Victim vs. Bully in the Workplace

Are you a victim or are you a bully?



These are strong words and they bring up strong feelings. Many of us believe strongly that we are victims and we have the stories to prove it. We rarely think of ourselves as bullies...if ever. But if we are victims, we are also bullies.

If you sit quietly and locate your most basic self, you will see that nothing is really wrong with you. You are fine. The part of you that you would call YOU, your essence, has never been harmed and can never be harmed. Can you find that person? For me, this essence is who I think I really am. I sometimes have to reach way back into mid-childhood to find that feeling, the feeling of Stephanie. This is the part of me that never changed and never will.

That's the part I want to speak to today. I don't want to talk to the part of you that tells the stories of how you've been done wrong. I don't want to hear your sad story, not today. We all have them, we all believe them, and on some level we know we are okay anyway. We tell the story of the bully---the parent or the system or the teacher or the lover--who treated us badly, made us like this, and we keep telling it, hoping it will be truer in the retelling.

But the reason I (and you) need to keep talking about this, is because it isn't true. It needs a lot of reinforcement, because it's a story that could and should be let go. You are more than a story in your past. And you are reading this now, so I know you are strong enough to walk past this story and get on with your life.

Who is the Bully?

If everyone is the victim (and we all have a story that proves we are), then who was the bully? Who perpetuated all these crimes? And have you ever asked your bully why they did what they did? If you have, you got an answer that said, "I was a victim once too, and that's why I acted like that." It's the belief in being a victim, that makes us overshoot a situation, maybe in self-defense, maybe to get back what we feel we lost, maybe to prove we are worthy of more. And so we bully or victimize another. Maybe our bully thinks we are his bully. Has that been as true if not truer than your original tale?

If this is all sounding a bit ridiculous, well, I couldn't agree more. I spent many years (and lots of therapy dollars) telling my story over and over...and eventually I just said, "Where's the exit ramp? How do I get on with my life?" The exit ramp is to stop telling the story. Stop telling it to your friends, your therapist and yourself. If you must tell a story, tell the ones you have forgotten (as have I) of where you were the bully. Can you imagine telling your friends about when you were the boyfriend dumper? Or how about when you didn't pay money back to someone? Have you also talked behind someone's back? Those stories...well...they seem to be magically erased when we are asked to recall them, don't they? You and I can do the same with our victim story too.

Who is the Victim?

When you declare yourself victimized, then there is a guilty party. There is someone to blame, and they are bad. This is the victim's weapon (inflicting guilt). This is how the victim/bully cycle perpetuates itself.

If I believe (tell myself the story) that I have been bullied by you and you have hurt me, then you are wrong. You are a bad person. You should be punished. This punishment may be "nothing more" than social judgment or rejection. And this punishment will last as long as I, the victim, decide you are the bad guy.

So, now the "bully" (whose weapon is control and power), now feels like the victim, because you made him guilty without an objective trial. He was found guilty without a jury of his peers, if you will. So in order to gain back a feeling of control, he will victimize you again. To prove he is right and YOU are actually the bad person, the weakling, the one worthy of judgment.

And so the cycle is attack/defend, defend/attack. And it will not end until both parties see that they are neither victims nor bullies. They are trying to get their needs met, albeit in a very ineffective way. What are their needs? To be accepted. To be liked. To be respected or admired.

Once you see this pattern in operation, you have come a very long way toward stopping it. It takes time to see this cycle, and it isn't easy or fun. Very few people will encourage you (though they will continue to encourage victim or bully behavior, oddly). You will be doing this work for you and you alone. But the reward is great. The reward is self-acceptance.

Author's note: Yes, I know about true victimization. With the exception of children or adults unable to protect themselves, I still hold to my message above : that once we've moved through these painful life lessons, we drop the story of being the victim and get on with our lives. Just dropping the story is proof of your inner strength. You can also reach back and help someone currently struggling. If that means helping and empowering people to stand up for themselves, or sending in funding for a group that helps temporary victims, these would be huge strides toward stopping the victim/bully cycle in our own life----and turning these experiences into something positive.

