endings and beginnings

Dear patrons,

I hope this post finds you in good shape as the end of the year looms — and that, whether you’re alone or with loved ones, it’ll be a recharging time for you.

I wanted to share some personal news.

In November, the woman who gave birth to me died.

As I mentioned in ‘double binds’, I cut contact with her around five years ago. After years of belief-beggaring malignant theatrics, she seemed to start gaining a degree of self-control when my brother and I were in our teens. We now recognise she was just ‘on good behaviour’ in our company because we stopped putting up with her antics.

Her obscene and lethal behaviour around my father’s terminal cancer — including numerous attempts to sabotage his care — revealed in the most shocking way that she hadn’t improved. In fact she’d got much worse. While my brother remained low contact with her, purely for practical reasons, I called it a day.

There’s a line in one of my favourite books, Robert Graves’s I Claudius: ‘Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.’ Hatch out they did. In the last five years, my brother reported more openly twisted behaviour. She appeared to believe that because he stayed in contact with her, he was sympathetic to her. She confided her contempt for various individuals to him, including some of her biggest supporters. She even made the mistake of telling him about various lies she was spreading about me. For the last five years, it was clinically entertaining to continue to receive letters from her expressing her ‘love’ and trying to reestablish a relationship — knowing all the time that she was running the most brazen smear campaigns about me behind the scenes.

Her death brings no new feelings — and revives no old ones. As some of you know from personal experience, when an individual is pathologically immersed in deception and performance, it’s hard to identify what — if anything — was ever real. There was no ‘there’ there.

My brother and I are now ploughing through all the predictable legal and practical procedures — and navigating some last-ditch dirty games from another disordered relative. Once resolved, there’ll be no more connective tissue to the poison of the past.

The next few videos are in various stages of production. But I’m thinking that after the next upload, I might squeeze in a video looking at how abusive individuals and groups can sometimes appear to improve, while in reality they might be getting worse.

I know that some of you have escaped your own poisonous environments this year. I celebrate every case shared with me. And I wish the same for all those who are still handling malignant relationships and quietly biding their time.

Peace,

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