The next couple of years were like a blur, I had no trust in my decisions on anything and just drifted through life trying to work it out. Financially it was a huge burden trying to still hang onto the house and rent and do whatever I needed too but the debt I got myself into was spiralling and I had no form of reprieve and I was deeply in denial about my reality. I had no trust in relationships but I ventured into the world of online dating in a desperate attempt in the lonely times. It was very devastating and really not good for my mental health the whole experience and I had just given up hope and resigned myself to my life without love.
I struggled with parenting in those years to meet the demands of the financial and emotional burden of being the only adult and parent in their life and the teenage years after the hit 15 were pretty brutal. I will not discuss the issues out of respect for them and their own lives I was pretty devastated that even though I had always made them my number one priority and safety they still struggled with their own difficulties and my guilt and failure as a parent was significant at this time.
I used alcohol to cope through these tough years and I had been on antidepressants for years but through this whole period I was still able to get up every day and go to work and function and be the only person to clean and maintain the house and yard was how I spent my life and again was on auto pilot and just maintaining to stay alive.
There were only so many years that I could juggle the financial debt and responsibility with mortgage and upkeep of a huge house by myself and I was left with the only option to declare bankruptcy. It was a devastating experience, my inheritance from my father and all of my attempts to hang on so tight for security had crashed and all because I had believed in love and fallen into the web of lies and was just another huge grief and loss that was at the time more significant than any other loss in my life. I had lost so much more than a house and I felt so angry with the Universe because I had done the right thing and taken all the responsibility and debt for the safety of myself and my children and I saw this as deeply personal and being blamed.
The next three years were a whirlwind of paying huge amounts of money out of my wage to bankruptcy and not even being able to get a phone plan and my daughter had to do this for me. This was a humiliating experience and one I will never forget but the lessons I learnt even though were hard at the time was again there is never any money in the world that is worth staying in abusive relationships and my beliefs set me free and I did so which my head held high.
It was also around this time that work trauma has resurfaced and the Social Work Management that I had been under for 15 years and my direct supervisor had been the subject of a Bullying and Harassment Investigation by the whole Social Work Team at the Hospital Service I worked with. I had succumbed to being a compliant victim of abuse for years because I needed to survive and hadn’t known anything different so to go through this process was traumatising and so many old wounds and triggers surfaced that were beyond imaginable for me. This process took years and even after the allegations were substantiated the level of trauma that I and others were exposed too was absolutely criminal from an organisational level. I was just so angry that after 15 years of struggling with these issues and everyone knowing and no one did anything until then is something I will never forgive and even though the allegations were substantiated the individuals were only demoted and moved to lower paying positions in other health services and not fired.