See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.

Charlotte Joko Beck Quotes

It's not often that I dedicate a page to one person and their quotes (I don't think I've ever done this, in fact)...but I just discovered this woman and she is worth every keystroke:




“When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we're alert. This gift is always present in anyone's life, that moment when 'It's not the way I want it!”



“There is a foundation for our lives, a place in which our life rests. That place is nothing but the present moment, as we see, hear, experience what is. If we do not return to that place, we live our lives out of our heads. We blame others; we complain; we feel sorry for ourselves. All of these symptoms show that we're stuck in our thoughts. We're out of touch with the open space that is always right here.”
― from Nothing Special




“Anxiety is always a gap between the way things are and the way we think they ought to be. Anxiety is something that stretches between the real and unreal. Our human desire is to avoid what's real and instead to be with our ideas about the world:

"I'm terrible." "You're terrible." "You're wonderful." The idea is separated from reality and anxiety is the gap between the idea and the reality that things are just as they are.




When we cease to believe in the object that we've created -- which is off to one side of reality, so to speak -- things snap back to the center. That's what being centered means. The anxiety then fades out.”





“Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That's all there is. That's all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it's all a shame, and on and on; it's all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.”
― Nothing Special




“Body tension will always be present if our good feeling is just ordinary, self-centered happiness. Joy has no tension in it, because joy accepts whatever is as it is.”




“Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.”




“...we're constantly waking up to what we're about, what we're really doing in our lives. And the fact is, that's painful. But there's no possibility of freedom without this pain.”




“It's of no use to look back and say, "I should have been different." At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see. For that reason, guilt is always inappropriate.”




'Guilt has a lot of arrogance in it.'

See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.

Would You Brag About Having an Eating Disorder?

Not sleeping 8-10 hours every night?

So many people are not..we've been taught it's lazy to sleep a full night, every night. That's a problem.

The increased weight gain of our society has been attributed in large part to inadequate sleep. There is a one to one connection (which is frankly unheard of in most double-blind studies) that people who sleep less than eight hours a night are unable to lose excess weight. Public safety officials report that the #1 reason people get in car wrecks is sleep deprivation. How many mistakes have YOU made at work this week? And why hasn't that 10th cup of coffee made a difference?

Let's work on this, folks. It's silly to call yourself 'lazy' for needing 8-10 hours a night. And bragging that you only sleep four hours a night (I hear this one a lot from men, especially) is like bragging that you have anorexia. It's a basic need and not negotiable.

See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.

Three (Free) One-Minute Stress Breakers

Do one of these three things when you are stressed. They will work. But only if you do it.

1. One Minute Meditation.
Learn to meditate in a moment with this hugely popular animated video, based on Martin Boroson's book, One-Moment Meditation. Reduce stress, improve focus and find peace ... right now.

2. EFT or Tapping.
Emotional Freedom Technique. Also called Psychological Acupressure. Resets the nervous system.

3. Alternate Nostril Breathing.
Balances the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.

Excerpts from "Pain in the Butt @ Work" E-book

Here are the first three suggestions out of 101 ways to deal with a pain in the butt at work. That is the title to my FREE e-book ("101 Ways to Deal with a Pain in the Butt @ Work")

#1
First, make extra sure YOU’RE not the Pain-in-the-Butt.

Look, if you can label someone a jerk, you have the ability to be one yourself. Psychologically, without getting into a lot of science, you can’t dislike what you don’t already dislike in yourself. Got it?

#2
I didn’t say this would be easy, I just said it wouldn’t be long-winded. So, let’s be clear: you downloaded this e-book because you dislike someone enough in your office enough to spend the time to read all 101 Ways to see if you can make yourself right about it. Right?

And how often has this strategy worked for you? I mean, of all the times you’ve been right about someone being a jerk, have they stopped?

