Post Workplace Abuse: Consuming Fear of Former Co-workers - A Bit More of the Story

A walkway I found in Salem, Massachusetts during our wanderings there.  Sometimes my journey through workplace abuse resembles a walkway like this rather than an open road or path.  Sometimes it resembles a maze.  Whichever, it's the path through that ultimately leads out that is the important part.

Yesterday's blog explaining why I felt so much fear of my erstwhile co-workers for so long was hard to write as, I'm sure, you can well understand.  Not only did it bring back the situation and the feelings surrounding it as though it had just happened yesterday, it also brought back the fear.

What if, especially now that I've changed this blog to my real name and my real picture identifying myself for who I truly am and not just some fictitious person who likes stuffed animals, one of more of these people somehow finds this blog and recognizes themselves in it?   Since I am now using my real name, it would really be a no-brainer for them to recognize themselves in yesterday's post IF they were intentionally bullying me, just as they did with that seven word status on my Facebook years ago.

It was bad enough to be in the emotionally shattered shape I was in, not sure if I was going to survive, but to have management calling me at my home at night and then sending emails threatening to discipline me made the experience so much more harrowing, so much harder to survive.  Although none of these people on the "other" side - the people I call the adversaries - was aware of it, I was very much in a fight for survival.  I was way too close that night to giving up, giving in, letting the waves of despair wash completely over me and sink me to the bottom of the ocean. i.e. suicide.  I was way too close.  Which was why my specialist had written me off work to begin with.  He was trying to save my life.

Would I even be here to write this blog if I had answered the phone that night?  If It had listened to the voice mail?  If I had called my supervisor back that night?  Fortunately, hubby knew best and whisked me away for a bit, away from the situation, away from the phone calls.  Away.  But that is another story, another blog posting.  Maybe tomorrow?  Since today's post seems to have a mind of its own.

Getting back on track, since these people somehow got the notion that it was not only OK but appropriate to search out my Facebook profile and then to recognize themselves in that seven word posting and run to management who would immediately pass it on to HR claiming an ethics violation, what would they be prepared to do now at this point several years later if they realized that I am now openly writing about what happened to me?  There is no management or HR to run to now.  For several reasons.  The most important of which is that I'm no longer there.  I never returned after the second back-to-back stress breakdown.  I've spent the intervening years recovering from all that happened. But this they wouldn't know as no one was in contact with me then when they got on my Facebook and ran to management with their conclusions about my brief post and not one of them is in contact with me now.

They had no clue then of how badly I was doing then and they have no clue as to how hard I am working to recover now.

But there is another reason there is no one to run to in the workplace now.  The workplace no longer exists.  The building we worked in is still there, but empty now.  The plant that produces the product we shipped out is still operating - but not for much longer.  Several months after I was forced to leave the workplace, the parent company announced that they were closing that facility and building a new one in a different location.  The building I worked in was the first area designated to close.  To the best of my knowledge, the building is now closed.  Just an empty shell of the place it used to be.  Inhabited perhaps by shadows and ghosts but not by real flesh and blood people.  They have all either had to find new jobs and go into the netherlands of retirement.

Hopefully, these people have not taken me - or rather the memory of me - with them to their new places of employment wherever they may be.

Hopefully, they have let go of the past - of their perceptions and assumptions of who I was - and are living in their present.  Hopefully.

Looking back at what happened, had management and HR not been so frustrated with the situation and had been looking at things more objectively, if they had called in an outside service to look into the allegations, the outcome could have been much different for all of us.

Over a year after the experiences I am relating now which ended in my forcible resignation, I ran into a man who I learned was employed in HR in Ottawa by the government.  I admit, I shamelessly picked this poor fellow's brains.  I told him about the incident with the Facebook posting and he, like others, felt that it could be construed as a criticism against my workplace ... but ... he felt there were far deeper issues here:  What were these people doing on my Facebook in the first place?  Then there's the when and where issues.  Where they searching out a co-worker's Facebook on company time and company equipment? (which brings up all sorts of issues in and of itself)

He basically said that while those seven words could be construed as a criticism of the workplace, the workplace had far greater problems then little old me.  His first reaction was that if these unnamed, unidentified people saw themselves in that terse, seven word posting and complained to HR and management about it, then they were admitting that they saw themselves in the posting.  They were, in effect, admitting that they were actively engaged in the act of bullying me.

And. No. One. In. HR. Or. Management. Saw. It.

They were too frustrated, too close to the individual trees to see the forest - the overall picture.

