I’m glad at least that your pain is lessening Purple. The sooner you’re well again, the sooner you can take some control, and you can do that, you just don’t know it yet.
You aren’t putting anybody out. It’s professional’s job to do things like do their job, and besides that, they’re in their roles for a reason. They are there to help, that’s why they’re doing it, and if they didn’t want to do it they’d have a different job, so they’d be horrified if they thought you weren’t asking for help because you felt like an imposition.
I’ll tell you something, something you’ll need to learn if you’re to get yourself out of this god awful situation. Absolutely nobody does things just for the hell of it. We’ve all got far too much to do and too many bills to pay for that. People do what they have to do to pay the man, things they want to do and things they are passionate about, but absolutely nobody acts against their own self interests, apart from people who are trapped and coerced in abusive relationships that is. You have been made to become used to putting your H’s needs at the centre of your life. Hell even your DS comes below him, and don’t say he doesn’t because he does, otherwise you would’ve been out of there like a scalded cat a long time ago.This is the thing though, you have to start putting your’s and DS’s needs front and centre of everything. Right now your DS gets treated like shit by his father, and his mother is physically sick and creeping round like a little mouse in fear of upsetting his dad. You’ve got to do as everybody else does and act in your own interest. Your H puts your’s and DS’s needs so far down his priority list they’re practically subterranean. So the crooks is this, you need to keep this in mind, that at the end of the day we’re all looking out for our selves and our own, and part of that is going to work, as a GP, or a counsellor at WA, or a housing officer at the council. They also in the main don’t want to sit on their arses all day playing solitaire, because that would be boring, and wouldn’t offer much job satisfaction at the end of the day. So next time you’ve got some time, and you’re holding the phone, dithering about putting someone out, remember, you are acting in your own self interest, which is what everyone does, and the person on the other end of the phone is acting in their’s, by doing a good job of their job and going home at the end of the day and feeling satisfied that their time spent in a job that they have to do to pay the man has been well spent.
Selfishness is a quality we all have to one degree or another, if we weren’t a little bit selfish we would never have survived as a species. We do what we need to survive. The real trick, which unfortunately a lot of people haven’t mastered is to understand this fact, and that it’s not necessarily a bad thing, indeed sometimes it’s the best, and necessary thing. Some people want everything and don’t care who they step on to get it, and other people are afraid to reach for what they need because they’re worried about how it’ll look to others. Somewhere in the middle there’s a happy medium where people take what they need, because they understand that they need it and what the consequences are of not getting it, and they also understand that how they look to others isn’t as important as their own wellbeing. The other trick that relatively few people manage to master is knowing that they are not mind readers. That what they think people are thinking most likely bares absolutely no relation to what they’re really thinking. So if for example you call WA you’re thinking, ’they’ll think I’m wasting their time and they wish I’d get off the phone because there might be a woman in real danger trying to get through,’ where as they’re probably thinking, ’hmm, I wonder if there’s a place we can offer her. This reminds me of that case the other week with that woman from Manchester. Don’t forget to check what Counselling is available before I get off the phone.’ People are almost never thinking what we think they’re thinking. Right now I’m thinking I’m rambling nonsensically and you’re probably bored to tears, but you’ll probably come back and say that’s not what you were thinking at all.
Anyway, on the off chance you’ve made it to the end of my lengthy essay, do have a think about it, because the only way we can survive sometimes is to grab any help we can find. Life can dump some almighty shit on us, and the options are basically inhale shit for the rest of our miserable lives or throw up our hands and grab hold of any lifeline we can find, and then when we’re shit free we can pay it forward to someone else, foremost being our kids, who can in turn be shit free and pay it forward to the next.
Oh, and one final thing. My housing support worker is a volunteer in our local DV service’s helpline. She does it because she wants to make a difference, and I can tell you right now that she would not think you’re a fraud. Whatever your H has told you people think domestic abuse is, he’s wrong, and every single person in the police, the domestic abuse sector, the medical profession, the council, the teaching and social care professions, and every other agency involved in safeguarding and protection would whole heartedly agree.