“Please No More Torture” - June 2022

21–22 June 2022

By late June 2022, I was no longer just fighting a workers compensation claim.

I was fighting to hold on to my home, my dignity, my health and, quite honestly, my hope.

Two years had passed since I had lodged my workers compensation claim. Throughout that time I had repeatedly asked for the protections the legislation was supposed to provide. A case manager. Communication with my nominated treating doctor. A return to work process. Weekly payments. Protection from the workplace contact that had caused my psychological injury, the national manager of employment relations and SAFETY.

Instead, I found myself emotionally preparing for yet another IME.

On 22 June 2022, I wrote to my lawyer:

“I’ve had a gutful of this system set up to destroy lives.”

Those were the words of someone who had reached breaking point.

For two years I believed that if I simply kept providing documents, answering questions, complying with every request and waiting patiently, eventually SOMEONE inside the system would do what the legislation required.

Instead, every delay created another obstacle.

In that same email I described what had happened. Again!

“My leave entitlements were used up while being abused and harassed… CCI deliberately withheld entitlements to allow this to happen…”

I listed what had occurred: the absence of a case manager after July 2020, repeated requests for information by CCI that had already been provided, the failure to obtain reports from my treating doctor at the appropriate time, and the continuing contact from the university “representative” whose conduct was the cause of my psychological injury.

I also wrote something that still frustrates me to read today.

“Does one’s records of evidence mean anything in this state’s ‘system’?”

That sentence wasn’t really a question.

It was despair.

By then I had accumulated folders upon folders of documents.

• Emails.
• Medical certificates.
• Reports.
• Complaints.
• Chronologies.
• Evidence.

Yet none of it mattered in the NSW workers compensation statutory scheme that, to me, felt like a scam!

The evidence never seemed to outweigh the power of the institutions involved.

As my financial situation deteriorated, I wrote:

“I’m on the brink of losing my home from the financial abuse alone…”

and

“I’m really frightened about my home right now and I’m not going to suffer systemic abuse anymore.”

Those weren’t legal submissions. They were cries for help.

The following correspondence reveals something else that often goes unnoticed in these systems.

Trauma makes administration incredibly difficult.

My workers compensation solicitor asked me to send the unlawful, undignified, humiliating letter after being hunted down in aggressive adverse action for 1.5 years since I requested a psychosocially safe work environment. I tried EVERYTHING to stop the abuse! 

My efforts are WELL DOCUMENTED!

Do these workers compensation solicitors have no sensitivity and compassion? Instead of a trauma-informed approach somewhere - anywhere - in this horrific system, I felt repeatedly retraumatised. 

I replied:

“[That] letter should be in one of the attached emails I sent on Friday. I can’t look at it. It’s trauma and humiliating.”

Later, after accidentally sending the wrong document, I wrote:

“I think it’s within this attachment. I can’t look at it. Please no more torture.”

And then:

“I’m sorry I forgot to attach. I need a break. This is so unjust and wrong. It’s just abusive and wrong.”

This is why injured workers struggle to complete paperwork or repeatedly submit incorrect documents.

The system is the cause!!! 

Sometimes the very document you’re being asked to retrieve is itself part of the trauma!!!

It means reliving it!

Every attachment can become another psychological injury.

Every request can reopen the wound.

On the same morning I also wrote privately to a colleague in the Directorate of Identity and Mission:

“I have a right to dignity in my job too, don’t I?… I have a right to be treated with dignity… because I’m a human person too.”

No worker should ever have to remind institutions that they are a human being, especially ones with an entire directorate dedicated to the University’s Identity and Mission, that includes a commitment to the dignity of the human person. 

The irony was impossible to ignore.

I was surrounded by organisations whose stated purpose was care, rehabilitation, health, justice or professional advocacy.

Yet I found myself pleading simply to be treated with dignity.

My correspondence even reflected the depth of my faith and my exhaustion.

I wrote:

“Jesus, my Saviour, has done His part for too long. I need human help to lift the cross too. Pharisees ignoring me, or Simon of Cyrene helping me?”

That wasn’t theology. It was loneliness.

By this point, I no longer believed I could carry the burden alone.

What I needed wasn’t another undignified and unethical report from yet another unethical IME.

Not another procedural step and yet another delay.

I needed someone—anyone—to simply help.

To see me.

These emails capture something important.

This wasn’t just psychological injury caused by a nationally registered, publicly funded university employer.

It was the cumulative harm of a system that repeatedly failed to recognise the human being inside the claim.

And perhaps the saddest sentence of all wasn’t about the law.

