Emotional Recovery from Workplace Mobbing (And Workbook) (eBook)

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

People don’t just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.

Albert Ellis

CBT, an amalgam of Behavior Therapy and Cognitive Psychology, has been developed over the past thirty years into a well-researched, commonly used and accessible form of psychotherapy.

I find it helpful for targets that are looking for tools to help them manage extreme emotions. I don’t see CBT as better than any other form of therapy but its prevalence allows us to examine it as a good example of the therapeutic process.

This is conventional CBT, tailored to workplace mobbing targets. Like all CBT, it involves acquisition to a mindset that rewards you in proportion to practice. There are many good CBT resources out there, some of which are mentioned in this book.

My CBT joke…

A man is driving in a remote area at night. It is late, around 3 am. His car begins to feel strange. He stops, looks and notices that his tire is flat. He then looks in his trunk and finds a spare tire, but not a jack. Looking around him he notices a farmhouse on a hill.

He decides that the farmer will have a jack and starts up the hill intending to ask him.

As he walks he is thinking: “The farmer is not going to like being disturbed at 3 am.

It’s pretty embarrassing being in this situation. I feel stupid for not having a jack in the car.

The farmer will probably think I am an idiot from the city and start chirping on me.

That will be humiliating.

Farmers have dogs! When I knock on the door the dog will start barking and wake up the whole family!

This is the middle of nowhere – farmers have guns! He might shoot me through the door.

The farmer will be furious; he’ll be yelling and screaming, the dog will be barking,

I’ll be humiliated and then he probably won’t give me that jack”.

The man knocks on the door.

The farmer opens the door and asks: “Can I help you?”

The man says: “I don’t want your goddamn jack”.

Most of my clients have been forced to hear that joke at one time. I like it because it so clearly illustrates the core principle of cognitive therapy. Life throws things at us every day; good, bad or horrible, but it is not the events themselves that create the emotions but the tendency of our thoughts to escalate from straightforward and reasonable to a place of distortion.

Sure the farmer might not like getting up at 3 am (mind you we don’t know for sure he isn’t already up) but will it really turn into a crazy conflict with a barking dog? That’s possible but it is a distortion. Furthermore, is there some sort of rule that the driver has to feel humiliation in those circumstances? It wouldn’t be a good thing if the farmer got mad but why would it follow that the driver need to experience any particular emotional response.

We have stories that define our lives. Your work story might be: “I am a good worker. I care about people and doing my job well. I believe that my boss and co-workers are good and work relationships are based on trust”. This works well for you. You have friends, do good work and make a wonderful addition to your organization. Then the mob; in the complex escalating series of events that define mobbing, change your story.

Suddenly you are being told that your work is bad, people don’t like you, and you aren’t giving enough, what made you think you could do this work at all? With each violation you are injured: your self-esteem, your health and your relationships are damaged. Every time you are abused or someone else takes the side of the mob the wound deepens. You ruminate over everything until you become obsessive. You feel a deep need to tell your story and be believed.

Those thoughts stay with you after you leave. What did I do to deserve this? Why did my friends abandon me? Will I ever work again? You may even have extreme and disturbing thoughts of harming yourself or the aggressive people in the workplace. Every time these thoughts come back, whether you are aware of it or not, they affect your mood and body.

Some of these thoughts are destructive but true (“I was violated by someone I trusted”) and others are possible but unlikely (“What if my boss comes to my home and attacks me?”). Either way, they become increasingly distorted and consuming. And we know that participants in a mob have no compunction about using your distress (caused by them) to demonstrate that you were crazy to begin with.

So pause here for a moment. What’s going through your head? How are these thoughts making you feel? If you’ve been mobbed I might have triggered something. You can change these thoughts and prevent the hurt and distress they cause. The mob changed your story and you can change it back. In fact you can make it better. It will require work but the process of changing your thoughts is well understood.

Most approaches to therapy address negative thinking. Most workbooks on depression and anxiety will teach you skills and formats for recording, assessing and changing your thoughts. This will help you investigate cognitive distortions and change them into thoughts that affirm and support you. Let’s take the two examples:

“I was violated.” Yes you were but this negative thought leads to more increasingly unrealistic negative thoughts (“my life is over“), and you become depressed, angry or sick. But people have been violated before; in work and other places. Many of them came back to lead healthy and productive lives. What did they do? What would work for you? Try substituting: “I am resourceful and can heal like others before me.”

“Someone from work may attack me at home.” At work many people get away with cruelty and abuse. But most know that their sanctuary ends at the office door. Attack someone in the real world and there are real consequences. Try substituting: “I am safe at home but I will make my home secure and in the unlikely case that someone shows up and threatens me I will call the police.”

Find someone to sit and “witness” your story from beginning the end. This could be a therapist, a partner or someone you trust outside of work. This meets a need that most targets experience. It also begins a process of self-examination. The deeper your commitment to the truth about yourself, the greater the gain. You will see the direct link between your thoughts, your emotions and physical well-being.

The basic principle behind Cognitive Therapy is easy to understand. Intervening between the situation at hand and your emotional response is a thought or thoughts.

Situation: the boss rejects your report.

Emotional response: you feel anger, humiliation and fear.

A CBT therapist would ask you to explore the thoughts that came to mind automatically when someone acts out of malice. So the outcome might look like this:

Situation: the boss rejects your report.

Thought: “I can’t do anything that pleases him. I can’t handle this. I’m going to lose my job. My career is over”

Emotion: you feel anger, humiliation and fear.

These thoughts are loaded emotionally. One in particular - “my career is over”- is particularly charged or the “hot” thought. This is probably what is known as a “cognitive distortion” - a thought that is distorted to the point where it no longer reflects an accurate view of reality. Most cognitive distortions represent possible scenarios but they do not represent necessary or likely scenarios.

Your therapist may send you off to investigate the rational basis for your thoughts and evidence for and against them. In her office or upon your return you will examine the evidence together. You may have discovered that other employers know that your workplace is dysfunctional. You may discover that outside of the reality of your workplace your reputation remains intact. You may even have discovered someone who was mobbed and yet moved on to a fulfilling and rewarding career in a safe context. Now you will be challenged to come up with a more rational thought. It might look like this:

Thought: This situation is painful but there is a world outside of this workplace. I don’t want to leave and there is a real risk that I won’t find work but there may also be opportunities for me.

Emotion: the negative emotions don’t necessarily vanish but they may be reduced and displaced by a growing sense of optimism for your possibilities.

CBT therapists like to measure things. For example, she might have previously asked the client above to rate her fear out of 100. The client might be surprised that by changing her thoughts the fear might have started at 95% but gone down to 55%. This accomplishes two things; the fear is reduced and the client through her work and activity has demonstrated that she had the ability to reduce that fear.

This approach can be particularly valuable for mobbing. People who pretend to be caring are not always supportive. They may also depend on your employer for their livelihood and reputation. You are told things that are untrue about your work. Your human flaws are grossly distorted.

People lie, manipulate and get away with everything. Who wouldn’t wonder what’s what?...