.  As soon as I start to dream I tends to wake up and often can't sleep again for an hour or two.  It's no surprise that my Fitbit shows I get very little REM / dream sleep even while I get good deep sleep. I wonder if systems that do not feel safe enough to do emotional filing in dreams, just don't get much REM. 

Maybe I had the dream because I started to put some of the things that I've learned about trauma in the last ten months, into this blog.  

The dream was set in a Famous Store. I had a conversation recently about that, and in real life years ago I did a work project for the first European Famous Store. Anyway, we had lodgings, my family, somehow in the back of this store, and we were  safe in there or thought we were. Nevertheless, it was a public place and anyone could walk in to the public part.  

Pigface did walk in.  He sat at a computer.  I was standing nearby, frozen. He gave me a truly hateful look. Then he was going back and forwards out of the doors, trying to do something, trying to arrange something. Then I saw him speaking to the doorman whose job it was to guard the door. It was all very quiet and furtive. And then the doorman went away.

I had a daughter in this dream.  The daughter wasn't allowed to go outside because it wasn't safe. But when the doorman went away, she slipped out, and we lost her, and we never saw her again. And I know that Pigface engineered that, that he paid or manipulated the doorman to leave his post because he knew that would happen.  It was all strategic. But also, he could never be blamed because the doorman did it. The doorman stepped away, the child wasn't supervised, the child stepped out. So he deliberately and strategically caused all the damage, knowing he would never face accountability. 

That, in a nutshell, is the shape of what happened without the detail of the accompanying direct attacks from him or social services who he got to take over from him once he was completely blocked by my husband and I.

In real life Pigface did a lot of the abuse work through alliances with extended family, friends and organisations and through lying to them. 

I couldn't make sense of the store at first. I thought the setting was random.  Then I realised it's a symbol of structured systems, gatekeepers, access, and control over connection. The dream put the threat not inside chaos but inside the architecture of power and public performance.  The dream isn’t just about the abuser, but about the machinery that enabled him. It's about a failure of the safety of systems that are supposed to protect you. The Famous Store is simply used by the dream to represent "a safe institution". 

Curiously there is a secondary tale there: I really did work for that Famous Company in real life, years ago.  I was trying to go the extra mile to support an internal team.  It happened to have been recently taken over by someone who wanted to work in the national politics of their country, famous for corruption scandals. 

I was helping that team get more direct access to resources via a meeting than they would normally get.  Usually they would not be in that meeting.  That person and their sidekick saw a way to get total access by making false claims about me so that I would get thrown out. So they did implemented these devious tactics, there was an unpleasant internal trial where I was lucky to be backed up by a sympathetic colleague of complete integrity.  They lost because they had no evidence.  I was horrified by what they had done and that I was then expected to work with people who were treacherous.  I refused and asked to be reassigned.  That was refused.  I didn't budge so I was let go.  The organisation was safe - until it wasn't.  The theme of betrayal that was also a key part of the Pigface saga was present in the earlier Famous Company story too.  Not only was the setting not random, even the name of the Famous Company was not random.  No wonder it all surfaced appeared in the dream.  The brain made those connections between the company, betrayal, the more recent trauma, betrayal and collusion by individuals and organisations, stitched them all together and added in all the other details too. 

Me “frozen” while he “goes in and out” maps a mobilisation/immobility cycle.  He is the threat.  The doors are about the boundaries he kept testing and the doorman represents the many alliance/ gatekeeping figures he used. 

The child is the loss (mum, who relied on me like a parent) produced by systemic failure.  Or the current loss of my sense of safety.

The danger is both in the intrusion itself, and the collapse of protection through collusion by allies within a system.

The dream is not about blaming the doorman, it's about how Pigface avoided responsibility for his harm and how guardians, institutions, and alliances enabled that, refused to see what he was doing, refused to look, to investigate and even masqueraded, as he did, as protection.   He camouflaged himself to appear innocent.  A wolf in sheep's clothing, just an ordinary punter in the store.

What strikes me is how clever dreams seem to be. I had to do a fair bit of cognitive work to see what was going on in the dream and at different levels.  But the subconscious brain just did it by itself in a story.  Amazing!