It was simply this:

“I need support. I’ve had enough systemic abuse.”

Sometimes that’s all an injured worker is really asking for.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 357-359, 361.

——

Further reading 

Badcock, J.C., Holt-Lunstad, J., Garcia, E., Bombaci, P., & Lim, M.H. (2022). ‘Position statement: addressing social isolation and loneliness and the power of human connection.’ Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection. [Online]: https://www.gilc.global/general-6 

The hidden injury: forced social isolation

The injury wasn’t only psychological.

It wasn’t only financial.

It was social.

In April 2022—only two months before these emails were written—the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection (GILC) released its international Position Statement Addressing Social Isolation and Loneliness and the Power of Human Connection. Position Statement 1 begins with a simple but profound principle:

Social connection is essential to health and wellbeing.

The statement explains that social connection is not merely having people around you. It means having relationships that are trustworthy, supportive and of sufficient quality that you know you’re not facing life alone. It concludes that poor social connection carries significant risks to both physical and psychological health, and calls for coordinated action across organisations, communities and governments to reduce social isolation and support social wellbeing.

That is exactly what was taken from me.

When I requested a psychosocially safe work environment, I wasn’t simply excluded from a workplace.

• I was progressively separated from colleagues I had worked alongside for years.
• Professional relationships disappeared.
• My identity as a university employee was deliberately dismantled by the senior executive group.
• Instead of support, I experienced exclusion.
• Instead of connection, I experienced isolation.
• Instead of rehabilitation, I experienced prolonged procedural conflict.

The workers compensation system focused almost exclusively on medical reports, legal processes and re-traumatising IMEs.

But almost nobody recognised that forced social isolation is itself harmful.

The legislation was designed to protect injured workers.

Instead, the failures to implement that statutory scheme left me without income, without a return-to-work process, without meaningful support, and increasingly without the ordinary human connections that make recovery possible.

For me, the financial damage and the social damage cannot be separated.

Losing hundreds of thousands of dollars was devastating.

But being cut off from the professional community that had been part of my life since 2001 was equally as harmful.

The Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection argues that organisations and policymakers should evaluate not only financial costs but also the consequences for social health and wellbeing.

That’s a conversation largely absent from workers compensation and WHS. 

My story isn’t simply about stolen wages.

It’s also about what happens when a nationally registered, publicly funded university employer, together with institutions established to protect workers, allows a person to become socially isolated simply because they asked for a psychosocially safe workplace.

That kind of isolation isn’t an unfortunate by-product.

It becomes part of the injury itself.

And the irony that a third employment lawyer advised to make a claim because, “It’s not worth your health.” See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/05/i-advise-you-make-workers-compensation.html

Once We Repaired Things - Part 10 - The Photo

Some photographs stay with you because they capture joy.

Others stay with you because they cause greater humiliation and trauma. This is about one of those photos.

When this happened, I was walking into a workplace every day, that no longer felt safe. My health was deteriorating. I was exhausted, frightened and trying to hold together a life that seemed to be falling apart from every direction.

And then there was Paul.

People often assume that pain comes from endings. For me, the deepest pain came from never having had the chance to speak.

That is what I have carried all these years.

After the midnight phone call, I was frightened.

I was intimidated.

I was extremely shaken up.

I found myself walking on eggshells, carefully choosing every word, wondering how I could explain myself without making things worse. 

See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/07/once-we-repaired-things-part-9-midnight.html. 

That is what trauma does. You’re trying to protect yourself and keep yourself safe while, at the same time, trying to communicate and be understood.

I was already feeling like the main character in a genre I never chose: a psychological thriller. My reality had become so distorted by the level of inhumanity I was experiencing that I no longer trusted my own footing. Every interaction felt loaded. Every decision carried consequences. I was constantly trying to work out how to stay safe while simply trying to be heard.

I remember opening Messenger and staring at the screen.

How do I convey my message safely so it’s finally understood? How do I ask to speak without being attacked or humiliated again?

I wasn’t trying to win an argument. I was trying to speak. That’s all.

Every time I tried to speak, Paul brought the conversation back to the same point.

“I’m in a relationship.” “I have a girlfriend.”

I wasn’t trying to argue with Paul’s choices or tell him how to live his life.

I had unfinished things I needed to say.

I was trying to explain what had happened. I was trying to tell Paul there was so much he didn’t know. 

I was trying to have a respectful conversation.

And the reality of that text message earlier that year was this:

It was my future too.

Whatever choices Paul made about his own life were his to make.

