Repeating the Trauma - June 2022

14–17 June 2022

By June 2022, I was preparing to explain my trauma all over again.

Because just when all was progressing for CCI to finally communicate with my NTD, Turks Legal suddenly enters the scene again, “on behalf of the insurer”. 

Another email arrived “requiring” yet another IME. 

Another “independent” practitioner. 

Another date circled on the calendar.

24 June 2022.

The words themselves had become exhausting.

“We require you to attend an independent medical examination on 24/06/2022.”

Not would you be willing?

Not how are you coping?

Simply…

“We require you.”

I was given no choice but to attend.

But this time I made one thing absolutely clear.

“I will be requiring a support person during the consultation. Please ensure CCI are aware that it’s inappropriate for a practitioner to deny a person this right for work-related psychological injuries.”

It shouldn’t have been something I had to fight for. Someone to witness the IME “transaction”. 

Also, someone suffering a psychological injury should never have to argue for the right to feel safe during an “assessment” supposedly designed to “evaluate” that very injury.

Yet here I was…

Putting it in writing.

Again.

But I do have one question for Catholic Church Insurance:

Why was CCI so adamant to do whatever it took to NOT communicate with my NTD and comply with their injury management and return to work obligations? 

These IMEs by CCI’s chosen practitioners were repeatedly used as obstruction to their injury management and return to work statutory obligations. 

WHY, CATHOLIC CHURCH INSURANCE? 

And what does ALL this reveal to us about the integrity, ethics and professional conduct of IME “practitioners” used in workplace psychological injury cases?  

WHERE ARE THE SAFEGUARDS? 

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What made this IME particularly painful was that it wasn’t even new.

It was the same practitioner who had “examined” me more than a year earlier (an examination never needed in the first place. What was “required” was return to work compliance!) 

I wrote to my lawyers:

“It’s the same practitioner as the one assigned on 31 March 2021. I’m going to be repeating myself again, yet with another torturous year of injuries.”

One sentence captured everything.

Another torturous year.

Not because my original workplace injury had simply continued…

But because the system itself had become another source of injury.

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I found myself trying to explain something that seemed obvious to me.

How could an injured worker continue being sent from one “assessment” to another while the people responsible for coordinating recovery had never coordinated recovery at all?

I wrote:

“I’m the only one who’s made efforts to implement the injury management plan, along with … my NTD.”

RECOVERY was NEVER meant to be something the injured worker carried ALONE.

⸻

By then I wasn’t just talking about an IME.

I was trying to explain years of accumulated failures.

I wrote that my treating doctor had never been contacted by a case manager.

I described repeatedly asking for communication.

Repeatedly asking for collaboration.

Repeatedly asking for protection.

Instead, I had been left alone to navigate a system that expected me to recover while denying me the very processes designed to support recovery.

⸻

As I wrote to my solicitor, the words became less legal and more human.

“My right to a voice in my recovery was repeatedly denied and ignored.”

That was the real injury.

Not simply being unheard once.

Being unheard over…

and over…

and over again.

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Then came one of the most heartbreaking admissions in the correspondence.

“I never viewed the … letter because I was distressed and humiliated, betrayed and abused and degraded by employer, insurer, union, and the NSW government departments meant to ensure our safety. It’s trauma.”

Trauma survivors avoid opening or reading certain correspondence. 

You might ask why don’t they “just read the letter.”

Because reading the words written means reliving the trauma, humiliation and indignity. 

⸻

By this point I wasn’t only trying to explain what had happened.

I was trying to explain what I still wanted…

…despite the years of aggressive adverse action by the senior executives of a nationally registered, publicly funded university employer and NSW STATE REGULATORS WHO DON’T ENFORCE COMPLIANCE ON ALL KEY STAKEHOLDERS …

…I wrote:

“I want to recover in my job.”

Not compensation, as per coercion down such a path, aided and abetted by the specialised insurer CCI (but restitution for the serious financial loss from this institutional wage theft must now happen, hence PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY).

I want my statutory workers compensation right to:

Recovery.

⸻

What strikes me most about these emails to Walker Law Group, isn’t the legal references.

It’s the desperation between the lines.

The hope that surely…

surely…

someone would finally stop and ask what was actually happening.

Instead, I found myself compiling legislation, documenting events, explaining procedural failures, identifying obligations, and trying to hold together my health while preparing to recount the same traumatic story to yet another CCI coerced IME “practitioner”.

I wasn’t recovering.

I was becoming an expert in surviving abusive systems.

And perhaps the saddest sentence I wrote during those days wasn’t about legislation at all.

It was this:

“I’m starting to feel no one cares about me in this society.”

No one should ever reach the point where that feels true.

Yet for me, in June 2022, after years of asking for help, that was exactly how it felt.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 355-356.

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Further reading 

I wasn’t only fighting yet another traumatic and unjustified IME.

I was fighting to reclaim the conditions that allow a human being to flourish.

I came across an article by Dr Wendy Purcell, “A Fairer Society is One that is Flourishing.” She writes that flourishing is about far more than the absence of illness. It’s about having meaningful work, financial security, dignity, purpose, healthy relationships, agency over our own lives, and the opportunity to become our fullest selves. She argues that these should not be privileges enjoyed by some, but universal human rights in a fair society. 

My lived experience has been the opposite, given how current ACU leaders treated me, my family, and who knows how many others. Human flourishing must be acted upon, not only talked about in bite sized videos and posts regarding Ethics on LinkedIn (see http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-deputy-vice-chancellor-of-ethics_01727877882.html). 

This is a Catholic university committed to the dignity of the human person in its very mission statement. The current leaders should not be there, nor should Catholic Church Insurance have continued such unlawful and disgraceful corporate conduct. 

The workplace injury itself was devastating, but what followed stripped away many of the very foundations that research identifies as essential for human flourishing. My health deteriorated. My financial security disappeared. My career was interrupted. My dignity was eroded. Relationships came under enormous strain. Even my sense of agency—my ability to have a voice in my own recovery—was repeatedly taken from me.

No one should have to spend years proving they deserve the opportunity to recover.

A workers’ compensation system should not merely determine liability. It should help restore the conditions that enable an injured worker to flourish again—to recover their health, dignity, return to work and place in their community.

That is what I was asking for.

And that is what I am still asking for.

Dr. Wendy M. Purcell  (2022, 14 January). A fairer society is one that is flourishing. [Online blog] : https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/opinion-and-blog/a-fairer-society-one-flourishing