As I end today's post, I come back to the my original question.  The one that haunts me still.  If one or more of these people reads this blog and sees themselves in it - even though neither they nor the workplace are named, even though we've all moved on during the intervening years, the question remains:  If they did those things do with impunity then, what are they prepared to do now?

*******

And so I come to the end of another blog today.  Another small piece of the whole of my experience.  Another step further out of the self-imposed closet of surviving workplace abuse.  Of dwelling in the shadow lands of exile.  Of recovery.

Until tomorrow ....

From a shadow to a real, live flesh and blood person, I've come a long way, baby.

Recovery Post Workplace Abuse: A Key Part of My Story - FEAR.

From this picture, you would never know the emotional turmoil I was living in at that point.  This picture was taken in 2011 when I was still in the acute phase from the second back-to-back stress breakdown when I went to visit a safe person in my life and experienced significant recovery.  Looking back our guess is that my GFA (Global Functioning Assessment) was probably somewhere in the 50s when I entered the plane for that visit and was probably somewhere in the low to mid 70s when I returned.

I've been thinking of making changes in this blog for a while now.  Changes such as reclaiming my name, my real identity.

It's been a long time coming, but I finally did it over the weekend.  Actually by accident as I want to make my blog more accessible.  I pushed one button.  The button linking this blog to my Google+ account which automatically linked my blog to my Google+ account.  Therefore, you wake up today to the same blog with a different name, Suzanne Guest, my real name and profile picture.

But, it's the same blog, the same writer, the same focus.

Only the name has changed.

It's another significant step on my road to recovery post workplace abuse.

I wasn't really going into this aspect now, but since I accidentally changed my name and picture from a pseudonym to reality, it's time to get into what has been holding me back all this time from using my name, my picture.  From being the real me.

It all comes down to one four-letter word:  FEAR.

My life post workplace abuse has been consumed by fear.  Not the fears I've mentioned so far such as heights, etc. which I've been working on for years now and blogging about.  But a very real fear (to me) of my former co-workers and what they might (or might not) be capable of doing.

To explain why I have so much fear of these people so long after the event, I have to tell a piece of my story.  Actually several pieces, so I'm guessing this blog post is going to expand into more than one post.  Kind of like chapters in a book.

I'm really not sure where to begin.  I could begin with that I've realized on the journey that I'm naive. I've always had a "live and let live" sort of policy in my life.  I also assumed that if you were kind to people, they would respond in kind.  In retrospect, I realize that I was so naive that I assumed that most people - or at least the people I was in contact with in my daily life - lived by the same philosophy:  live and let live.

In reality, that is false.  In all honesty, I had no idea of the lengths and depths some people would go to to get what they wanted.  I had no idea what people could be capable of.  Especially if they were in a group pushing each other on, so I was ambushed time and time again.

My second back-to-back stress breakdown occurred after my fifth shift after returning to work from my first stress breakdown.  I was trying to train a person to take over my duties so I could move to another shift and, hopefully, a better situation for me.  I never made it.  This trainee been hired and started working while I was off and had thus been in close contact with my adversaries.

I had found her difficult to train as she seemed to be resisting me at every opportunity at one time going so far as to say that when she was on her own she wasn't going to do things the way I said.  (?)  That question mark was my initial internal reaction.

Ever tried to train someone who doesn't want you to train them? Believe me, it's no fun.

On the fifth shift, she did something we don't do.  Not a big thing, but since I was operating under the perception and assumption that I was there to train her the correct way to do things, I told her so.  Things escalated from there, and she went running into the room where the managers' offices were not realizing that they were all gone home for the day.  I followed her.  I knew she was intent on reporting me to our mutual manager and, from experience, I knew how that was going to turn out.  I would be automatically be perceived as being in the wrong.  It would be perceived as another example of how I couldn't get along with people.  Not that there was something very wrong with a situation in which a trainee can battle consistently with her trainer or feel that she can report her trainer to management for trying to train her.  But following her to that office and confronting her would also not work in my favour.  Anything I did was scrutinized under the microscope of the manager's perceptions and assumptions, and I always came up on the short end of the stick.  Following her and confronting her would be wrong because I would be perceived as loud, confrontative, and possibly threatening as I am a passionate person who talks not only with my hands and arms but with my whole body.  I would be (and had been several times before) perceived as not being in control of myself.  Sigh.

But to do nothing would not work in my favour either as this person's tale would be taken at face value and believed as being the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I was very much in a catch-22 situation.  Staying silent didn't work.  It perpetuated the on-going situation.  Confronting the situation didn't work either as it ended up being a power/control play in which I consistently lost more power over my situation.

