A DS PTSD friend here wrote me this today:  "I think sometimes it is easier to go for bat for an innocent person then ourselves. I feel it is a step for standing up for ourselves later on too. You have opened that door, broke a pattern...." 

What she was referring to was how this week with your support I stood up to my micro-managing boss at the community college where I teach.  I got her to step aside and let me and my community college's counselor carry out a crisis intervention with a student of mine.  He came to me for help for deep depression after his sister's funeral following her overdose death.  

I have put up with my boss micro-managing my relationship with students for years.  She triangulates and manipulates a lot, throwing me under the bus to upper administration whenever there's static and taking credit whenever there are positive outcomes.  That office politics type of maneuvering is how she became a boss to begin with.

But my community college counselor and I got help for this student together and we did it because this time I drew a boundary with my boss.  I told her being discreet for this student was more important than her usual grandstanding, so to be quiet and not copy my email to her being accountable to her about it to all of the usual higher ups.  She was stunned. 

It worked.  The student trusted us because my community college's counselor and I protected his anonymity.  He showed up to the emergency counseling session we set up for him and got his intake done for a prescription for antidepressants from a psychiatrist.

So, again, I think what my DS PTSD friend here wrote me today about it is something I need to learn from:  "I think sometimes it is easier to go for bat for an innocent person then ourselves. I feel it is a step for standing up for ourselves later on too. You have opened that door, broke a pattern...." 

What do you think?  

1. Maybe I broke a pattern for how I live here in my present job with this boss.  

2. Maybe I opened the door to a new pattern if I get an opportunity for one of two new jobs at other colleges  I've interviewed for this month.  

3. Maybe this was a breakthrough for growth concerning a pattern going all the way back to abusive mom and my crazy childhood.  

I am aware that I didn't resolve my CPTSD childhood issues all at once with this, of course.  But it may have been a breakthrough moment when I showed myself what I can do.  When I go back to work next week, given my boss's past pattern, she's good at office politics so she'll have figured out how to come back at me for putting her in her place this once.  I have tenure, so she can't fire me, but she put me through extra hoops over my PTSD with a dean last Fall. 

In Spring 2016, I sat down with my community college vice president and the head of human resources and gone on the record about my PTSD disability in case in the future I needed an accommodation.  In Fall 2017 I invoked my PTSD disability for an accommodation under the law to teach regular teaching loads and stop being assigned years of overloads any more.  Even though my request for an accommodation had been coming since I went on the record in 2016, she obeyed the law but found a way to embarass me in retaliation.  She made me explain my PTSD diagnosis  to this dean all over again in an extra unnecessary meeting just to put me through talking about it under more stress. 

I discussed that unnecessary stress with her pointing out everything was on the record already ever since 2016, and she wouldn't budge. Her only show of respect for my PTSD and that extra stress on it from that unnecessary meeting she made me have was for her to let me schedule that meeting with that dean myself.  She said I could schedule the dean meeting myself so I could then schedule a session with my psychiatrist right after it.  That way I could recover from the stress of talking about my PTSD unnecessarily to a higher boss. 

To do that, of course, meant for me to reveal to the dean that I saw a psychiatrist, so it was a neat office politics trick to out me on her part.  It was mean. 

That's why standing up to her was to hard now, but I did it for this student.  I want to make it worth it by learning a PTSD recovery lesson for myself from it, too. 

What do y'all think?

Is this how we grow in recovery beyond the patterns of our PTSD?