Names

We call the abuser Pigface, for distancing. It used to be Fuckface but that was too angry, had too much energy in it. 

I can't use the name he was given at birth.  It revolts me, turns my stomach, literally sickens me.  I can't use the term usually used for a male sibling.  Even hearing that word in other contexts sickens me.  I shrink and feel threat at that term, in any context.  Even "sister" is awful, in any context.  The whole concept of siblings feels dangerous to me now.  When I hear about people's great relationships with their sibling I think: Right.  That's nice.  For now.  Even inside my head there's an unspoken...Just wait...so what they will do; this, even while I know that plenty of people have great, supportive relationships with their siblings.  It's that chasm again between what the mind knows but the body believes.

The abuser is actually grossly overweight, obese I think and has a snouty, piggy face. I don't mind real pigs. I do think the name is offensive to them and I'm sorry about that.

I met a witness to someone else's trauma this year. The abuser in question was also male. Most trauma statistically comes via males by a stretch. Curiously, the witness also called that person Fuckface. The choice of name can be no coincidence. Maybe trauma causes you to put all your fear and  loathing and horror of an entity into a name. 

In other contexts I referred to him as "it", which is still my preferred approach. "Him" accords too much humanity.

I also called it the Ladon, or the Bloat. The Ladon was a multi-headed monster, who guarded the Golden Apples of the Hesperides but was eventually killed by Hercules.

Once, social services went through mum's contacts in our house, without permission.  They had said they just wanted to call someone - Pigface I think it was.

I had mum's key contacts on my phone because she couldn't remember how to make phone calls and she often didn't hear the phone or more often couldn't remember where she put it.  I had signed mum in on her phone to my Spotify via my Google signin, where I had a playlist of music she liked so we could play it for her through her phone.   We didn't have to do it through her phone. It would have been easier just to play it through my phone we could have done it through my phone we wanted to try and give her as much agency and ownership as possible and having her phone was part of that.

Pigface took away that agency when he controlled her phone, her messages, took her hearing aids, her ability to interact, her choice, her dignity, took her family, took her home, her community, her church her photos & photo albums, took away everything familiar. And her money, and her possessions. When he took away our cards to her and the photo album of the times we had spent together, as a present. 

I can only think it was Social Services opening the contacts app that triggered a Google synch  and that the link to Google could only have been via this signin to Spotify. All my contacts synched to mum's phone - thousands of them.  We didn't realise this because mum's friends were in my phone and they tended to call me because Mum didn't hear her phone - because he taken her hearing aids.  I also had mum's friends on my phone for convenience

But social services, though they didn't say anything then, later said to me about this "inappropriate" name.ñ they'd found in mum's phone. That's how we found out because we then went to look at mun's phone.  The way they said it was as though my contact entries in my own phone were not, actually, my own business but evidence that could be used against me while they completely ignored his many abuses, including gross financial abuse against mum.  

It's not even the "deny and deflect" tactic that this council is so famous for and that is such a trademark of abusive / defensive organisations.  They're not denying they caused the issue by their own inappropriate and unprofessional activity, they just go immediately on the attack. 

So Pigface would have seen all my contacts, or his social services would almost certainly have told him about how he was referred to in my phone, because everything they did was for him and what he wanted.  Not for mum and not what she wanted. 

I never spoke to him, said anything, wrote to him. I couldn't do any of those things because of the attacks and the horrific things he did to mum.  I was frozen, sometimes in a functional freeze, sometimes completely immobile.  Horror and fear does that.

I just helped mum: to get her eyes tested, her ears, take her to the podiatrist, the GP, the physiotherapist, take her to classes, to concerts, for walks, I spent almost all my time with her, sharing the photos and videos of her  with her friends.  So all he could do was invent lies.  

To receive evidence that he was in my phone with a "nasty" name would have been like finding gold for him.  And it was nothing at all to twist that, as he twisted everything and say I'd put that in mum's phone. 

I don't know what other data of mine synched to mum's phone through social services' intervention but it would have been seen by Pigface.  