In other words:  I was dammed if I did and dammed if I didn't.

I didn't know when I left the office that day that I would never, ever enter those days again.

I had no idea of what that confrontation had done to me until the next day.

I wanted to die.

I wanted to kill myself.

Life was no longer worth living.

I couldn't do anything right.

In short, I was despondent.  Without hope.  Hopeless.

I made an emergency appointment with my specialist i.e. psychiatrist.  When he asked me what he could do to help me, I broke down and cried out "Kill me.  Kill me."

He gave me six more weeks off so that I could be totally separated from the workplace to give me time to heal.  "Totally separated from the workplace" were his words.  Apparently, in retrospect management didn't get the memo that people on sick leave are supposed to be separated from the workplace and left alone.

You might ask at this point why feeling as I did I was allowed to go back home and not hospitalized.  Sometimes I wonder that one myself.  In some ways, it would have made things easier for me.  It would have put the situation in a different perspective:  my life was in danger.  I was ill.  I could not work.

However, I have had some very good coping mechanisms in place.  I had also built up a small but strong support system with hubby and my family.  In addition, I did not have a "plan" to do away with myself.  What I did have was a desperate desire not to give in to the waves of despair which were washing over me, drawing me down and threatening to overwhelm me.  I had struggled so hard and so long against giving in to suicide that I really didn't want to give in now.  Bottom line.

I had a therapist who worked with me.  I had a family who loved and supported me.  I wanted to live.  And. I. Had. No. Plans. To. Hurt. Anyone. Else.  Which is very important.  Under the mental health act, if you are deemed to be a threat to yourself or anyone else, you are automatically hospitalized for 72 hours.  I was deemed not to be a threat to anyone else.  Believe me, they (the mental health officials i.e. the psychiatrist in this case) ask some very pointed questions.  Including if I had plans to hurt these people who were hurting me so badly.  Also, asking if I had access to any weapons.  Which I don't.

Those words, italicized, underlined and bolded, are important to remember in the next part of this story (which will be told in another blog) about why I fear these people so much.

This is why I was allowed to go home to heal.

However, apparently things were going on back in the office which to this day I still don't understand.

My manager started phoning me at home, in the evening, my second day off.  Hubby refused to let me take the call or access the voice mail so it wasn't until the next week when I accessed my work emails that I found out the reason for her calls.  Some unknown person(s) in the office had gone on my facebook page, seen a post and gone to management with the claim that I was violating ethics by that post.

The offending post?  I had written:  "Bullies 100; Suzanne 0.  Off work again.

Originally, I was confused by her demands to delete something on my facebook page.  I had no idea what she was talking about.  Until.  She sent me screenshots of my offending post.

Screenshots?  She's getting on my facebook page and monitoring it?

I felt confused.  And then violated.

Please note, that nowhere on my facebook was ever written where I worked who, more importantly, the names of these people.  There was nothing there to identify them.

That posting was essentially a cry for help.

In essence, going back to what H. Norman Wright has written, I was reacting what I thought was normal in an abnormal situation.

Having a stress breakdown is not normal.  It affects the thought processes.

All I knew at that point was that I was in big trouble emotionally, and I needed help if I was to have a hope for survival.  I needed those on my facebook page who knew me to pray for me.  To reach out to me.  To affirm that I wasn't the horrible person those in the workplace were believing me to be.

I never thought for one minute that the people in the office would ever think to access my facebook - let alone do a search, find my profile and took a look.  None of these people were Facebook friends of mine, so they would have had to do a deliberate search.

And I made it so very easy for them.  Below is my profile picture at that time.

My file was in my real name.

My file was public.

As I've said, I was naive.  I had no idea someone would deliberately seek out my profile for nefarious purposes.  I had no idea that what I had posted as a cry for help would be perceived to be an ethics violation by those in the workplace who saw it.  I had no idea.  I was naive.

Immediately, I made my profile private - which seemed to anger my manager even more as it appeared that she was closely watching my profile.

I changed my profile picture so that it was of something other than myself.

It was then when I realized that workplace bullying could and did go outside the workplace.

I no longer felt safe, even in my home, and especially in the outside world.

More followed, but this is enough for now.

This gives you a glimpse into my world.

A world not only constricted by workplace bullying but by fear.

So I stop for today.  This has been emotionally wrenching to write.  But it's a key part of my story.  A key part of what has been holding me back from complete healing and why the internal, emotional damage was so extensive.

More of the story tomorrow....