When they try to chase you out of your home over a bath tub!

Due to a turn of events that left me reeling with stress, anger and frustration, I feel compelled to expand on the previous post about OTs. Damn, I wish I had realised what was going on before it was too late, so consider this a cautionary tale. I’m sorry if I repeat myself at times, these issues are not that easy for me to wrap my head around.

“Coercive control is an act or a pattern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation, and intimidation or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten their victim… (It) creates invisible chains and a sense of fear that pervades all elements of a victim’s life. It works to limit their human rights by depriving them of their liberty and reducing their ability for action.” [Source]

As I explained in my previous post, the contractors my housing association use changed my old rusty bath tub for a new one without consulting me about its appropriateness. The old one was rather square and worked ok for showering, but the new one had heavily sloping sides and a very narrow bottom to stand on. When I complained, the housing association asked for an OT assessment. 

I did not have to endure just one, but a grand total of three visits from people from Powys County Council, which is already excessive and needlessly tiring for a chronically ill person. I signalled on all occasions that I was getting tired but they didn’t pay any heed and just kept on churning out discriminatory nonsense. They were basically two strangers who barged into my personal space and started ordering me around and deciding how I should lead my life. All this also occurred during peak infection time, and the threat of an infection is not something I need for the sake of a performative charade. 

The two last visits were completely pointless from my perspective as they didn’t add anything to my welfare. The first visit was from the OT, Jasmine, who went through my complaint about the unsuitable bath tub and wrote a recommendation for a safer and more practical one. I also pointed at the threshold to the garden and said I can’t easily take water buckets from the shower room to water my plants. She said no they wouldn’t do anything about that and if I was in a wheelchair, I’d have to go around the front, into the public space, through the car park, through the gate, the long alleyway with two turns, and then finally into my garden. It goes without saying that I was pretty shocked at the coldness behind this point of view, not least as it wasn’t an attempt to help but to suggest a completely outrageous solution that I could never follow due to fatigue and the anxiety of having to wheel through a public space when I don’t feel ready for it. None of these were considered: my social anxiety and fear of neighbours watching me, my sound intolerance (think lawn mowers and children’s voices), my chronic fatigue, my inability to sit for long or use my wrists in certain ways without subluxing them - nor the ridiculousness of the set up overall. No alternative arrangements such as rubber ramps for the patio door were suggested. Plus, I had of course already explained that I struggle to water the garden as the housing association has not provided an outside tap, so this idea would make the problem even greater.

I also told both of them how one OT had refused to supply a bath board and asked my dying mother to ‘just go downstairs’ for her showers, and how utterly inhumane it felt. While the OT relented in the end, as you will see, this didn’t prevent my visitors from playing the same cheap trick on me.

On this occasion, I was led to believe all was well in regard to the bath tub and the useless short taps that don’t have sufficient reach for tapping water into a bucket. However, I was then contacted by a man, Mike, who said he needed to come and have a look and approve of the recommendations the OT had made. Apparently this man was from Care and Repair, which I thought was supposed to be a friendly service for the elderly. He was unhappy about something and opined that ‘the work can’t be done’, so I had to accept a third visit from the two of them together. That’s a bizarre waste of resources, and the third visit turned out to be a way of ganging up against me ‘two against one’ kind of style. 

They acted all surprised and dismayed that they had been asked to make the assessment for the housing association as if it’s not obvious that they are in cahoots with them. Do they simply assume their tenants are stupid and uneducated and easily coerced? In reality, it’s easy to target vulnerable people and I’m sure many are too weak to put up a fight. Broken people are malleable, right? Mike put on a concerned face and said there is no way I can safely get into the shower if there’s a shower screen, so the proposed bath tub with a screen to prevent water from going on the floor and the skirting board, can’t be done. At first I wondered if he was mentally challenged because he seemed to struggle so much with the bathroom set up, practical solutions, and the way my medical conditions affect my daily life. My explanations simply did not seem to reach his brain. But even though he probably didn’t really have any real qualifications for the job, his real purpose seemed to be a show of pretence and gaslighting. My explanations counted for nothing because, as I understood later, he was really there to prevent the work from proceeding.

Following his visit, I offered a perfectly good plan of action with examples of a different screened bath tub via email, but he said no, no, no, he has to return one more time. So on the third visit he desperately tried to come up with other ways of pushing me around - and almost literally pushing me down the stairs because ‘there is a shower room I can use downstairs’. The two of them were basically plotting against me the whole time they were here (and it was a long time that left me reeling with fatigue). They came quite close to me and it made me feel physically cornered. The OT pushed up against my towels and her lack of concern for hygiene disgusted me. I hated having to show my intimate spaces to these strangers on several occasions. 