That's the same as having your privacy invaded, another loss of safety., though a drop in the ocean, compared to the rest. But loving surveillance because of the control that gives he would have been like a pig in shit.

We know he controlled mum's phone when he took her for five months and because all of his behaviour was to have oversight and total sole control over everything connected to mum - decisions, money, house, surveillance cameras, everything.

Walls

This post is about how almost wilfully ignorant the mind can be about what is happening to the body and how it can refuse to get on board with helping it. In fact, it doesn't know what the body is doing. It's like passengers talking to a driver - one is saying go left and the other go right. It's also about how the strategies and patterns the body develops to try to help itself to safety, one of the most basic drivers of human behaviour, can eventually backfire. 

I have been a closet “anxious person” for decades, closeted to myself.  It’s unrecognised, internalised, masked, even to yourself in some cases.  One lives with the physiology of threat without the narrative. The body carries around vigilance and develops patterns and strategies to to adapt to that.  The mind thinks something else altogether is going on. It’s as though one hand is waving “I’m raising a family in Scotland” the other is waving “Let’s be really careful about who we let in”. 

“Getting on with it”

The first inkling that I might be more anxious than normal, was not, bizarrely, when I was sent to see a specialist for my physical symptoms when I was working in high pressure jobs. I just didn’t think about it then. I went along, listened, must have talked and just carried on with my life. It wasn’t that I denied anything was wrong.  I had gone to get help after all.  Life was difficult with these physical and emotional symptoms. It’s just that I don’t remember it defining me particularly: “Oh, I’ve got anxiety”.  God, of course I didn’t tell a soul I was getting help for palpitations and shaky hands and I had to wear a hat all the time. No, I just got the help and carried on and thank goodness at that point  my boss who talked harshly to people and glorified in being tough, went on maternity leave.  

I do remember the first and the last thing the specialist said.  The first thing was: you don’t breathe. What does he mean?, I thought.  Much later, maybe in yoga, I understood that some people could breathe from the belly, but I had no concept of how to do this and couldn’t, for a long time, years probably. I just didn't have that degree of relaxation. I remember being plagued by pain in the shoulders from that era. The last thing he said was: don’t leave it so late to get help, in the future, a lesson I never took on board - again, because of anxiety I see now.

Recognising “unusual” behaviour

I can remember realising my anxiety was too much, not normal when I had a significant  overreaction to my son unexpectedly vomiting at the beach aged about two.  I also had a newborn. I panicked,  took him there and then to the GP who said it was me who had the problem and told me to come back.  At this point, one could ask, not normal for whom? Someone with no support, a toddler and a newborn, plus a host of other things he certainly didn’t know about?  

I had to drag us all there for an 0830 appointment, having not slept again.  We were slightly late and he refused to see me.  He also said not to bring the kids.  I didn’t have any options so that was the end of that.

An unconscious cost/benefit analysis

Thus began - had already begun, in fact - a very rocky two decades with my GP practice, rated the worst in the area. I am largely mute there.  It’s involuntary. I am simply terrified of the environment. I know it reflects twenty years of problematic encounters there amplified by the sense of threat coming after the attacks by the Ladon last year and social services this years. Selective silence after repeated invalidating encounters is a shutdown response. There is a cost to entering that environment. The body learns not to speak where cost exceeds safety. 

Before I had kids I didn’t consciously really admit to myself how much anxiety I was managing. 

The root of anxiety

I must have just thought it went with the territory of having demanding jobs. I didn’t really have time to think.  In eight years, I worked for six companies, all but two global players and travelled all over Europe, repeatedly to the US and to South Africa, not to mention holidays abroad, in Thailand, in Brazil. In five years in London I moved five times. In perhaps four years before that it was another seven houses.  I travelled for work a lot. In my last three years there I was studying after work  for a degree in philosophy.  In my last year I was also pregnant. At this distance anyone can see it was too much.

