Sorry you are in this situation but you will land on your feet. Just hang in there and wait it out. I wish I could say your poly story was shocking and unheard of but it’s the norm.
I did want to clarify one thing. You said that all this happened “because of a process designed to help me grow professionally”. While that might be what you hoped to get out of it, the process is absolutely not designed for people’s career growth. The process is designed to vet candidates and weed out people that cannot/should not be trusted with classified or sensitive information.
As someone already noted, including direction on your questionnaire as to who can be contacted and when is pointless. The boxes will be checked as required. The process requires information and a clearance can’t be granted with important information missing. I had one person ask if we could wait until everything else was collected and reviewed and then right before the clearance is granted we could contact their current employer. It just doesn’t work like that.
You know this now. Hopefully this thread will inform others and they won’t end up finding out the hard way.