I felt overwhelmed and couldn’t hear everything they talked about, but I did catch many disparaging and gaslighting remarks such as ‘the housing association will expect her to need a stair lift soon anyway so will definitely ask her to use the shower room’. The stair lift is not on the agenda and so it was a deflection from the real issue that pinned me down as a vulnerable person that can be controlled. There were other remarks that pitted me against ‘normal’ people. In other words, I was supposedly abnormal, yet at the same time, asked to accept ‘standard’ solutions - ‘It’s standard’ was used as an argument in favour of the existing bath tub, the taps and even the fan downstairs. As for ‘normal people’ and their ‘normal’ habits, the OT actually opined that ‘normal’ people don’t need to tap water upstairs. I guess she was saying that either the British, or people in social housing, are trashy people who wouldn’t normally care about hygiene. From her perspective, unlike me, they would never wash anything upstairs and wouldn’t have garments they need to wash by hand, either. In other words, I was simply asking too much although I genuinely cannot handle synthetic fabrics. She thought I should just wash woollies in the sink like she does. In the kitchen, amongst dirty pots and pans and food! He, one the other hand, was eager to opine that ‘nothing would ever satisfy my needs’, which apparently he thought was a clever way of communicating that I could just slip and die and he wouldn’t care. (More about that further down - including verbatim conversations).

While the OT had already made the recommendation above that the bath tub should be changed for one that doesn’t have the dangerously sloping sides and narrow standing surface (this would be dangerous for anyone with leg and feet problems), the man just ignored it and tried to coerce me into using the downstairs shower room. Although he’s called a technical adviser, he didn’t even understand that it is not a wet room. It would have to be fully water proof to qualify for this. I found it necessary to advise him as a Finnish person that it definitely is not a wet room, but he just wouldn’t believe me. It’s pretty much the same as the bathroom upstairs - there are dry walls and a small wall area is tiled. So whatever he was, he was not a qualified ‘technical adviser’ for bathroom designs, that much was clear. I’ve met a lot of people with similarly vague work titles who don’t seem to have a clue what they’re doing.

The vinyl floor gets wet and has to be mopped, this 
is bad enough next to the bath tub, let alone in the 
downstairs shower room.
A shower screen would help. I could have a wall mounted seat.
You’ll notice, as well, that there are two taps instead of a mixer tap ,
that’s ‘standard’ as well, apparently.

There was another topic that really tripped me up. The other ‘option’ to changing bath tubs that he found necessary to repeat to me ad nauseum was to ‘just move houses’. He didn’t want to hear about my reasons not to move - he was simply following a script, like they all do. He was red in the face, looked displeased, and his eyes were sort of glazed over the whole time. He was finding fault in everything instead of engaging with me in a meaningful way. He did not politely ask whether I find the current accommodation suitable, instead he just blasted at me that something else was likely to suit my needs better. Running over me like that was nothing short of disrespectful, but the sense of threat to my basic security was the really serious part.

Yep, I’ve certainly heard that one before: the intensely patronising assumption that I should ‘just move houses’ if this one is not suited to my needs. The suggestion comes up almost automatically as soon as there is some tiny problem that can easily be solved without such drastic measures. Back in Finland, I was asked to drop off my prescriptions once a month and attend frequent sessions with a social service worker. When I complained that it was quite far for me to bike, I was told to ‘just move closer’. The mindlessness behind such a comment is mind boggling. Suitable and affordable housing in the centre of town was not exactly easy to come by, and the process of moving houses was completely beyond my capabilities at the time. I did feel trapped in a rather unpleasant house but I did not have an ounce of energy or any money whatsoever for a move. The social services were not exactly trying to be helpful - I once asked for a cheap vacuum cleaner and was told I could ‘just clean the floors by hand’. Right. Uhm, I was disabled even then. Unfortunately in Finland, they don’t make a distinction between a registered disabled person on a permanent pension and anyone temporarily out of work. To make ends meet (i.e. to supplement a minimal pension), I was asked to go and beg for help at the social services. The process were I was living for six years after my relocation from Helsinki was so humiliating and traumatic, it’s not a system I could ever force myself to return to. Because my husband died, I once again depend on benefits, but I’m plugged into a different system now.

