New Job: Navigating After Toxic Environment

New Job: Navigating After Toxic Environment

Hello! I am an accounting professional of over 25 years. I've been fortunate to have everything from grunt temp work, to consultant, up to being the director for an iconic venue. COVID resulted in a redundancy in my coveted role I held for 7 years. It was fortunate for me to be in a position to take a few years off stress free (besides the whole pandemic thingy). I went back to work in what I thought would be a stimulating environment to heighten my expertise.

It was a bizzare situation. There were red flags that I chose to minimize. Then the gaslighting came, being froze out by management that pretended to want to be "best buddies", being begged not to leave because nobody stayed in the position, asked to ignore the inappropriate behavior of the business dealings, and then the conflict of interest I was inadvertently privy to that I ended up having to report to the overseeing agencies. I constructively quit after being so laden with stress that I ended up in the ER with arrhythmia and subsequent heart medication. Oh, and I didn't even mention the barrage of wrongful death suits filed in two months that we had to pretend did not exist.

Moving forward, I persisted in my job search. I landed a role with an amazing organization I had been aiming for the past 10 years. I started two weeks ago. Everyone is consistently kind, smart, and outgoing. The inter-oganizational praise for others and the company is a constant. I can't help but feel paranoid that I will find out it is all a lie eventually.

Everyone that has known what I went through with the past company was beyond awful (it made international news along with my internal perspective). So what I see now does make sense why I would feel this way. I don't want the skepticism to show up in my presence at the new job. I want to relax into the role, go along with the good vibe everyone has, but I find this the most difficult thing to do! I almost feel like I am going to fail myself out of the role because my attitude is skewed towards expecting the worst--even though my logic says much otherwise.

Anyone else been here before and can you tell me about your experiences?