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Hi all

I am brand new to this forum.  Not quite sure how much or how little to put here. Guess a little precis of cause and effect might be the thing to do.

Dad very emotionally abusive and violent towards whole family, level of abuse and dictate was so extreme (he once tried to hire a hitman to kill us all) he is considered borderline psychotic.

I am very close to my mum and sister (guess unity against a bully).  I also have a sister in Canada that I have yet to meet in person but she traced us a few years ago and she is now very much part of our family. I Had a brother but he was ill with schizophrenia and eventually took his life. I have been in a succession of unhealthy relationships.  I was sexually promiscuous and frequently find myself in unsafe situations.

As well as being bullied at home I was bullied during my school years and was very introverted.  I am a very different person today but still live a constant battle with myself.  I have many positives in my life, and celebrate those positives.  In spite of the many positives, my life is extremely difficult, I am never at peace with myself and constantly seek approval from external sources. 

I was excelling in work which gave me a real sense of purpose, and achievement, I felt valued. Many changes happened in my workplace and I found myself in constant battle with abusive managers.  I was tipped over the edge and have never recovered.  I have not worked since 2012 when I was diagnosed with PTSD.  I am terrified to return to paid employment in any capacity and am obsessed with getting justice against my former employer but am too scared to start proceedings, in case I don't win.  I am actively practicing galloping inertia to prolong my hope.

Hope what I have written is okay.

Thank you

Regards

Hi

I am brand new to this forum, and was just taking a stroll through some of the posts.

Thank you.  I really identified with your post.

I am constantly arguing with myself, about whether or not I am 'allowed'  to feel and react the way I do in situations, when others seem oblivious to the 'clear and present danger'.  I am often made to feel paranoid or am told that I am oversensitive or am imagining things.

I find myself trying to justify my feelings and reactions, which are instinctive.  I start trying to explain hyper-vigilance, which invariably leads onto explanations about why I am this way.  Before long, my whole life story has poured out (albeit in a deliberately emotionless way).

This definitely made things worse with my former employers.  Friends and others in social situations will try to understand, but when I hear myself talking or replay conversations, in my head, I just hear my explanations as excuses.

I really loved your explanation. 

Hi C,
I hope that you got through yesterday alright without too much struggle, and I'm sorry that you're having to deal with someone else's bad behaviour -- wouldn't it be nice if work could just be about doing the job well.

I want to say how impressed I am by your awareness of what's going on with your co-worker and how you've been affected. My own experience is of not conciously noticing the bullying until I was very near my breaking point. So if awareness is Step 1 of protecting yourself, I think you're doing a really good job (and that you can give yourself a break and not force yourself to create perfect documentation, because you really are doing a good-enough job already at this difficult self-protection business).

I worry sometimes too about the trouble I have with the other person's behaviour maybe being my problem because I'm the only person being bothered by it -- you know, my fault for being over-sensitive. Congnitively, I know that's wrong, and that the idea come from early messages from my family of origin. I'm working my way through many repititions of thought-stopping and -substitution to get that idea out of my head.

Here's my substitute thought: I'm not over-sensitive, and it's not my fault that this bothers me; I'm a canary in the coal-mine (or CPTSD sufferer in the dysfunctional workplace). Birds have a lower tolerance for certain air pollutants than humans do, and coal mines can have unpredictable pockets of "bad air," so miners used to bring caged songbirds into the mine with them. So long as the bird was fairly lively, the miners knew they were well within human tolerances, but if the bird keeled over dead, they knew to get out fast before they felt too sick to run. A key point for me to remember, is that the bird isn't faking it, and doesn't need to toughen up -- what the bird needs is fresh air (!!!) and for the person(s) in charge of the cage to be attentive to little signs that will save both the bird and themselves.

I don't know that all of that story is completely true, but I used to work with toxicology data, and i do know that scientists have used birds' heightened sensitivity to poor air quality to point them toward human health risks that they weren't previously aware of. For example, have you ever read the warning on a non-stick pan about not pre-heating that pan without any food or oil in it? If you heat an empty non-stick pan, small amounts of chemicals from the teflon coating will be released into the air from the hottest parts of the pan. (Oil or food in the pan helps to even out the temperature, prevent hot-spots and reduce how much chemical is released to air.) Canaries are part of why we know that happens and why we have a strategy to reduce the human health risk. When non-stick pans were new, a bunch of pet birds died while someone very close by was pre-heating a teflon pan. investigating the birds' deaths led scientists to figure out the problem and prevent mitigate the human health risk.

To put it another way, I/we/the birds are all shifted a little bit to the left on a curve of exposure versus response (aka a dose-response curve), meaning that we have a noticeable reaction at a lower exposure level. The toxicant (or bullying behaviour) is real at all exposure levels, and lots of other people will start to notice adverse effects as exposure continues.

Wow. Obviously I've thought about this a lot, and now to persevere with the thought-stopping.

Good luck at work.
smg