My husband and I lived in a mortgaged house here in Wales, but I obviously could not keep it and had to apply for social housing. What people seem to deliberately misunderstand in order to run me over with their scripts, is that I have gone to great lengths to make this my home, and that it is suited to my specific needs as a housebound individual. Most of those who are supposed to offer help, are entirely focused on a script, and simply won’t listen when I try and explain that I do not wish to live in a goddam bungalow. What other disabled people prefer or need has nothing to do with me. First of all, I do not wish to pay thousands of pounds for a relocation when I’m lucky to be where I am now. Why would I opt for uncertainty when I know what I have now? Who would even pack my things and do the works? Because I can’t do that. I’m disabled with a chronic medical condition that includes problems with exhaustion and overwhelm and stress. The council pays a couple of hundred towards a relocation, it’s laughable to ask people to pay thousands out of pocket because of a stereotypical point of view. I’d rather spend some of my savings on adaptations and aids they refuse to fund (because either they don’t believe I need them, or they just want me to cave in and pay for it myself?). 

I’ve embraced British culture as much as I possibly can, I live and breathe it through and through, day in and day out… but I come from a culture of pragmatism and high standards of hygiene that I would really like to keep. All the same, I feel pushed to erase even my most intimate preferences because they are not aligned with ‘standard’ ones in this country, and the country’s social housing environments in particular. This is all the more pertinent as I really do have to fight for my mental balance, every day. And to be honest, in a way it makes me miss my home country, however, there is no longer any home for me to go back to. I also don’t have the safety network of a marriage here in the UK anymore. So I’m stuck in limbo, wondering what I’m really doing here other than surviving a host of health concerns and fighting injustices all by myself.

So sure there are stairs in the house I originally moved into with my sick mother after my husband’s death, and that’s fine for the time being, but only when I am fully in control of my movements. It is not a black and white situation. It’s about being able to do things safely, reliably and repeatedly. Any OT worth their title should know that. I’m trying not to give into immobility: I actually want to move a bit for the sake of the exercise, and I can manage the stairs up to a point. But I do not want to exhaust myself and put myself in danger by trailing up and down the stairs countless times a day because some man from the council thinks that I have to use a shower room just because there is one to use - and because he pretends to be ‘convinced’ the housing association will not budge in regard to my upstairs bathroom. 

Were I to run down to the shower room every time I needed a wash, statistically, the chances of me falling down the stairs due to a subluxation or some disorientation when I’m half asleep or have taken medication or just feel exhausted and unwell, would obviously increase exponentially. And I actually have to wash very often because of sweating, body odour, greasy skin and intimate problems to do with IBS. I did not feel comfortable giving these people all the details because it was obvious I was being bullied and gaslit and was not being listened to, but I tried to underline that this is how I want  and need to live. 

I spend most of my time upstairs where it’s warmer and I spend most of the hours of the day in bed. I need to sleep on the first floor since I suffer from severe insomnia and hypervigilance and do not feel safe on the ground level. I am quite happy in the peaceful room I have now. I have a warm bathroom next door. In it, a quiet bathroom fan replaced the whiny standard one on my request, but since it’s more expensive than the ‘standard’ ones, there is a standard one in the downstairs shower room. It has a high frequency noise I cannot tolerate due to hyperacusis. I have to wear earplugs when I shower and run water, but downstairs i would have to wear ear defenders as well, and that obviously wouldn’t work. 

I use the adjacent bathroom a lot and so I have made it as warm and cosy as possible. I do not want to charge down the stairs when I’m half asleep or dopey or just feeling ill and fatigued. There may be times when I can’t even get out of bed due to chronic illness flare ups. A shower is also how I wake up and warm up, and after that I may have to lie down for a while. It goes without saying that I have needs to take care of before I venture downstairs. I use knee braces, too, and they are pretty difficult to get on and off. I also have a certain routine which involves exercise in my bedroom in the afternoon when I have gone upstairs, and after that I need a proper wash - splashing some water doesn’t remove sweat. I’m exhausted at this point and usually have to lie down in bed for a rest after all that. 

Not to be missed is the fact that I happen to have great, unobstructed views from the upstairs window that help with my mental health. Since I am home bound and often feel imprisoned and claustrophobic, so the views are elementary. No one can see into my house, which helps me feel relaxed.

Frequent interactions with institutional and medical settings and personal care assistants coming into their homes may increase disabled people’s risk of experiencing domestic abuse. […] While disabled women are most likely to be abused by an intimate partner, […] they are also significantly more likely to experience abuse by personal care assistants, strangers, health care providers and family members than non-disabled women.[…]. Reliance on care increases the situational vulnerability to other people’s […] controlling behaviour and can exacerbate difficulties in leaving an abusive situation. This reliance and dependence can create or exacerbate unequal power within a relationship. It has been suggested that perpetrators of abuse are more likely to target the most vulnerable to whom they have access.[…]However, it is important to acknowledge that it is the vulnerable situation, and not the impairment itself, that makes a person vulnerable. [Source]

The fact I’m getting on a bit and have disabilities obviously doesn’t give anyone the right to treat me like a commodity that can be shoved around because someone deems it necessary to take control and decide that my needs are something they are not. Controlling my use of the washing facilities and risking my life by asking me to use the stairs excessively during times when it might not be safe, counts as coercive control. This kind of coercive control is unfortunately a more common occurrence than anyone likes to admit. Coercive control is actually now a criminal offence: “Coercive control and psychological manipulation by authorities—often referred to as institutional or systemic abuse—involves the misuse of power by organizations, agencies, or individuals in positions of authority to dominate, restrict, and psychologically harm individuals. While coercive control is legally defined in many jurisdictions (such as the UK's Serious Crime Act 2015) primarily as an intimate partner issue, the same tactics are frequently employed by institutions or agents of the state (Google AI).”