But those choices profoundly affected mine as well, and I was left carrying the consequences without ever having been given the opportunity to speak.

See: http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/once-we-repaired-things-text-that.html

Then came the updated profile photo. If Paul’s goal was to humiliate me even more, he succeeded. It’s too much unjustified shame and indignity to carry, especially after the painful battles I’ve had to go through in my life.

To me, in that moment, it felt like another door being slammed in my face without any humanity and compassion whatsoever. 

While I was trying to find the courage to speak, while I was carefully choosing every word because I was frightened and walking on eggshells after the midnight phone call, Paul changed his profile photo.

I was asking for the dignity of a conversation.

Instead, the photo became the moment that’s stayed with me all these years.

I cannot describe the humiliation I felt. I still live with the humiliation. What I carry in my heart now is too much pain to bear.

I remember thinking over and over:

Please let me speak.

Please ask me what happened.

Please ask me how I’m doing.

Nobody did.

Not Paul.

Not anyone.

That’s the part that’s stayed with me.

For years afterwards I’ve carried shame that wasn’t mine to carry.

I questioned myself.

I questioned my reactions.

I questioned whether I had any right to feel hurt, frightened, humiliated or overwhelmed. Or, heaven forbid, to feel angry. 

Trauma can do that. It can convince you that your own feelings somehow became unreasonable.

But let’s be honest. Societal expectations can convince you of the same thing. Where has human empathy gone?

Nice girls are STILL expected to just accept things that men do, even though they’ve crossed her boundaries. Men expect her not to show anger or fear or frustration or make reasonable requests for respectful communication. She’s expected to just accept men’s unapologetic actions and words toward her, even if it costs her everything. His feelings and future matter. Hers do not. How is that fair or authentic?

At the very same time, I was fighting institutional failures that were taking away my health, my support network, my financial security and the future I had spent decades building.

Different people.

Different circumstances.

The same overwhelming feeling.

Everybody seemed to be making decisions about my life while I stood there without a voice.

That’s why this part of my story is not only about one photograph.

The photo became a symbol of what it feels like when you’re trying, with every part of yourself, to say, “Please listen to me,” and the conversation never comes. Only shame and humiliation.

And indifference.

It became a symbol of what happens when somebody else’s decisions reshape your life, yet your own voice is never part of the conversation.

That’s why I’m writing this now.

I cannot let my own voice disappear from my own story.

Every human being has the right to dignity.

Every human being has the right to compassion.

Every human being has the right to be heard.

Every human being has the right to flourish.

No one has the right to take those things away from another human being.

For a long time, I felt as though those rights had quietly disappeared from my own life.

And then they were aggressively being taken away.

Writing this story is my way of reclaiming them, one word at a time.

Because my life matters too.

To be continued…

The Things We Cannot Control… and the Things We Can

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”

Aesop

Today I learned that a genuinely kind man passed away in April.

Years ago, during one of the darkest periods of my own life, I helped him after he rescued a cat. Together we found her a forever home. He loved animals deeply, and I learned today that he even left a gift in his will to the Cat Protection Society. Two beloved cats now need new homes because he is no longer here.

His passing has stayed with me all day.

There are some things in life that are beyond our control. Serious illness, cancer, and many medical conditions remind us of that. We fight with every treatment available, we pray, we hope, and we love. But ultimately, not every outcome is ours to determine.

What is within our control is how we treat one another.

Whether we choose to make a phone call.

Whether we check in.

Whether we speak up when we see someone being harmed.

Whether we use our position to protect someone instead of remaining silent.

Over the past several years, while enduring institutional persecution, I’ve seen something that has profoundly changed my view of society. I have seen extraordinary compassion from a few people. But I have also witnessed something equally powerful: the inhumanity that can exist when people decide that someone else’s suffering is not their problem.

Silence is sometimes presented as neutrality.

It rarely feels neutral to the person living through the harm.

There is a difference between suffering that no human being can prevent and suffering that continues because people choose not to act.

Those choices matter.

Today I’m remembering a good man who showed kindness. It reflected who he was.

His life has reminded me that the measure of our humanity is not found in the words we post about compassion. It is found in what we do when someone in front of us is struggling and we have the ability to help.

Please don’t underestimate the impact of a phone call, a conversation, a simple act of courage, or a refusal to look away.

Sometimes those small choices can change the course of another person’s life.

Rest in peace, my dear friend. Thank you for reminding me what kindness looks like.

When the Systemic Harm Followed Me Home - June 2022

A workers compensation “claim” under a statutory scheme ended up becoming about survival.

