Life Post Workplace Abuse: 2014 in Review

As always, we tend to get nostalgic as one year ends and another begins.

Me, maybe more so than most, as I continually traverse this never ending, ever changing journey towards recovery.

In late 2013, I had a major break through on the road to recovery, my pre-workplace abuse personality, that irrepressible, sometimes irreverent, frequently extroverted and usually outgoing part of me came back - in full force.

It was a major breakthrough but not a total cure as the events of 2014 showed as they unfolded.

There were some really neat times when I felt on top of the world ... and there were some really down times with the negative emotions overcame me and threatened to knock me down for the count.

Below are the highlights, the significant parts of 2014 in photographs.

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2014 began for us with a fireworks display at the local ski hill - something we've never done before.  But somehow it felt right - even though hubby and I don't ski.

Gazing at the ski slope from the balcony, I felt like I was watching a Currier and Ives print in the making as people began walking up the snowy slope towards where the fireworks would begin.

January brought snow, snow and more snow.  Also bitter cold.  What is now begin called the never ending winter began.

In February I had quite an adventure when I went to Belize with my sister in law aka sister in love.  I was thoroughly fascinated with everything I saw and experienced.

 In March while winter still kept its grip hard and fast on the region, we finally had some break in the long, long winer and the snow began to stop falling and the ice on the river began to break up

April came and while there was increasing evidence of spring in the area, winter was still showing its handiwork in certain areas as in this  Good Friday photo of an ice column in the Elora Gorge shows.  We called this time of year last year "sprinter" - spring meets winter.

In May another sister in love along with one of her friends gifted me with a special prayer quilt that they'd made just for me.  A special gift.  One that gladdened my heart and made me realize just how precious the people in my life are.

In June, there was than one event to commemorate.  One weekend we went back to the little town on the lee of Lake Huron where we spent our first winter of married life.  I hadn't been back in years, so this was a special treat.  Also being well enough to drive myself was a sure sign of continued healing.

The second event was  The World Wide Knit in Public Day at Shall We Knit?  I have avoided contact with people, especially "strange" people, people I don't know, but for the first time ever I was well enough to attend on my own ... and thoroughly enjoy the event.  No anxiety.  No fear.

The third significant event was going to Write Canada! The largest Christian writers' conference in Canada on my own.  No companion needed.  No anxiety.  I felt free and on the verge of something significant in my life.

In July our "Western" daughter came home for a visit and took us to a favourite place:  Tobermorey, Ontario on the tip of the Bruce Peninsula.

In early July, we took her to Niagara Falls.

In August, I celebrated my 65th birthday at the CN Tower, Toronto, Ontario with family combatting my twin fears of height and elevators.

In September, we went to Parry Sound for a few brief days.  Another favourite spot of ours, I felt fully alive for the first time in years holding a canoe paddle in my hands and wandering around with camera in hand.

In October, there is always the annual Oktoberfest/Thanksgiving parade in our town in Thanksgiving Day.  For many years I was unable to attend, but a few years ago I decided to make the effort.  Family and friends willingly "enabled" me.  This was the third year I went and the first time I was feeling fully alive.

November brought a craft sale at a senior's centre.  I had done two craft sales before, one in 2012 and one in 2013, and both were dismal failures.  No one looked at my handiwork let alone bought anything.  This time, I plotted a new strategy, focussing on one items - hats and headbands - and a better display and did reasonably well.  The best part of all was that my exuberant, pre-workplace abuse personality was showing itself in full force.  I was alive!  And having fun.

December brought the experience of a lifetime which is now being dubbed the "Great Poultry Pageant" (written about in a previous blog entitled "Loss and Laughter") where a little guy dressed in a turkey costume stole both the star and the show.

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And now, as the sun rises on the first day of the new year of 2015, I look forward in anticipation.  What will the new year bring?  What further challenges will I face on the road to healing?  What significant breakthroughs will I have?

Until next time ... Happy New Year's!

Surviving Workplace Bullying: More of the story - the second possible serial bully

It's amazing how many things I can think to write about, the words freely flowing from my brain, when I'm otherwise occupied.  On the bus.  In the workplace.  Knitting.  Oh! My mind does some of it's best work when my hands are occupied with needles and yarn.  Too bad I can't plug a USB port from my mind into my computer so I can both at the same time.  Sigh.

Yet when it comes to looking at that blank page, my mind freezes.  Stops entirely.  All the creative juices totally halted.

My mind has been occupied lately not so much with what I experienced in the workplace as the research I just uncovered this week regarding serial bullying.  I always suspected that I had been targeted by serial bullies but could never prove it.  Part of the reason is that the only way it can be proven that a person is a serial bully is by discovering the patterns.  Another part of the problem was that if I did try to speak up, I was constantly dismissed by being told that these were just my "perceptions" and "assumptions" and, therefore, had no validity (the lie I've written about in earlier posts).