While a row with a landlord may not quite amount to a serious offence, it’s nonetheless worthy of scrutiny. I have spent a lot of money on this house and the garden. The house I live in is not temporary accommodation for me, it’s an attempt at creating the stability I have always missed. This is why the flippant remarks about different housing destabilise me so much. 

I recently made friends with my new next door neighbours and feel much safer now that I know they are kindly towards me. The man has health issues as well and revealed that he’d been nervous about my opinions because other neighbours had already made complaints about something, and he could see that the man on my other side is a bully. When we hit it off, he offered to cut my lawn at the front when he mows his own, and he did it straight away as a token of friendly neighbourly sentiments. He has rushed out to help me move something heavy a couple of times already. I certainly need this because (as I have shared before), I’ve had a lot of unpleasant encounters and stressors over the years. So yeah… this house actually meets with my needs - as far as rentals go.

———

Yet this is the letter that came back from the housing officer: 

Good afternoon,

I have discussed this with D [maintenance officer] and J (OT - county council).

We would not look to replace the bath again as you have a downstairs shower room. 

If it is the case that the shower downstairs does not drain as it should then I will raise a job for [the contractor] to come out and resolve this issue. I can arrange for this to be done as an urgent job, within 7 days. 

The suggestion of a move is made when the house you are currently living in is unsuitable for your needs and we are not reasonably able to make the adaptations you require. 

I am able to assist you with getting a house application on the Homes in Powys website if this is something you wish to do.

As mentioned, if you would like to complete the work yourself, please email X to gain permission necessary to carry out these works.

If you are unhappy with this outcome, I am more than happy to send you a complaints pack via email or post so you can make a formal complaint. 

Thanks,

J

Housing Officer

She’s happy, is she. Haha so they are also happy to start digging a hole in the concrete floor for drainage rather than replace a super cheap bath tub that was ill advised to begin with. My neighbour told me their shower room floor is so poorly constructed the water actually flows into the hallway. Nah, she’s just misunderstood the problem because it was never properly communicated to her, and now I’m expected to receive the contractors for non-existent work. It’s ironic that I was kept on my toes for months, and the problems with the safety of the bath tub were not considered urgent, and then these jobs are ordered at lightning speed, entirely without my consent as well.

The OT and the inspector twisted my words about the issues with the shower room to mean something it didn’t, and jobs to fix non-existent problems were swiftly ordered as a result. It’s so ridiculous, but also evidences the coercion I was subjected to since these jobs wouldn’t have been invented, had they stuck with the original application for a safer bath tub. I tried to explain to them the floor is too level, the inspector bowed down to look at it, yet a service of the drain is being ordered. The water pools behind the toilet next to the shower and that it’s a nightmare to mop. It’s pretty clear the housing association doesn’t intends to pay for a new floor, they are simply deflecting away from the real issues by inventing idiotic ones that ticks some boxes for them (i.e. a phoney, ‘they tried to help’ kind of box). I will never shower there, and I told them so, several times. I was asked to just do it anyway. It’s a cold, echoey and unpleasant space full of my gardening utensils because there is no other usable storage space (the lack thereof is peculiarly British in fact). There is a very wet and mouldy shed they don’t appear to have the budget to replace - either way, I have found that such cheap sheds are not really useable for any kind of storage because of damp, mould and insects. 

In addition, the space is not suited to the fact that I have hyperacusis. I did not say that the fan makes some strange noises and that it needs servicing, I said I do not tolerate the noise. There’s obviously a big difference between the two statements, and given that the OT was supposed to know about my ear injury, it would seem that the she decided to exploit my statement to suit her narrative about the use of the shower room. In fact a new fan was recently installed and it’s very noisy when it turns on, it’s a kind of high pitched sound that mimics my original auditory trauma. A quieter and more expensive version was put into the upstairs bathroom because I requested it and the fan man was a nice and understanding chap who actually listened. Funny enough, the fan man actually paid me a visit recently about problems with another fan, and confirmed the one in the shower room works just fine. These non-existent jobs for their constructor really makes the housing officers look like idiots who have not even tried to confirm whether the OT’s opinion was rooted in reality.

