We can breathe again…
Well ok, so we can’t breathe freely because of the stupid cold we have… But financially we can breathe a little more easily. The money to assist in paying for our therapy has come through from ACC, so the huge debt we’d been stuck with from the separation and the cost of therapy has been eased a little…
We’re still in a rather large financial hole, but at least we’ll be able to buy food and petrol when we need it. Yes, we know there are other people out there struggling more than us… We also know that the only reason we’re haven’t had to declare bankruptcy is that most of the debt is a private loan – to the mother who won’t demand it back soon, but its tied to all sorts of other issues. So we’re grateful that we are able to live in a flat and feed our cat.
On the therapy front… We’d tried to get our therapist to answer some questions via email to see where she stands on what diagnosis she is treating us for, and what experience she has with this diagnosis. Her response was a fairly reasonable “we will talk about therapy while in therapy”. That’s fine, we’d love to be able to talk about this in therapy. However, we dissociate so much during therapy that we won’t remember the answers; and we just don’t have the courage or level of trust to ask these difficult questions while sitting in front of her. Will wait to see what her response to that is…
PDF Why are people so self-fish?
There’s this woman at work who is ALWAYS moaning, ALWAYS depressing to be around. We accept that she is going through a rough patch in her marriage, and it’s probably going to end. But why does she have to moan all the time??? On Monday, our manager at work wanted both her and I to go over to the graphic designers who had worked on the Institutional Repository with us to give them a gift. Well “moaner” was asked to come too – “but I have distance to do” “I can’t make it”… blah blah blah… We didn’t want to go either cos we hate fuss, but really wanted to thank the designers cos they had done a great job…
So we went over with the manager and she gave us all a $50 book voucher each for the great job we’d all done. Moaner got one as well, but she didn’t even act ashamed that she was moaning about even going over to see these guys less than 20mins before.
Then yesterday she was moaning about having to put the cost of buying new curtains onto her VISA… Good grief, we can’t even afford food this week! Another lady at work is having to deal with a dying husband! Get over having to put a luxury onto your VISA card you ungrateful woman!
I think what really gets us is that she has no empathy. On Monday one of the other ladies could hardly walk because she’d hurt her back. Moaner didn’t even notice. We noticed and we’re going through hell. In the past she’s talked about people taking marriage seriously – while in front of us going through a marriage separation! She’s told all sorts of racial stereotypes about how its usually the “brown skinned people” who do domestic violence – again in front of us and she knew we were victims of domestic violence. We’re of European descent…
Ohh the drama queens….
Separation Agreement
Yesterday we signed the separation agreement!!!
We’re almost free of him!!!
We can finally get rid of all the rubbish he left behind that we’ve had to look at daily for the last 7 months!!!
Here’s the clip we did to celebrate… ***Trigger warning***
Our lawyer was the first to say that we came off much worse out of the agreement, but realistically we didn’t expect to come out any better. It was more a case of trying to minimise the losses. So from the $25000 that was owed at the end of the marriage, he pays $1500. $850 of which is to pay for a hole that he punched in the wall last year during one of his outbursts. Thankfully about $15000 of that debt is to our mother who isn’t demanding it back anytime soon. Hopefully if we get any financial support from the impairment levels from ACC we’ll be able to survive in a flat by ourselves.
I know people have different financial stresses, but at work there’s this woman who has a mortgage, a partner who is working and is doing up her house – and ALL she does is moan about money, needing her next paycheck, how poor she is etc. It’s kinda hard to hear when we’re just surviving financially and another woman at work has a husband who was diagnosed with terminal cancer a couple of months ago. Suppose its all relative…
ACC – officially impaired!
We’re officially impaired!
At the start of this year we started a process to try and get some financial assistance from ACC (state run accident insurance). Sensitive Claims for any sort of mental injury caused by a traumatic experience are considered by ACC to be an “accident”, meaning that they will cover part of your medical and therapy costs. In order to receive further assistance we applied for the Independence Allowance which meant going through yet another assessment to determine whether there is any long term effects from the “accident”. So in early February we went through the process of assessment and for the last 7 months have been waiting for them to make a decision about whether we’re entitled to anything or not.
We rang ACC about a month ago to find out what was taking so long, to be told that the peer-reviewer was questioning the “wording of the diagnosis” and was waiting for information from my regular psychiatrist and also a psychiatrist that we were assessed by over a year ago! We don’t mind them asking our regular psychiatrist, but the psyc we saw over a year ago said on his report that we had two children – when in fact we had two CATS. So the guy doesn’t really inspire confidence.
Yesterday we got the phone call… You are 31% impaired in your global functioning… Wow, so we really are damaged? It doesn’t seem real until you see the figure. As I’ve stated we keep a full-time job, pay bills, avoid hospitals etc. So it’s easy to believe at times that we’re making it all up and we’re not really all that bad. But according to 3 psychiatrists who are paid by ACC and have a vested interest in under-reporting impairment levels, they’ve put us at 31%
Welcome back to reality…
Tax
Only certainties in life are tax and death… Have tried the death thing and failed miserably at it, now it seems we fail at the tax thing too. Just got a bill today to say that we owe about $700 extra in taxes! Far out… Too much!
We already owe about $20 000 in debt that we inherited from the separation, now this on top of that???