In addition, I felt based on my experience in the workplace that those "investigating" the problem were too closely involved and allied with those whom I have identified as serial bullies in the workplace.  Imagine how validated I now feel three plus years later when I see my "assumptions and perceptions" being corroborated when I read the following  section in the Bully Online article entitled "Behaviour of the Serial Bully" which web page I've also linked to an earlier post this week. (Emphasis on certain phrases are mine.)

Virtual Immunity from CorrectionSerial Bullying at work is unlikely to lead to an arrest or even disciplinary proceedings because their most common offences don't involve physical violence or are shrouded in doubt: The serial bully can explain away just about anything, and frequently blames others and distracts attention from the real issues. Few would have the patience to investigate as incisively as necessary. Finding someone with the courage and integrity to investigate impartially is even harder. Any investigator, whether an internal employee or director, or an external investigator, may well fear of adverse consequences from upholding a complaint about a serial bully, the potential consequences being personal (e.g. damage to their own career prospects, not being paid etc.) and corporate (e.g. identifying evidence of actions for which the organisation is vicariously liable).
The writer has studied the results of several investigations into alleged bullying, conducted by internal and external "investigators". Only one was objective and thorough. Of the remainder, the best was superficial in the extreme, with the worst ones obviously intended to destroy the complainants' reputations. Only the objective investigation correctly identified the root of the problem.
One possible explanation for investigators and fellow managers being so easily manipulated by a serial bully appears in a research paper by Clive R Boddy, entitled "Corporate Psychopaths, Bullying and Unfair Supervision in the Workplace" (2011):

"The cold-heartedness and manipulativeness of the psychopath are reported to be the traits that are the least discernable to others and this allows them to gain other people’s confidence and facilitates their entry into positions where they can gain most benefit for themselves and do harm to others (Mahaffey and Marcus, 2006)."

Did you notice how in the last quote, these authors, Mahaffey and Marcus 2006, identified serial bullies as psychopaths?

Scary, isn't it?

Did you also noticed how the "serial bully can explain away anything"?  Which I take to include being how one person could go through approximately six people in an approximately two year period of time.  Not to mention how many people had come and gone in that position previously.

These are all things I've learned in the process.  Things I didn't know then.  If I had, I might have done things differently.  A lot differently.

Also, if I'd been as far along on the path of recovery as I am now, I would have had more strength to do things differently especially with the knowledge I have now.  I wouldn't have put up with all the garbage.  I wouldn't have taken it on myself to make things better by myself.  I would have realized that it takes two and that if the others weren't willing, then trying to make things better by myself was simply an exercise in futility.

As it was, at the point all this started in the fall of 2006, I was in the very beginnings of what would turn out to be an amazing journey on the road to recovery.

At that point, I was still "scared of my own shadow", eager to please, easily intimidated, avoided confrontation like the plague, etc.  I realize now that part of my dysfunction was that I had been raised from early childhood to be a co-dependent, and that tendency was to play a major role in the scenario unfolding in the workplace.

If I had been the person I am now combined with the knowledge I have now, especially that at least one person was a serial bully and there appears to be a relationship between serial bullies and psychopathy, I would (or should) have realized that I was in a situation where winning was not possible.  The best thing I could have done for me would have been to quit at the very beginnings of the situation.

But I didn't know that then.  The literature I've read says that because bullying at it's beginnings is very subtle and virtually unrecognizable to anyone, including the target, it takes approximately two years for the target to realize that he/she is being bullied.  That was me.  It was almost exactly two years from the instigation until I realized that I was being bullied.  And even then, I was resistant to the concept.  It was only the research on the net that opened my eyes.

If you think there is any possibility that you are being bullied in the workplace, I urge you to do a google search and start looking at what it says.  Research carefully, though.  Look for multiple articles by multiple people to back up your "perceptions and assumptions".  And if you do choose to go to HR with your findings, back up your position with hard copies of the research and make sure you leave them with the HR representative.  It's much harder to dismiss hard copies of written research then it is to dismiss thoughts or concepts conveyed verbally.

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This isn't really where I intended to go today.  Frankly I admit I am procrastinating about going into the situation with the person whom I will simply call "person #2 who I believe may also be a serial bully.

However, I felt it was time to interject some of the research here so we - you, the reader, and I, the writer, - have some common basis for what I'll be writing about in the future.

In the workplace, I realized that none of us were in the same book store, let alone the same book.  The same page?  Forget that concept entirely.

In order to even have a hope of understanding the complexity of workplace bullying, we need to be as close to the same page as possible.  Being in the same book helps.  

Until Monday....

Surviving Workplace Abuse: The next chapter in my saga about how I became the workplace target - the beginnings

The picture above was taken from the Observation platform of the Parry Sound (Ontario) observation tower overlooking the town of Parry Sound, the harbour and a piece of Georgian Bay.  Gorgeous, eh?

It is so much easier to see the overview, to place pieces in context, when one is looking at things from a distance.  You see things from this vantage point that you would never see on ground level, up close and personal.

So it is with my experience in the workplace with bullying.  From a distance, it is so much easier to see and analyse things.  For me that distance is the three plus years I've been out of the workplace working diligently on recovery.