Exactly. Let’s try something that works for a change.

#3
There are a few ways to deal with butt-like people. First, is avoidance. I’m fond of this as a first step. I’m not talking about the cold shoulder.

I’m talking about NOT being in the breakroom when they are, NOT joining the group around the coffee pot when they are, finding different ways of hanging out so that interface is minimized.

This isn’t cowardice. It’s taking control of your environment. If you HAVE to work side-by-side with this chump, hang on.

Download the rest right now. See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.

Train Your Brain

Brain Plasticity in Action: Getting smarter and happier You can re-train your brain to overcome depression and anxiety
by G. Frank Lawlis

Up until ten years ago, the prevailing thought was that our brains were basically the same potential the day we were born until the day we died. As Supervisor to American Mensa, the “High IQ” organization that allows only the top 2 percent of the population on intelligence tests in their organization, I have been reflecting this core belief of genetic intelligence as a standard of scientific basis. However, with the advance of brain scans and increased capability to measure neuron function down to a single cell, I have had to concede that not only can the brain get “smarter and better balanced,” but this process lasts a lifetime. And to put the new findings into greater relevance, the smarter you get the happier you get.

One of the principles of improved brain plasticity, as mentioned in my book entitled The IQ Answer, is that neurons (the brain cells) tend to gravitate toward high activity centers. Much like we develop motor skills to learn to ride a bicycle, the motor cells will accumulate as you build the coordination to keep yourself going. It takes trial-and-error for the brain to coordinate the neurons and accumulate enough for the practice to establish the high level of balancing and muscles to finally build the “package” of neuron connections for bicycling that seems to stay in place for decades.

Consider how emotional “packages” of neurons can be developed that establishes negative-affective states, such as depression and anxiety. These complexes can be replaced by “pleasure” bundles of nerve networks that are much less destructive to one’s life, which as a reinforcer for change. Too often people use this same appeal to become addictive to drug-induced states. You can train your brain to be happy and free from stress.

The first step in re-shaping your brain in its emotional reaction, as well as mental intelligence, is to destabilize the restrictive nerve bundles, perhaps breaking the sequence altogether. Instead of thinking how to do mathematics one way, learn to do it in other ways. If you can’t get out of a stress storm, take charge and re-train to do what you want it to. But first, you have to stop the thinking process. How do you do that? One of the most common ways is to change your breathing patterns. The brain, and the whole body, responds to the patterns of how you breathe. For example, consider that you might breathe 22 cycles a minute, and your brain thinks that you are in danger (the rabbit breath rate.) Naturally you are going to have a brain that reacts in anxiety storms. You won’t be able to think clearly for mental exercises because you would be in survival mode and looking for quick answers instead of thinking through logical solutions. Start breathing in 12-14 cycles and get your brain processing in a more normal state. There are other ways of stopping thinking patterns, like going on vacation, listening to certain music, exercising, etc.

Step two for changing your brain for better emotional solutions is while you have destabilized the anxious brain pattern, establish the pattern you want. Like learning how to multiple or ride a bicycle, find your pattern you like. I have found listening to favorite music tunes works like magic. Some people listen to gospel songs all day, and all they have to do is hum a familiar phrase, and BOOM they are in their preferred states. Romantic songs do it for me, especially Willy Nelson.

As I said, you have to practice what you want or the destructive brain storms return. The more you learn to train your brain for what you desire, the better you can accomplish what you want.

The critical kicker to maintaining your skills in brain plasticity is celebrating your abilities. Similar to the research on behavioral modification, the brain loves adoration. You deserve the slap on the back to brag on yourself. Once I trained my vision acuity from 20/80 to 20/20 and I gave myself a little party. I gave a gift of a new car to remind myself of how well I did. I am now 68, 40 years later, and I still have 20/30, although the car has gone to other junk by now.

I do not consider myself extraordinary in any sense, but my years on psychology have awed me with my brain and all it can do, if you will give yourself a chance. It may sound ridiculous, but that is the stuff of growth. And you have the power to make a difference in your life at any time you want it.