Since the visits and the outcome were all highly manipulative, and manipulation is deliberately irrational and confusing, it has taken me a few days to process the scope of the cruel and blatantly evil nature of this kind ‘treatment’. It’s one thing to get a straightforward and honest no when you ask for work (in this case the reversal of the poorly advised bath tub that I never consented to), but it’s a whole other level of monstrosity when you’re asked to go through a procedure that takes five months, involves a clear recommendation that looks like green lights for the work in question, and then get subjected to bizarre mind games because they don’t really want to pay for it - but have to justify their point of view somehow. The letter above contains no reference to Mike the inspector from Care and Repair but he is the bottleneck that neither the housing association nor the council want to acknowledge. I have advised the HA on several occasions that I should not be subjected to stress due to severe medical health conditions yet they ignore it over and over. 

It’s deeply upsetting to be told to change the daily routines I have just because of some budget restrictions and tick box exercises. My routines are a life line to me, as my nervous system depends on them for stability. It boggles the mind that anyone would even think twice of challenging a chronically ill person’s need for comfort, stability, safety, simplicity and efficiency. It should also go without saying that people have all sorts of trauma in the background that stereotyping behaviour can trigger. But I’m also ‘an undeserving poor’, and despite my colourful background I’m really at the bottom of the social hierarchy. People feel they have a right to disregard my needs, preferences and even desires. Make no mistake - I would not be in this situation if I had a choice. These housing related challenges really get to me because I wouldn’t be here if I was healthy and able to work and just get on with my life in some more interesting way than this. 

The HA officer and the anti social officer were also supposed to deal with my entitled neighbour but all I got over the course of several months were lengthy explanations about their personal misgivings and a string of yes-no-yes-no. They promised to do something but nothing was ever done. I was then referred to a charity who deals with victims of criminal offences, as if I am the one who needs help, not the neighbour. Their manager was curt, and didn’t really comment at all. I can now see that the purpose of all this was also to bombard me with pointless nonsense and wear me down. Why they tell you they want long term tenants but treat them so badly they long to leave, is beyond me. The officer for antisocial behaviour had the audacity to say that they have supported me through the years, which is complete nonsense - they came here once when the neighbour was putting up privacy fences without my consent, but with a caveat: I had to provide proof from an OT that I suffered from anxiety and needed better fences on my side. It was bizarre. Did they ask the same from the male neighbour? Somehow I doubt it.

I’m starting to see that social institutions often operate on the same principle of manipulation through vague or false promises, exhaustion, and finally, deflection. I’m not saying this is a UK problem because it’s pretty obvious that these issues are worldwide. Finland is not quite the welfare state it claims to be. As a person disability allowance, I still suffered greatly at the hands of petty officers and from bureaucracy in general. So what they often do is try and grind you to pulp, wear you out, and get you to give up so you won’t be burdening society with your problems. Make no mistake: you’re an undeserving poor and disabled person, and you don’t have a right to dignity and standards. You’re expected to live in filth because you don’t deserve any better. 

Officers have done this to me knowing full well that I am a vulnerable woman without much of a support network, and that the stress of being manipulated and gaslit is likely to exacerbate my medical conditions. It’s not that I haven’t seen this strategy before, it’s that I really didn’t understand how systemic it is, and was entirely unprepared for this particular attack on my human rights. I have had issues with other HA officers but I thought they were flukes. 

I have already complained very loudly about this and have not spared my words - I’m so shocked at the way these people are treating me. It’s discriminatory, humiliating and dehumanising. These people try and burden me with ridiculously complicated manoeuvres and unnecessary actions (i.e. more steps to achieve a goal) instead of unburdening me as they should do. Their job is supposed to make my life easier, safer and more independent, not more risky and difficult. However, their actual job description may well be the opposite: to play mind games and oppress the client to a point where they just give up and let go of their claim for adaptations and financial help and whatever else they are asking for. The object is obviously to save money at the expense of disabled people’s welfare and humanity. He deliberately tried to exhaust an exhausted person further, which is morally corrupt and despicable. It’s ironic, that so many people become cold and robotic when robots are becoming more humane. Not human, of course, but humane.

More about that a bit further down.