The distance - and recovery, partial that it appears to be - also afford me the ability to look back at my experience without many of the feelings I experienced when going through it:  the confusion, the anger, etc.

The distance allows me the opportunity to look at things more objectively and say this is what happened to me in as factual and logical way as possible.

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I started yesterday's blog with the intention of talking about the type of workplace bullying called "mobbing", but as my fingers filtered through the thoughts in my head on the keyboard, I realized that going straight to the type of bullying called "mobbing" is like putting the cart before the horse.

Bullying starts small.  Usually with only one person.  However, like a little snowball which when rolled around and around enough on moist, wet, packing snow becomes larger and larger until at some point it is so large, heavy and unwieldy that it cannot be moved, unchecked bullying has the potential to become something much larger than its individual, component parts.

And that is why it goes unnoticed in its earliest stages.  The very beginnings of the snowball called bullying are often completely undetectable - by anyone - even the person selected for bullying.

I truly believe that my situation in the workplace began with two separate people, unfortunately at the same time in the same place (our workplace), who had their own issues.  Their own problems.  Their own hopes and desires.  I just happened to intersect with both of them separately in negative ways.  And they both happened to intersect with each other and draw others into the snowball.

Both, I believe were serial bullies in the past.  Moving from one "victim" to another.

I believe from the first co-worker's own words, plus observation, that she had a pattern of bullying people long before I ever crossed her path.

In fact, the Union president who worked in our office during that time, at one point said that this person had problems "getting along with people".  That was before.  Before the Union president became privy to whatever my co-workers were saying about me and joined forces with them.

Today, we go into the second co-worker who I also believe, although I cannot prove it, was a serial bully.

I'd been having problems with the co-worker who worked the shift immediately before mine.  She often left two to four hours of work from her shift for me to finish.  I often felt like I was like a race horse rushing as fast as people out of the starting gate.  Day after day.  As we were a 24/7 operation in the transportation industry, I had no choice but to finish the work she'd not done.  If I didn't complete what she didn't, the product would not go out.

In addition, this person would isolate and pick on little things.  Constantly.  I was the target of petty emails on a constant basis.  I was the target of misinformation.  I can't recall at this time all the little things this person did because they were little.  They were petty.  But they were constant.  Undermining.

I discovered later, much later when the bullying in the workplace was full-blown and I started researching it, that this behaviour of picking on the little things with the intent of undermining a well-established employee also comes under the definition of bullying.

As time progressed and the situation continued, I decided it was time for a "divorce" so to speak from this person.  An opportunity came up to take a mat leave position which, while remaining in the same office, would effectively remove me from direct interaction with that person.  It would also entail learning new skills.  Working different shifts.

I jumped at it.

What is that saying about going from the frying pan to the fire?

Moving to the new position involved training someone to temporarily take my existing position and then going into a long period of training myself.  And that is where I made a crucial mistake.

I figured the person coming in knew - and accepted - the fact that this was a temporary position.  That I "owned" the job she was taking over and that I had every intent of going back to that job when the mat leave was finished.

Oops!

I had difficulty with this person from the very beginning.  Although to be fair, I have to admit that she came in at a difficult time.  I was supposed to train her - and another person - at the same time (which is an impossible task at the best of times, I think) AND catch up on all the leftover work at the same time.  I couldn't really begin training this person until I got caught up.  Simply because it takes extra time for untrained people to catch on.

Also, the person in question had come from another part of our large plant, the production part, which was a separate entity entirely.  There was no certainty that if this didn't work out for her long term that she would be able to get her old position back.  So it was a risky enterprise for her.  One I only recognized too late.

Also, concurrently, the supervisor who had hired me for the mat leave and hired this person to replace me and who had created the scenario of me training two people at the same time, left suddenly.  As in he was there one day and gone the next.  Walked out.

Oops again!

Fortunately, we had a management trainee on board who had been destined to take over the responsibility for our supervision so she took over that supervisory role - just much sooner than she had thought.  Without the transition period she had expected.

Does anyone else see this as a recipe for disaster?  At least in hindsight?

An overworked employee who is expected to play catch up on a daily basis, train two people at once combined with a new, inexperienced supervisor?  Not to mention, the co-worker I was trying to get a "divorce" from who was still in her position and still very capable of undermining me?

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... If I knew then what I know now.

If I knew how all these various forces in and of themselves, not even factoring in the individual in the other office I've identified as a possible serial bully, perhaps, just perhaps, I would have realized that I was at the very beginning of an exercise in futility and cut my losses and run.

But leaving, quitting, is not in my personality.  It is not something I do.

So I continued on.  

The picture above is taken from the exact same location, the Observation Tower, in Parry Sound, overlooking the same piece of scenery, from the same angle.  The only difference is that for this picture, I used my zoom lens.  Zooming in on one particular aspect, in this case a boat which fascinated me, of the scenery below.

In a sense, this is what I'm doing with this blog posting.  Zooming in, focussing, on one particular experience in a long series of experiences that comprised my experience with bullying in the workplace.

Until Monday ... I hope you have a good weekend.