By June 2022, I wasn’t simply trying to resolve a workplace injury. I was trying to stop every part of my life from collapsing under the weight of a system that had failed to do what it was legally established to do.

 

The irony still leaves me speechless.

Workers compensation legislation exists to support workers while they recover and return safely to work.

Instead, I found myself fighting to save my employment, my income, my health… and eventually, my home.

Everything became connected.

And SIRA NSW continued to do NOTHING. 

⸻

Throughout June 2022, my emails were not really focused on ensuring rehabilitation (except for this repeated unethical coercive bullshit on the 24 June 2022 - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/07/repeating-trauma-june-2022.html). 

They were about settlement dates.

• Contract deadlines.
• Penalty clauses.
• Mortgage security.
• Property sales.

Whether I could settle on my new home before the vendor exercised their legal rights (the only person who seemed to have no human rights, let alone legal rights under a supposed statutory scheme, was me).

Every decision was being driven by one terrifying reality:

I had been left without the income support and return-to-work assistance I should have received years earlier.

If the workers compensation system had operated as intended, none of this should have been happening.

I wrote to my real estate agents:

“If someone makes an offer like $390,000 but can settle on or before 29 June, I’ll accept this over higher offers…”

I wasn’t chasing profit anymore.

I was trying to preserve certainty.

I needed security.

I needed one thing in my life that couldn’t be taken away.

⸻

In another email, I tried to explain what had brought me to this point.

I wrote:

“The irony is that had employer and insurer complied with workers compensation regulations, I would never have been in this horrible situation. I’d have been back at work mid-2020 healthy and well with my dignity intact.”

That sentence still hurts to read because it was written in the middle of the crisis.

I already understood exactly what had happened.

The system that was supposed to prevent financial catastrophe had become the cause of it.

⸻

As deadlines closed in, I became increasingly desperate.

• I instructed my lawyers to negotiate.
• I asked questions about penalty notices.
• I sought extensions.
• I approved offers.
• I accepted legal advice.

Every email reflected someone desperately trying to prevent another irreversible loss.

I even began contemplating asking my brother to become a joint owner of my new home so I could complete settlement.

I wrote:

“I’d rather my brother gain from a business transaction than I lose my secure home just as everything is about to turn around for me.”

I now realise how extraordinary that sentence really was. 

An injured worker should never have to restructure their family’s financial future simply because statutory obligations were never enforced.

And little did I know then that the NSW Government regulators and other agencies were going to continue causing financial and systemic harm for several more years. How naïve of me. 

⸻

These emails communicate someone trying to solve impossible problems.

Every message is practical.

Every decision is logical.

Every option is explored.

I kept adapting because I believed that eventually someone inside the system would do their job.

I still believed compliance mattered.

⸻

But buried amongst the practical discussions were moments where the emotional toll finally surfaced.

I wrote to my real estate agents:

“I’m avoiding my email tonight and tomorrow morning. I’m meeting up with my mum tomorrow and I’m so freaked out by daily morning distress and frustrations in emails.”

That quote says everything.

My mornings had become associated with dread.

Every new email carried another problem.

Another threat.

Another delay.

Another reminder that I was completely on my own.

⸻

Then I wrote something that still brings me to tears.

“It’s my mum at the foot of the cross watching her child being abused and persecuted by society when she asked for help… that hurts me the most.”

That wasn’t legal language.

That wasn’t argument.

That was grief.

Not simply for myself.

For my mum.

She had watched her daughter ask for help through the proper channels.

She watched me trust the system.

She watched that trust be repaid with years of harm.

⸻

In another email I wrote:

“The banks must comply with regulations. But the regulator for personal injury matters makes exceptions for larger organisations who commit workers compensation fraud and turn a blind eye to the insurer’s non-compliance.”

The rules seemed to apply to everyone except those with the greatest responsibility to follow them.

Every deadline imposed on me was enforced.

The statutory obligations owed to me appeared negotiable.

⸻

These documents capture something that’s rarely spoken about.

Financial harm caused by institutional failure doesn’t stop at bank balances.

It spreads.

• It reaches your family.
• Your relationships.
• Your sense of security.
• Your health.
• Your future.
• Your ability to make decisions.

Eventually, it reaches the place every person should feel safest.

Home.

By June 2022, I wasn’t simply trying to buy a home.

I was trying to stop an avoidable institutional failure from taking yet another piece of my life.

And all the while, I still believed that once the regulators enforced compliance, everything would finally start to turn around.

I had no idea that years later I would still be waiting…

While the institutional wage theft continued.

To be continued…

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 393-400.