Overcoming Depression

This story is about a client of our Workforce Development program in
Oakdale who was able to overcome her depression and conquer her struggles. This story was written by Program Coordinator, Kaylee Brown.

This client started Job Readiness with us as a single mother of two who had a Bachelors degree in criminal justice and had been out of work since completing her degree. Her youngest son is in elementary school and her oldest is 18. Her oldest son has severe disabilities and she struggled caring for him on her own. With her youngest getting older she found herself having to place her 18 year old in a home that specializes in supporting individuals with disabilities.

When I met her in May 2015 in our job readiness class, she was deeply depressed about having just moved her son with disabilities out of her home and into his new home. She felt regret, felt like a terrible parent and felt helpless about what she could do. I offered a listening ear and asked her to keep me posted on how he was doing and she was doing. We would talk almost every day about her visits with him and updates. After about 2 weeks from our first meeting, she had gotten comfortable enough with me to discuss why she wasn’t working.

She said she would feel guilty going to work because she thought she would enjoy working. She said she couldn’t allow herself to be happy and at work while her oldest son was having to live in a foreign home. We talked more and more about allowing herself to feel happy, how much her boys would love for her to be happy, and that taking a job would benefit her whole family in financial ways but also emotional ways because a happy mother brings that happiness home with her and that it is something that she gets to share with her boys, not take anything away from them. We had these talks every few days for the next couple of weeks and she would update me on how well her son was doing at his new home and how well the staff took care of him. You could begin to see a slight physical sign of relief… but the pain was still there.

Until one day, she walked in and showed me some papers. As I read them I realized she had just been offered a position at the Riverbank school district full-time, with benefits and with a monthly salary over six times more than she was currently surviving off of. She first told me she didn’t know what to do, should she take the job? What about her boys? One of the things the staff in the Oakdale Workforce Development office do on a daily basis is allow people to tell their stories and be heard. So when she started to consider letting the job go, I had built a solid relationship with her and was able to offer my opinion even though it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, I knew she needed to hear it. I told her try it, if it doesn’t work out you don’t have to stay at the job, if it’s too much then you can quit, but you deserve to take that job and see what it’s about and see how it affects your family.

So, what happened? December 2015 she visited me at the Oakdale Workforce Development site and shared with me how she loved her job, how happy she has been, how well her boys are both doing and how grateful she was to not only have this dream job, but to be happy and at peace with herself and her family.

To learn more about our Workforce Development program visit: http://bit.ly/2davcHe