This article was not written by Stephanie, but by G. Frank Lawlis. See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.

This SHOULD be Happening....Because It Is !

Excerpt from FREE PDF "The Work of Byron Katie"

WHAT IS....IS

The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want. If you want reality to be different than it is, you might as well try to teach a cat to bark. You can try and try, and in the end the cat will look up at you and say, “Meow.” Wanting reality to be different than it is is hopeless.

And yet, if you pay attention, you’ll notice that you believe thoughts like this dozens of times a day. “People should be kinder.” “Children should be wellbehaved.” “My husband (or wife) should agree with me.” “I should be thinner (or prettier or more successful).” These thoughts are ways of wanting reality to be different than it is. If you think that this sounds depressing, you’re right. All the stress that we feel is caused by arguing with what is.

People new to The Work often say to me, “But it would be disempowering to stop my argument with reality. If I simply accept reality, I’ll become passive. I may even lose the desire to act.” I answer them with a question: “Can you really know that that’s true?” Which is more empowering?—“I wish I hadn’t lost my job” or “I lost my job; what intelligent solutions can I find right now?”

The Work reveals that what you think shouldn’t have happened should have happened. It should have happened because it did happen, and no thinking in the world can change it. This doesn’t mean that you condone it or approve of it. It just means that you can see things without resistance and without the confusion of your inner struggle. No one wants their children to get sick, no one wants to be in a car accident; but when these things happen, how can it be helpful to mentally argue with them? We know better than to do that, yet we do it, because we don’t know how to stop.

Free PDF

Watch this video as Katie helps someone do "The Work":



See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.

Work Stress Quiz

People like to take quizzes. Here's one regarding work stress.

Take Quiz

See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.

You Spot It, You Got It

By now, many of you may be familiar with the concept of projection or what some call "shadow work." These terms are used to describe the phenomenon that ALL humans experience, which is to push out or project what we reject in ourselves onto others. Said another way: If you are irritated or angered by another's behavior, it is because you have not accepted that aspect of yourself.

You may be saying to yourself, "Well, that's good! We need to keep ourselves others under control or we would all turn into robbers and murderers!" I look around and notice that those who are self-accepting (flaws especially) are very peaceful. And I notice this "tried and true" method of self-flaggelation hasn't kept our prisons clear and free of humans. So how about considering another way?

Now, this is for YOU. Don't start sharing the link to this blog entry with a "Boy, does my coworker need this..." or "My spouse has got to see this---she projects constantly!" That's just you projecting again...do you see?

We can only change one mind: our own. So here's a video that will help TREMENDOUSLY:



See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.

I'll Do It, But I Don't Have to Like It

Motivation. Morale. Enthusiasm. Positive Attitude. These are the buzz words that my clients throw about when talking about their 'lazy employees' (or rather what they lack). But what these supervisors do not understand is that motivation to perform a task--more accurately called 'interest'--- is not something that can be manufactured.

Interest cannot be forced. Interest either comes naturally or must be faked. And faking requires a motivator. We often call this "the carrot or the stick." We can either bribe someone (carrot) or punish someone (stick) to perform a task they are not naturally interested in.

Does your interest in getting something done come from somewhere else? No. This is not about how someone was raised or whether they are a good person or not. This isn't any different than, say, gravity. If a good person walks off the top of a building, they will drop to the ground, just like a bad person. Interest shifts as the topic shifts. You are interested in your department doing their work. And if you aren't, or are secretly not enjoying your job, then you rely on bribery (a paycheck) or punishment (disciplinary action and even termination).

So, let's ease up on our "slackers", okay? They don't want to do it. But they do it anyway. Because you supplied praise or punishment. These are the only artificial motivators when interest is lacking.

And let's remember this truth when you tell your children they should WANT to clean the house because it's theirs too and therefore will not get an allowance for doing so.

Haha! That's a good one.

See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.