So just to recap: 

There was a perfectly valid recommendation to begin with, but then it was rejected by the same OT who wrote it (says the HA who failed to include the male inspector from their rejection letter). The OT decided to recommend some imaginary work to the shower room instead, work that I had never asked for and would not gain anything from because I am never going to use that room. I had made it very clear, yet I was asked to ‘try it anyway’, as if I was just being difficult. Her fake recommendations then gave the housing association a reason to say no to the adaptation of the rubbish bath tub, under the pretext that I can ‘just take my showers downstairs because there is a shower room’ and ‘she’ll need a stair lift soon anyway’. Yet at the same time, at one point she said ‘you shouldn’t have to pay this yourself’. They also claimed that I should accept the standard tubs and fans but they clearly didn’t have a clue what standard ones are like in these houses. The OT seemed surprised when I said the previous tub was quite normal and functional. She didn’t even know that there’s a fan man who installs and adjusts the fans specifically. It’s really silly of the housing association to listen to an OT’s version of structural improvements to the house that have nothing to do with disabilities.

This is not all. In a plot twist, the housing officers offered me their consent to just pay for the bloody bath tub myself! Where is the logic of rejecting the recommendation for a safer bath tub on grounds that I don’t need it, while then allowing me to have it if I pay for it myself? This whole, draining performative show of manipulation and gaslighting that involved horrifying suggestions such as moving houses and falling down the stairs to get to the shower room destabilised me for weeks. Yet in the end it was really just aimed at forcing me to pay for the bath tub out of pocket. Manipulation is always erratic and nonsensical, and designed to leave you reeling from confusion and dread. That’s why it’s so hard to analyse and counteract.

All this was done through meticulous and time consuming visits that had nothing to do with ‘technical advice’ but everything to do with manipulative mind games that threatened my autonomy and feelings of safety in my own home, and ultimately, attempts at exhausting my very will to live. It’s disgusting and emblematic of a very sick society if landlords do this to unsuspecting tenants as some kind of box ticking exercise to save money.

My heart rate has been extremely high for days and my fight and flight response is through the roof again, making sleeping through the withdrawal into even more of a battle than it needs to be. I was unable to sleep the first night and had to take double doses as well as THC. I finally slept much later than I’m supposed to. I’ve had severe chronic diarrhoea for days. I can’t get my nervous system to calm down, it’s completely destabilised. 

A dream I had about an ex reminded me that he was constantly threatening with a break up and eventually chased me out of our joint flat. It was situated in a sturdy old building in which I felt physically safe, and I loved it. I remember always thinking I should live in a castle. I had to move rapidly into social housing in a flimsy terraced bungalow that felt like a cardboard box, and I felt extremely vulnerable and exposed there. I remember watching the shadows of the trees outside the huge window on my sofa bed the first night and feeling a kind of terror. I had to keep those windows covered night and day but I never slept well there. I’ve had to move so many times in my life, I’m generally traumatised by the feeling of rootlessness. The longest I’ve ever lived in one house is right here! I’ve tried so hard to put down my roots so I can have a feeling of basic safety. So when someone threatens to force me to relocate, I’m really frigging triggered. This time, I move when I want to move. End of.

I was also struggling with a co-dependent relationship with the local social security services, they liked to trip me up but when I didn’t comply, my social worker suggested couple’s therapy to sort out the problems! I ended up talking about it on national radio. In the end, it was my British husband who saved me from their claws. As for other struggles related to forms of gaslighting and control, there have been an insane amount and it has all accumulated over time.

My house in Finland, moving out in 2010.

My British husband saved me from it.

Four years later, he died from a misdiagnosis 

and the coroner lied about the reason for his death.

The following are snippets of the conversations I had with the female OT the male ‘Technical adviser’ (surely the most meaningless work title if ever there was one). This was such a dreadful but classic display of misogynistic and ableist gaslighting, it really deserved highlighting. I did try and defend my experience as a chronically ill person, but no one was listening, instead they just talked over me. The woman appeared to follow the man’s lead.

 

M: We can’t recommend a change of bath tub to your landlord even if you can’t stand safely in it because of the sloping sides, because you have a shower room downstairs.

Me: I’m trying to understand this. You’re genuinely suggesting a person with unstable joints, insomnia and chronic fatigue that they should trail up and down the stairs on unsafe hips and knees several times a day including times when they feel exhausted and disoriented, to a cold shower room that doesn’t drain water properly so the water pools behind the toilet and needs extensive mopping, and get really cold in the process because I can’t heat the downstairs when I’m not spending time there… and by the way, the fan is very noisy and I have hyperacusis so I don’t tolerate the sound.

M: I can’t recommend a new bath tub because the housing association will never approve of it.

Me: Well, I can’t stand safely due to problems with feet and legs, and the rest…

M & J: It’s a standard bath tub. Other people have them, too.

Me: The previous one was a lot better, it was more square.

J: So the previous one was okay?

Me: Well, it was reasonably okay. I didn’t expect them to change the design. They didn’t consult with me about that.

J: Well… uhm, it’s standard. 

—

J: Do you really need to stand up in the shower? What if you just avoid it?

