When Recovery Started

Recovery for me started in the fall of 2006 after my first experience with workplace bullying at around the same time my second experience was probably in its very earliest stages.

At that time, I did not realize that the first experience was workplace bullying.  I did not realize I had experienced trauma in the workplace and had PTSD.  I only knew that something was radically wrong with me.  That I was not "getting over" this experience as I "should."

I was using all the techniques I knew which had worked many times before.  I worked on forgiving each of the people - all supervisors and managers - who had had a part in this.  Yet, I still felt a raging anger inside that would not be quieted.

Even after six weeks, six months, it still felt as though it had happened yesterday.  I couldn't put any distance between me and what had happened in that place.  Especially the ending which was traumatic in and of itself as I was unceremoniously walked out at the contract end and deposited at the back door like yesterday's garbage.

I was depressed as well.  Nothing seemed worthwhile.

When recovery started, I had been working at what turned out to be my last workplace for a little over a year.  The job which would five years later end in workplace abuse.  I began this job exactly three weeks to the day after being walked out of my former jposition.

I didn't realize it then, but it was probably way too soon to start new employment.  However, I was doing what I had always done before.  I picked myself up and started looking for new employment.  I did, however, have a few weeks respite at my mother's house, the house I had grown up in.

Going into the new workplace was a victory yet it was also a hindrance as I brought a lot of unresolved baggage with me from the previous workplace.

Let's face it.  I was probably an emotional mess.

We never see ourselves as others see us.

I'd been seeing a counsellor off and on for quite a few years by that time so it was only natural to go back to her.  After most of my sessions with her, I would feel the need for a counselling session after the counselling session as I felt more confusion afterwards than when I walked in.

It seemed that she took issue with almost everything I said or thought.  The words I used.  The concepts I expressed.  Especially when I showed negative emotion.  That really got her dander up.

The last time I saw her was so bad that not only did I leave with tears streaming down my face but as I huddled outside the entrance to the building where she had her office, I felt worthless.  There was a major street just a block from where I was waiting for my daughter to pick me up and I felt the siren's call to walk down to that major road and walk in front of a car.

I'm not sure what stopped me.  Maybe because that was the one day, the only day, when my adult daughter needed the car and had dropped me off arranging to pick me up afterwards.  She pulled up.  As I got into the car, I said "I don't want to talk.  I just want to get home."  We drove home in silence.  The tears never stopping. Arriving at our house, I went straight to my bed huddling under the covers in the fetal position.  My poor daughter hadn't a clue what to do.  So she called her older sister telling her I was a mess and then handed the phone over to me.

I walked afternoons, so all my appointments were in the mornings which meant I still had an eight hour shift to get through.  Somehow I did.

At some point in the following day or so, my husband, both daughters and my son-in-law were with me and all said, "You are not going back to her."  I protested because I thought I was to blame for the bad session.  My son-in-law added, "I'll help you find someone else."  He was as good as his word.

He contacted a friend who was a counsellor and came back to me with several names from the agency his friend worked with.  He described one of the women as being amazing.  The drawback was that her office was located in a small town about 40 or so kilometres from us.  At that time, I would rather take a bus than drive even in town; therefore, committing to go weekly - or as it turned out biweekly - was a difficult decision to me.

I did choose her.

Driving to that first appointment, I expected her to throw me out as being too difficult because of my recent past experience.  But she didn't.

It was there in her office that I experienced unconditional acceptance for the first time in my fifty plus years of life.

It was because of that unconditional acceptance, that place where I could say anything and not be judged where the process of recovery began.

A process which has been ongoing now for more than 11 years.

It was this process of recovery and the continuing on-going counselling which allowed me to survive the second experience of workplace abuse.