Even so, it wasn’t that that was the trouble, or so I still believe.  Maybe it was, maybe it was all the moving, the adapting to different environments, but I’d done that all my life.  What really caused the problem, was bullies.  Dogmatic, unreasonably demanding, controlling, dangerous people. They tended to be manipulative, ambitious, or exploitative. They were by no means everyone but every company I worked in or once, a client I worked for, had them.  I was helpful and conscientious but if I got in the way of whatever these people wanted, I just came a cropper every time.

Beyond that the roots go into childhood. I was bullied as a child and I was raised in a way that did everything but encourage me to stand up for myself. The body is constantly receiving stimuli. The brainstem compares incoming stimuli with stored patterns signifying safety or threat. You think you, your mind, is in charge, but everything to do with threat and safety is happening on another level.

Walls

Eventually, I just shut myself off from the threats, that is to say, the people that I couldn’t choose to be around who might harm me. At first, it was to raise the kids.  Their father was largely absent for twelve years, until just before COVID.  The house was large, old, needed attention and constant repairs.  The kids needed an adult all the time they weren’t in school.  That was me. So I stayed away from paid work.  Distance meant safety after much harm.  I shut myself up in a small town in Scotland in my mid-thirties. I said it was to be near the parents and it was.  My children had great relationships and some wonderful times with them - we all did.  But I remember trying to explain taxation to my two year old in the car and thinking something wasn’t quite right.

Perhaps deep down, I was doing the only reliable thing for my system to feel safe. I hated the question “What do you do?” because my stumbling, evasive answers looked like avoidance.  The reality was I was exhausted all the time.  I haven’t slept well - regularly slept enough or slept through for at least twenty years. I fight for sleep in dribs and drabs over long nights that gnaw into my days.

 I tried my very best for my children, though looking after them alone was often hard and there were a lot of other issues. I hadn’t realised I’d shut myself up with a whole bunch of other problems. But I made sure I was available to them all the time.  They came first, always.  I went to everything at school, we did after school clubs, then we did free play.  They tried all sorts.  We did homeschooling and flexi schooling and full time schooling. Weekends and school holidays were full of play and exploration and the outdoors.  They had healthy meals, fresh air, and lots of reading.

With nobody else buffering the edges, I made my own buffer and even then it was a pretty rubbishy dyke. I didn't have much spare energy or raw material for building. 

Intruders

Wounding people still got through from time to time over the years.  The council education department was one of those - not a person, just a brutal, faceless entity and shoddy in every way.  My son’s last primary was ranked one of the worst in the country and yet I was hounded, harassed and isolated by that department, and made to feel as though I was going mad, for complaining about nothing as important as education, but about the pre-requisites for that: a safe environment, were bullying is properly addressed medical conditions are properly managed. It anyone had been watching it would have looked like David and Goliath, with no ending appropriate to a famous Bible story. In this version David gets stamped under Goliath's foot. It happens all the time when vulnerable people are up against a monolith, so, most people, most of the time, quite rationally, don't try.

Stuck?

Those problematic intruders apart, I seemed to have found a workaround where I could survive in partial isolation from the world. I had built walls to survive. I still went out from them, have fun, and I could go back behind them too.  But as the years passed I had a nagging sense I might also be walled off in a sense and, stuck.  I wasn’t sure because there was a lot about society I recoiled from.  The reasons people stay in, are part of society, didn’t on the whole, seem attractive or relevant to me. 

I  didn’t choose my walls because I preferred emptiness. I was, am, a social person.  I like and enjoy people when they aren’t threatening and I like to help, in whatever way, if I can. If the environment feels safe, I can function well. You wouldn’t know. That’s the point.  One can become so adept at masking it just doesn’t show or doesn’t show as anxiety.  It might seep out in other ways.

It gnawed at me. I had years of higher education, an impressive CV, was multi-lingual and had picked up another array of skills since leaving work, some hobbies, some practical related to owning and repairing an old house and raising children. Yet I just didn’t put myself out there.  I was hidden away and a large part of it was avoidant, fear based. Another part sought company, conversation, dance, laughter, fun. There is a point when coping strategies harden into identity, when resilience becomes a shell to hide inside. 

There is no arc, no rising and dissolving of tension in this story, just a lived paradox.

Well, no arc yet.