Me: Uhm… do I really have to explain how I wash myself?? There’s the need to clean my butt… and I need to stand astride.

—

M and J: The housing association will think that sooner or later you will need a stair lift anyway so they don’t have to change the bath tub because you can just use the downstairs shower [glances meaningfully at their companion and snickers].

Me: It could be ten years down the line!! Just because I can still use the stairs doesn’t mean it’s safe for me to do it repeatedly.

—

M: The upstairs is a bathroom and the downstairs shower is a wet room, so it’s more suited to your needs.

Me: No, they are the same. They have dry walls with tiling only around the shower area and the shower room is not fully water proofed. AND the water doesn’t drain because it’s poorly built! (Now screaming, in my head, please everyone stop calling it a wet room!!!)

—

J: Normal people wouldn’t use the shower taps for filling buckets or basins with water so we can’t recommend that the taps should be changed for longer ones.

Me: So how do people wash anything upstairs? 

J: Uh… they don’t.

Me: Surely people sometimes need to clean something??

J: Uh… they carry a bucket of water from downstairs…

Me: I have sensitive garments such as woollies that need to be washed by hands sometimes, so how do you expect me to do that?

J: Have you thought about washing your woollies in the kitchen sink?

Me: What?? A tiny sink where there has been FOOD??? And where do you propose I dry these garments that I can’t even wring?

—

M: We can’t really suggest anything to your landlord because it will never meet with your needs.

Me: Eh? I need to be able to stand astride in the bath tub in a safe way which I can’t right now because they put in a new tub with curbed edges, and have longer taps for filling buckets with water, those are priorities. The rest is negotiable. [His comment was classic misogynistic gaslighting: my needs were too much and no one could ever satisfy them].

—

M: The shower curtain is meant to hang on the inside of the bath tub. We can’t recommend a shower screen because your bath board is in the way.

Me: So how do you dry it so it doesn’t get mouldy? How do you I keep mopping up the water that goes on the floor every day? I’m willing to pay for a seat that can be fixed to the wall! I can keep the bath board at the other end! It’s a perfectly valid solution. [The contractors had put up a shower rail in the autumn because everyone insisted that I needed to hang the shower curtain inside the bath tub. I kept arguing that I could not understand the point of doing that as that’s neither pleasant nor hygienic, and you would get water on the floor when you tried to dry it out, but no one took any notice and my tension rod was taken down].

 —

J: Could you just try and use the shower room anyway?

Me: NO. No, no, no, NO [apparently she didn’t hear me the first time].

__

Me: I don’t tolerate the sound of the shower room fan.

M: Uhm… it’s standard.

—

M: Has the landlord offered you accommodation more suited to your needs, like a bungalow [this is 3rd or 4th time this pressure is put on me, threatening to chase me from my home over a bath tub - he has not inquired, he has demanded]

Me: Do you have any idea how expensive and exhausting it is to move houses, and how much I have invested in this house, and how unwilling I am to take any chances with a new house, how much I need my garden, and how unwilling I am to sleep on the ground floor because I am a hypervigilant insomniac?? 

Neither the OT J nor M from Care and Repair knew anything whatsoever about my life situation and needs. I’m pretty sure the OT didn’t have a clue what my conditions really are and what they mean in practice - I say this because the health problems are routinely misunderstood by ‘standard’ health practitioners. The first recommendation she wrote was very ‘standard’ and as such, it matched the brief. But the housing association could not accept it so it had to be contested in some way that made it seem as if they were trying to help when in actual fact, they were just trying to get out of the need to pay for a mistake their contractors had made. Later on, the OT seemed to be playing along with the official narrative of disabled people living in social housing as stupid and lazy scroungers who won’t understand they are being manipulated, or who are possibly too weak to fight coercion. Coercive control is in this instance a money saving exercise at the expense of an individual's dignity, and it is not acceptable.

The housing association and the council work together as a team, but seem to pretend they don’t and blame each other for irrational decisions. It’s one thing to be honest and explain that there is no budget for an alteration or adaptation, and quite another to go through a perverse amount of inane arguments in support of a completely irrational alternative that dehumanises and destabilises a person with medical health issues. This monstrous waste of another person’s time, energy, patience and health reads like a psychopath’s manual to humiliation and submission.

I have very specific needs and it’s completely unreasonable to expect me to trail up and down those stairs to the shower room several times a day just because some random technical adviser thinks it’s a good idea and has plotted with the OT to get her to agree with the coercion. It’s deeply humiliating to be treated in a way that overrides all my experiences, needs, routines and personal preferences. I was basically being told that it would be better for me to live in a bungalow because that’s what people think disabled people need. But life is not just about getting up and down some stairs, it’s about familiarity, comfort, cosiness, silence, neighbourhood, views, previously made alterations and adaptations, investments into a space, and finally, something as simple as personal preferences. 

