The Furniture Remains, But the Friends Are Gone
When I last visited the mother’s flat, I was struck by a haunting contradiction. All the relics of her earlier life remained in place: the old furniture from the home she once shared with her late husband, the framed photographs of family life, and the mementos that spoke of decades of shared history. On the surface, it looked like continuity—as if time had carried forward the essence of her life unchanged.
But the reality beneath this curated tableau could not be more different. All of the mother’s old friends from the Gold Coast—women and families she had known for years—are gone. They are no longer in her life, no longer connected to her socially, no longer even visible as online contacts. With the sole exception of a Lubavitcher friend aligned with Chabad, every thread to her old community has been cut.
This is not the natural fading of friendships that can occur with age or distance. It is too complete, too precise, too sudden. The preservation of objects alongside the erasure of people reveals something far more deliberate: a pattern of coercive control. The furniture and photos remain as props, creating an illusion of continuity, while the living relationships that gave them meaning have been eliminated.
The result is engineered dependency. Surrounded by objects from her past, the mother is permitted to remember, but not to connect. The presence of those relics becomes a cruel irony: they testify to a life once rich in friendships and family ties, even as the gatekeeping around her today denies her the living connections that once defined her. This selective curation of memory is one of the most insidious aspects of coercive control. It maintains the appearance of continuity while erasing its substance.
For a woman in her seventies, this social pruning has profound consequences. Friends are not just companions; they are safeguards against isolation, checks against exploitation, and sources of perspective beyond the influence of one dominant figure. To lose every friend but one — and for that one friend to be linked to an ideological or institutional network that possible aligns with her partner — is not chance. It is design.
This is why coercive control is now recognised in Queensland law as a form of domestic and family violence. It is not always about physical harm; it is often about shrinking the victim’s world until they have nowhere to turn and no one to trust except the controller. When the friends are gone but the furniture remains, what you are seeing is not the natural passing of time, but a deliberate act of erasure.
And it is here that the line must be drawn. Forcing an elderly woman into isolation while maintaining the illusion of continuity is not care, it is not companionship, and it is certainly not love. It is abuse — elder abuse in its purest form — and it must be recognised as such.
There is also something profoundly symbolic about this contradiction. The furniture and photographs are mute witnesses; they do not challenge, they do not question, they cannot intervene. They remain as a kind of stage set, a curated museum of a life that looks intact to the casual eye. But the living human witnesses—the friends who might notice changes, who might raise concerns, who might ask difficult questions—are all gone. Their absence is not just social, it is strategic.
In this sense, what is happening in the mother’s flat mirrors a broader pattern seen in coercive dynamics across societies. When power wishes to maintain control, it preserves appearances while eliminating the independent actors who can resist or expose the truth. The state keeps the flag, the crest, the ceremony; the abuser keeps the furniture, the photos, the semblance of family continuity. But the real lifeblood — the community of peers and equals — is hollowed out.
For the mother, the consequences are lived and immediate. At seventy-four, she should be surrounded by the comfort of old friendships, by people who know her story from the beginning and can speak with her as equals. Instead, she is enclosed within a carefully filtered circle in which her only external point of contact — the ultra-Zionist Lubavitcher Chabad cultist — aligns with the same network that her partner possibly represents. That is not freedom of association; it is controlled exposure, a way of ensuring that even her one remaining “friendship” is a gatekept channel.
This is why isolation of the elderly is so dangerous and why oversight bodies must take it seriously. Isolation is not always a matter of being alone in a room. It can occur in plain sight, even in a flat filled with memories, even with one or two sanctioned contacts. It is measured not by how much furniture surrounds you but by how many living voices have been silenced from your world.
When a woman’s friendships are stripped away, leaving only curated objects and controlled channels of contact, what remains is not family life but captivity disguised as domesticity. This is the silent theatre of coercive control: the photographs and furniture whisper of continuity, but the empty absence of human voices screams of domination. To allow such a situation to persist is to sanction the slow suffocation of a person’s autonomy under the guise of care.
This is elder abuse, plain and unvarnished. It is not accidental, it is not benign, and it cannot be excused as a quirk of circumstance. It is a deliberate program of isolation designed to render an elderly woman dependent, voiceless, and invisible, while strategically showcased when circumstances for the gatekeeper demand. The evidence is there for anyone who dares to look — in the silence of absent friends, in the carefully managed facade of continuity. And it demands not just recognition, but intervention.
What is most revealing is that the public political positioning of the gatekeeper and his internal political allies has effectively become a proxy for a personal attack against me. What might once have been passed off as opinion or community posturing is now plainly visible as part of a broader pattern of hostility, designed to discredit me and isolate me. However, they have gravely miscalculated as I have just lodged a formal complaint with the UK Solicitors Regulation Authority regarding this internal ally of the gatekeeper and their unprofessional conduct. This overlap between public discourse and private coercion exposes their intent: it is not about political conviction at all, but about using politics as a weapon of control. In doing so, they have provided their own paper trail of bias and retaliation — evidence that now works decisively against them.
There is also the unresolved shadow of Roya’s death. It occurred seven years after my father’s passing, within the same family orbit, and under circumstances that remain troublingly opaque. What makes this nexus so difficult to dismiss as coincidence is the speed with which the current gatekeeper entered the mother’s life after the husband's death, followed by the pattern of coercive control I have since documented. I do not claim certainty, but I raise the question that oversight bodies must inevitably ask: were these losses merely natural turns of fate, or do they form part of a longer arc of control and erasure? The silence surrounding Roya’s death is not closure; it is an unanswered question that now presses harder against the backdrop of what is happening today.
