Reply to Work experiences you couldn't move past easily?

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "Work experiences you couldn't move past easily?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]TW sexual assault.

I was sexually assaulted by my boss about 4 months into the job. Not rape, but very intimate unwanted touching. It was so shocking I just froze up. I remember I smiled when it was happening, which kills me, but I now understand is a common trauma response when you're scared of offended or escalating. It was so horrible. I still have flash backs about it sometimes and it gives me these flashes of rage, because I froze in the moment and I wish I'd been able to say something, swat his hands away, anything.

I was so new, and the company didn't have a proper HR department, so I wasn't sure who to tell or how to address it. I wound up confiding in a colleague who I'd become friends with during my time there. She told me "oh I'm sure he didn't mean it that way -- that's just the way he is." Over the next couple years, I confided in a couple other people there and got similar responses. In the meantime, that same supervisor made himself my "mentor" and befriended me. Never actually touched me again but continued to raise sexual topics with me frequently, ask me intimate questions about my relationship. He also interjected himself into my personal life, would weigh in on any major life decision, gave me tons of unsolicited advice about things like how to wear my hair and dress. I kept trying to raise these issues with colleagues or other supervisors. Each time they would acknowledge that he did these things, but kept telling me "that's just how he is" and "you have to find a way to work with it."

I LOVED the work I did at this place, it's the reason I stayed. It was so fulfilling and meaningful to me, and there was nowhere else I could do it. Leaving felt like a big loss to me, and still does on some level. I still sometimes wish I could go back, not to that specific workplace, but to the same work. After I quit, I kept thinking about what had happened, how powerless I'd felt, how wrong the situation felt. I wound up writing a letter to the company's executive leadership explaining what had happened to me and what had happened. I wasn't asking for anything, I just felt like it needed to be in writing, that having them on formal notice to it might help the next person.

They ignored it, three months later the person who assaulted me was promoted into executive leadership. It felt like a gut punch.

I still think about it all the time. I sometimes see this company in the news for good work they do (and they do in fact do good work) and it feels painful to think about. I've gone to therapy, I've worked through it using CBT. It resurfaced all this stuff about my childhood (I was physically abused by both parents when I was a child). It feels like a pivotal moment in my life but I've struggled to turn it into something that feels transformative in a good way. I think worse than the assault, or any of the harassment, was just how everyone kept telling me "this is fine, this is normal." How not a single person said "that sucks, it shouldn't have happened." Not one! I'm still pretty messed up about it, tbh, though I try not to think about it this much. Reading other people's stories brought it back though.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics