I had no idea what was hiding in the dark.
When I was in my thirties, I had an exceptional professional opportunity. But, part of the back story is that I was beautiful and sexy and I wasn’t fully aware of my affect on people. I was married also. I was hired by an executive director (ED) who pursued me after being in a class I gave on the dually diagnosed population. I worked in mental health and he worked in substance abuse treatment (SA Tx).
He hired me away from my first mental health job and I went to work as a program director of a methadone clinic in 1994. I loved the work. The ED and I had a vision and goals for the agency. It was a midsized substance abuse treatment agency in a midsized city. He was first to begin the goals accomplishment and he attained the money for a huge campus outside of town and out of the rat-infested building we were in. I was swiftly promoted and put in charge of the build-out of the new facilities. I was in charge of the entirety of outpatient programs for our agency. That included day treatment, outpatient, methadone treatment, drug court and a contract with the department of corrections. I was in heaven, literally.
Unfortunately my marriage was falling apart. After two years at this new job, I left my husband. Then the unthinkable happened and my mother passed away suddenly of a heart attack and stroke. She was only 67 years old, which made me 37 as she was almost exactly 30 years older than me.
My boss was sympathetic and caring and all of the things that he could be. He just wanted me back at work and after two weeks I started back.
Something had changed between the ED and me. I don’t know exactly what shifted or when it happened. He had once treated me like an executive director in training and often joked that I could run the agency after he retired. But then he began acting angry toward me. He was cruel in ways I could not put words to. The timing coincided with my divorce. He set me up for impossible challenges, such as failing to tell me about an eight o’clock meeting and then becoming angry when I arrived at 8:10. He knew I had high schoolers and that, as their only transportation, I sometimes had difficulty getting them to school on time.
He continued his games by attending my staff meetings and undermining my procedures in front of my own staff. Or by insulting me and siding with others during executive meetings. If I asked for support or assistance, it didn’t come.
This was all shocking to me. Our relationship was radically changing in the midst of an avalanche of work. We designed the outpatient program with observed urine drug screening with a colors program for the Drug Court. We had successfully wrangled the Department of Corrections contract. We were writing grants including Federal probation grants. We also had an award-winning program that included mothers and infants in a day treatment program. Our programs were a success!
Why the antipathy towards me? Some of my staff gave me an answer, I’m not sure it was true. They thought he was attracted to me. He moved his office next door to mine. We were working harder and more efficiently. We wrote a million dollar grant and we won it. He became meaner and more condescending openly sharing his antipathy with me. After a particularly cruel afternoon…
I finally went to the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) and filed a complaint against him. He was appalled. Even though it was against the law, he immediately confronted me about it. When you are in a suit such as this, the two involved cannot legally discuss the suit. He did it anyway.
One of the biggest issues that we disagreed on was our supervising physician. The physician was a known misogynist, who demanded that women disrobe for the required physical examination (only women). He also required the methadone clinic to work with blind dosing. The clinic was not allowed to let the clients know what dose of methadone they were on. This physician continually violated patients’ rights. No matter what, my ED would take no action including after nurse managers complained directly to him.
Basically, my boss eviscerated me. Making it impossible for me to take constructive action. I needed the lawsuit to set things right. Instead, it was the beginning of the end.
We were almost at the five year mark of working together when it all came to a head.
I worked with a team of two other women. I was not close with them because they scared me. The younger woman, a young and single and beautiful person was the woman I was closest with. Her face was divine, but she was overweight. The marketing vice president said he loved looking at her (that is an example of how inappropriate the men were).
One of my team members was having trouble with relapsing and I was trying to give him a second chance. I used a veteran counselor to supervise this recovery effort.
On a personal level, my daughters and I had escaped to an apartment and it was just the three of us. I left an unfortunate man who was not good for us. So, we were alone and it was beginning to work well for us. It was a very vulnerable time for me.
At work one day, I was outside talking with my relapsing staff member. We were close together, talking quietly. We stood under a tree that I was leaning against.
One of my work colleagues came to me later stating that her staff member saw me kissing a staff member in the front of the office building. What a bizarre thought. Of course, I’m not going to kiss anyone and being on site is a ridiculous charge.
In the meantime, my nurse manager came to me with a huge complaint against our physician as he had prescribed a sedative to a pregnant woman in withdrawal from heroin. The patient had low blood pressure and the physician refused to admit her to our methadone program. He spoke to her in Spanish and according to the nurse, he was angry and condescending to the patient. The nurse manager explained to me that the sedative could put her in real danger because of her low blood pressure. When I brought this complaint to my ED it was dismissed and so was I.
He then started questioning me about the perceived “kiss” with a staff member on the office grounds.
When I asked my colleague about the perception, she stated that she believed that I had kissed someone on the grounds. She then gained the agreement of our second female colleague. They both believed that I had “kissed” a staff member on the grounds.
The ED called me into his office and cruelly questioned me about the incident. The questioning was clearly grounded in disbelief for anything I said. I absolutely stood my ground. How could we be talking about this perceived kiss when I have a physician who is acting outside of treatment norms and walking all over the patients’ rights?
When I found out that my female colleagues weren’t supporting me, I was crushed. I put in my resignation. When I came to work to complete my notice, I was escorted off of the property.
I spent my entire young life trying to figure myself out. I don’t want my subconscious to run my life. I observed how people were often driven by things that they didn’t understand. I have studied hard. I come from an abjectly poverty-stricken childhood. If I am not careful, I could repeat that. I worked in Lifespring (a personal growth training program) for several years. Most of the work centers around understanding the ego of me and the work of understanding the self, inside a social life with a history. In my case a very negative history that I was laboring to improve.
Something I missed because it had never come up for me, I had never faced it. It was the rejection of my sisters. I had a childhood rife with rejection. I was often left at stores or other locations where my parents would fail to do a headcount, and I was the one left behind. I’m not sure why it was always me, perhaps because my head was in the stars. But my twin sisters had each other and my older sister had her nose in the air. My sisters left me out of everything. They would even directly push me away. One of my first memories is of stealing a quarter from my little sister because they kicked me out of their play. I tearfully returned the quarter to her. I turned out to be an ugly duckling. As I got older, I started gaining attention and I was not always sure why.
That rejection caught me at age 41 when my work colleagues rejected me and called me a liar. I was crushed. It was so painful that resigning was the only way to survive the wound that had been ripped open and then stabbed again. But I missed it, it was until I was 65 that I realized why I had resigned. Of course, I remembered the pain, but I couldn’t figure out why it hurt so much. After all, my ED didn’t hurt my feelings, I was only angry and defiant with him. That deep pain came from my childhood, and I didn’t figure it out until more than 20 years after the fact. The source of the pain from my colleagues was the memory of my sisters rejecting me. I felt small, unwanted and ugly. When we were young I was considered to be my parents’ only plain child. I had straight yellowish brown hair. Two of my sisters were tow-headed and a third was a redhead, they all had lovely waves or curls. Perhaps that reality is what drove my sisters to disregard me. That disregard was still driving me when I was 41 years old.
I wish I had discovered the flaw in me sooner; I could have survived the hard way that I was treated. I have to say that in retrospect it did all work out.
I loved my profession and continued to manage methadone clinics for another ten years, working for a competitor. It was the only choice I had. I forswore the C Suite and never returned. My daughters finished high school, of course. My life moved on. The pain was raw for many years. But I even recovered from that eventually. When I was in my sixties and realized what was tantamount to self-betrayal because I didn’t have the self-awareness necessary to manage the situation, I was close to inconsolability. After studying self-awareness for years, I ended up being overcome by an old, infested wound that reared its ugly head in a moment of extreme weakness. I couldn’t stand the pain and had to resign in the absence of support from anyone, any where.
And justice was never served. This is another story like millions of other stories about men who can’t get over their egos and who take things personally. If you based my performance appraisal on accomplishments, there was no contest. No one was able to write grants that were accepted 100% of the time, except me. And then I managed those programs profitably. It was one hell of an experience. And a defining one. And then a memory.