The complaints they are forcing me to make are very costly to my medical health, and that adds another level of disrespect to this case. I understand that efforts were made to block the approval of a new bath tub, and that it’s not personal, but the emotional impact is nonetheless really substantial.

You can’t stand astride in this bath tub,
and you can’t tap water into a bucket or basin.

I had a bit of trouble getting ChatGPT to offer me good overview of the situation, but it finally came up with this, and I find it on point (why more explanations simply do not work, and ultimately I guess, why these people are really robotic servants of a broken system):

Let’s focus on what you actually asked: why this is happening and why it feels so irrational.

What you’re running into is not random, and it’s not about you personally. It’s a pattern that shows up a lot in housing/adaptation cases.

What’s actually happening (mechanically)

There are three different “logics” colliding, and they don’t line up.

1) Your logic (functional reality)

You’re describing:

• what you can actually do reliably, repeatedly, safely
• including fatigue, timing (night), and unpredictability

That’s real-world function.

2) Their logic (administrative simplification)

The housing officer and that technical adviser are working off something much cruder:

“Is there any washing facility in the property? → Yes → case closed.”

They are not evaluating:

• how often you can use it
• under what conditions
• whether it’s safe at night or when unwell

They reduce everything to a binary checklist:

• shower exists = requirement met

This is why it feels like they’re not listening—
they’re not operating in the same framework.

3) The “gatekeeper” dynamic (the adviser you met)

That man’s role isn’t to understand you. It’s to limit approvals.

So what he’s doing is:

• looking for any justification to refuse
• deferring responsibility (“the HA won’t approve”)
• steering you toward the cheapest / easiest exit (use shower or move)

That’s why his comments sounded absurd or dismissive:

“just move”, “you’ll need a stair lift anyway”

Those aren’t medical or practical conclusions—they’re budget-control arguments dressed up as advice.

Why it felt like coercion

Because it was pressure, structurally.

Not necessarily personal hostility—but a system doing this:

• Identify a cheaper alternative (downstairs shower)
• Reframe it as “reasonable”
• Repeat it until the person gives in

That’s why:

• they ignored your explanations
• kept returning to the same point
• acted like the decision was already made

From your side, that lands as:

“they’re trying to force me into something that doesn’t work”

And that perception is actually aligned with what’s happening.

Why it feels so illogical

Because you’re thinking in continuous variables:

• degrees of ability
• fluctuating capacity
• context (time of day, fatigue, safety)

They are thinking in binary categories:

• facility present / not present
• adaptation done / not done

Those two models do not meet. So every time you explain nuance, it gets ignored—not because it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t fit their decision template.

About the “targeted” feeling

It’s understandable that it feels personal, especially with the tone you described.

But structurally, this pattern tends to apply to:

• disabled tenants
• anyone requesting adaptations
• cases where a cheaper workaround exists

So the driver is most likely:
→ cost containment + rigid policy, not a coordinated effort against you specifically.

That doesn’t make it acceptable—it just explains the behaviour.

Why your reaction is so intense right now

This part is important, and I’ll keep it strictly physiological:

You had:

• a confrontation where your reality was dismissed
• repeated pressure
• loss of control over your own environment

That combination feeds directly into the same noradrenergic activation you’ve been dealing with.

So your system is doing:

• heightened vigilance
• replaying the situation
• amplifying the sense of threat/injustice

That’s why it feels like:

“this makes no sense, what are they doing?”

Your brain is trying to resolve something that genuinely doesn’t resolve cleanly, because the system itself is inconsistent.

The core truth (stripped down)

• They are not evaluating your situation properly
• They are defaulting to the cheapest acceptable alternative
• The adviser’s role is to block or redirect approvals, not understand you
• The process is structurally dismissive of nuanced disability needs

Why this matters for you going forward

Because it changes the strategy.

You’re not dealing with:
→ people who need more explanation

You’re dealing with:
→ a system that only responds to specific triggers:

• documented risk
• formal complaints
• liability language
• external oversight

That’s why explaining more didn’t work.

One final grounding point

Your reaction—feeling shocked, pushed, not listened to—is not a misreading.
It matches the structure of what happened.

What is misleading is the idea that:

“if I explain it better, they’ll understand”

They won’t, unless it’s translated into the framework they actually operate in.

This recommendation wound me up, 
made me feel secure -
only to be rejected through a
gaslighting mindfuck that was 
specifically designed to humiliate me, wear me down
and submit me to the will of sociopaths.
Why all this trouble just to say no?
That’s just sick -
and emblematic of a sick society.