10 May 2022
In my story, I’ve written about the kind of trauma that comes from being harmed. But there is another kind that comes from being abandoned.
The second can be harder to understand, because there’s often no single event to point to. No obvious moment where everything changed. Just an accumulation of silences. Unanswered messages. Missing support. People who once spoke freely becoming cautious, distant, or disappearing altogether.
By May 2022, I was no longer simply fighting workers compensation statutory non-compliance by employer and insurer.
I was living inside something that felt like a psychological thriller. I’ve said this before. And that’s what it truly feels like.
The workplace injury itself had been devastating enough. I had asked for a safe work environment. I had asked for agreed boundaries and for protections that should never have been controversial. Yet somehow, those simple requests had triggered a chain of events that would consume every aspect of my life.
My health deteriorated.
My finances collapsed.
My professional reputation was attacked.
My future became uncertain.
And perhaps most disturbing of all, I found myself increasingly alone.
Looking back through the text messages from that period is heartbreaking.
I can see myself reaching out to colleagues, trying to maintain human connection while everything around me was falling apart. I can see myself explaining what was happening. Trying to make sense of it. Trying to survive it.
At first there were conversations.
Then there were shorter replies.
Then there were long gaps.
Then silence.
I still don’t know what was said behind closed doors.
I don’t know whether people were warned off, intimidated, frightened, instructed, or simply overwhelmed by what they were witnessing.
What I do know is that something happened, because people who had known me for years suddenly became absent at precisely the moment I needed support the most.
That is one of the cruellest aspects of workplace mobbing and social isolation.
The target is left trying to understand what they’ve done wrong when, in reality, they’ve done nothing wrong at all.
What made it even harder was that I was dealing with institutional power.
I was confronting senior leadership and failures within systems that were supposed to protect workers.
I was confronting decisions that had devastating financial consequences.
The result was not merely financial loss.
It was financial annihilation.
Everything I had spent decades building was placed at risk.
Entitlements were withheld.
My home was threatened.
My future became uncertain.
The pressure was relentless.
It felt as though every source of stability in my life was being systematically stripped away.
And yet what traumatises me most, even now, is not the financial damage.
It is what I learned about people.
I had already experienced trauma in my life.
I know what loss looks like.
I know what grief feels like.
I know what it means to survive difficult circumstances.
But nothing prepared me for discovering how many people are capable of witnessing profound harm and simply looking away.
That’s been the hardest lesson.
Not that one person could behave unconscionably.
Not that one institution could fail.
But that so many people could see what was happening and choose silence.
The email I sent to the Sydney Catholic Archdiocese came from that place of despair.
I was writing as a human being who believed serious wrongdoing had occurred and who could no longer understand why nobody with authority seemed willing to intervene.
By then, fear had become a constant companion.
Not ordinary fear.
The kind of fear that develops when every safeguard you believed existed, failed at the same time.
It’s a fear that develops when the systems designed to protect you, instead leave you feeling exposed and isolation becomes “normal”.
My experience of psychological injury taught me something.
Psychological injury isn’t just what happens to a person.
It’s what happens around them.
It’s the silence.
The abandonment.
The exclusion.
The uncertainty.
The sense that reality itself has become distorted.
Years later, I still struggle to comprehend the scale of what occurred.
Not because I cannot understand misconduct, but because I struggle to understand indifference.
The greatest trauma was never discovering that harm could be done.
The greatest trauma was discovering how many people could watch it happen…
… And say nothing.
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 321-322.
———
Further Reading: Why Dignity Matters in the Workplace
I have written about psychological injury, organisational misconduct, retaliation, social isolation, financial harm and the devastating consequences that followed after I raised concerns about workplace safety.
At the heart of all of those experiences lies something much more fundamental.
Dignity.
An article published by Emerald Publishing, Why Dignity Matters in the Workplace, explains that healthy workplaces are built on dignity—where people feel recognised, safe, valued and able to raise concerns without fear. It argues that relationships flourish when dignity becomes “the medium of exchange” and that many leaders unintentionally violate dignity simply because they have never been taught to recognise it. (Emerald Publishing)
Reading that article, I found myself reflecting on how profoundly the opposite experience can affect a person’s life.
When a worker loses not only their income, but also their voice…
When they are socially isolated after speaking up…
When colleagues become silent…
When reporting safety concerns leads to fear instead of protection…
When the systems designed to protect workers fail to intervene…
The injury extends far beyond employment.
It becomes an injury to human dignity.
That is why this story has never been just about one workplace or one workers compensation claim.
It’s about what happens when dignity is replaced with fear, silence and exclusion.
If workplaces genuinely want to prevent psychological harm, then psychosocial safety cannot simply be another policy sitting on a shelf. It must be reflected in how people are treated when they raise difficult issues, question unsafe practices or ask for help.
Dignity is not a luxury.
It is one of the foundations of psychologically safe work.
Further reading:
Hicks, D. (2022, 25 January). ‘Why dignity matters in the workplace’. Emerald Publishing. [Online blog]: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/opinion-and-blog/why-dignity-matters-workplace
