I'm really worried about my DSIS and at a loss about how to help her.
DSIS is 29 and has never had a job. She lives with our parents and is very much the baby of the family. She's been making half-hearted efforts with job hunting and has done some internships and temping, but there is always a drama or a problem.
She had some problems at school during GCSEs and failed the first time around, she then went to a college that specialised in retakes and got 8 GCSEs and 3 A-levels at A-C. She went on to university and graduated with a BA in summer 2012. I think that the GCSES knocked her confidence as did being 2 years behind some other people on her courses and that this had a knock-on effect.
After graduating, she made a token effort to job hunt but always seemed to be self-sabotaging (e.g. turned up to interviews in jeans and trainers and afterwards was in floods of tears over the interviewer being critical of her) or said she couldn't find the address so didn't go and ignored calls from whatever agency had recommended her.
My family and I have called in lots of favours for her and put her forward for internships and temp/perm work. Literally every time, except once, she has complained that people are mean or rude to her or that there is some form of bullying. I’m torn between thinking she has the worst luck out of anyone, that she is deliberately sabotaging it because she can't be bothered, and that she has undiagnosed MH issues that are causing problems with the work.
She worked at my cousin’s company for a short while (but in a different department) my cousin said that DSIS was frequently emailing or messaging her for advice on how to handle tasks at work, and would often try to pressure my cousin into doing some of her tasks by (in my cousin’s words) “laying on a guilt trip”.
My uncle has arranged work for her on at least 3 occasions and she has pulled out at the last minute every time leaving him short staffed. He eventually said that he wouldn’t be able to help her anymore because it was making him look bad.
She had some seasonal temp work with my employer when I happened to be on honeymoon. She messaged me every day about how horrible her supervisors were being to her and asking me to interpret things they said (I get that conversations sound different over text but she was relaying things like "he told me to do something straight away because it was urgent but he said it in a way that sounded like he thinks I'm stupid and that I'm wasting his time" or "she gave me a client file but she dropped it on the edge of my desk instead of passing it to me nicely"). Anything I said wasn’t good enough and she would always end up with saying things like “I suppose you want to be off having fun and not having me bringing you down”. When her contract ended, her supervisor discretely asked me if everything was ok as she was frequently very late to work and had a lot of absences, especially after “she was asked to do something she obviously didn’t like to do”.
I tried really hard to support her during her employment and after leaving, I felt really guilty as I had introduced her to lots of my contacts and that I was responsible for the horrible experience that she had there. I helped her with her CV and spent hours every day scouring job adverts and helping her with cover letters etc. I even went through a stage of rehearsing the journey to interviews with her but I stopped doing that because I realised that I was making the situation worse.
Since leaving that job in 2015, she's had a couple of temporary placements but has left each one because she has said that the people in the team are bullying her or excluding her. She's been to countless interviews and always comes home with a story about how the interviewer was rude or mean to her and that it undermines her confidence and knocks her back. Recently these stories have escalated to include people on the tube or the bus looking at her in an odd way or people in shops being rude to her.
I've suggested, in numerous ways, that she goes to her GP for a general chat about how she is feeling. I've told her about the counselling I've been to and how helpful it has been to me, and suggested she could try it. I've looked up schemes that help people back into work or that hold skills workshops. She always dismisses these things (well, she usually blanks me for a few days and then gets my mum to pass a message that she isn’t interested). I’m so worried about her and I don’t know what I can do to help her :(