DEALING WITH A CONTROLLING, TOXIC BULLY

By
Bill Cottringer


It is easy to get trapped into feeling negative about being mistreated by a controlling, toxic bully and worse over not feeling you can do anything about it. It is frustrating, humiliating and maddening. And you can get even more uncomfortable and even “paralyzed” when such unfair bullying is coming from a person who has authority over you and you fear the consequences of saying anything about it.

First of all, at the left end of the spectrum of interpersonal relations, there are “difficult” people, because of their differences from you in the way that they think, operate and communicate. Towards the end of the difficult group, there are “toxic” people who are totally negative, dishonest, hurtful and disruptive. And at the very end of this group there are a few “toxic bullies,” the most difficult, if not impossible people to deal with. These are very unhappy, insecure people who use anger, intimidation and control to build themselves up by making someone else feel helpless. Their motives for doing this are usually pathological and their use of anger is often the ultimate expression of weakness. This anger typically masks fear, shame or guilt about their own insecurities and inadequacies (I secretly wonder if toxic bullies are put on earth to show the rest of us how not to be).

Toxic bullies leave us with only three choices:

• To try to do something to change them.
• To attempt to accept them for the way they are.
• To leave the situation.

None of these choices are easy to make, because none guarantee a desirable win-win outcome. The first choice requires great courage, hope and belief in what you are trying to do to and a healthy toolbox of skills to change the other person; and the second two demand great sacrifices.

Being effective in changing how people treat you is a difficult skill to learn. First of all we teach people how to treat us by how we act and what we say and do, or don’t say or do, in response to their responses to us. Not saying the right thing or not doing anything usually just continues the undesirable behavior and makes the situation grow worse.

The way things work is that you really can’t change someone else’s behavior. Thoughts drive feelings which result in behavior. If you want to change behavior, you have to do something that prompts the other person to change the way he or she thinks about something that affects you—like the negative impact they are contributing that may not be good for anyone, including them.

The typical response to a toxic bully, especially one in authority, is passivity—taking the mistreatment, not thinking you have any power to do anything about it, and not even trying to do anything about it until enough is enough and you just quit. And sometimes when people take enough, they explode aggressively. Either way, there isn’t a happy ending.

Years ago, when I was a prison warden, bullying and passive-aggressive responses were a common problem with both inmates and staff. We went to the University where I had done some graduate work and developed a model of treatment called assertiveness training and successfully applied it to this bullying problem we had in the prison, starting with the staff and working our way to the inmates. In fact, over the length of my prison career, assertiveness was the most effective rehabilitation program, next to the religious programs.

Assertiveness is when you shift blame for how you are feeling from the other person to yourself, in a sensitive, tactful, and diplomatic way. In fact, the biggest key of applying effective assertiveness is in shifting “You” words to “I” words. A good example of an effective assertiveness statement in an extremely difficult situation—say where a swim coach is bullying, over-controlling and picking on one of her swimmers and it is having a negative impact on performance—is as follows. And keep in mind, the timing must be right to do this and only after you have thought through the whole situation carefully, to see the value of your own discomfort.

“I have something uncomfortable to talk about but if I don’t get it out I feel like I will explode. I feel unfairly singled-out, mistreated and picked-upon by the things that I am hearing and seeing, and this is all having a very negative impact on me and influencing me to perform poorly. I would like to improve my performance by learning what exactly I am doing wrong and how I can perform better. Do you have any suggestions for me?”

Of course the delivery of an assertive message has to take into consideration all the many different ways people think, learn and communicate. Some people focus on details, while others concentrate on seeing the big picture with short summaries. Some are feelers and some are thinkers. Some are mostly concerned about getting results quickly and others have more patience on using the right methods to get to their destination. Some like things in writing while others stick with verbal exchanges. And some prefer to be approached in a direct way, while others like more indirect approaches. The most effective way to deliver an assertive message is to know your “audience” and the way he or she thinks and their preferred communication style and then doing it that way.

You really can’t be very successful in trying to change something you don’t understand completely. Here is an important piece of this puzzle to consider. The way you see a situation has a lot to do with what expectations you have of it. And those expectations often bring their own outcomes, good or bad. The simple law of attraction says that like things attract like things. If you react to a negative person negatively or even neutrally, you always get more negativity and the situation continues.

On the other hand, if you change your approach and find something positive to appreciate in the person or situation and react to that positive aspect in a positive way, you will gradually get more positive results. This reduces the impact of the negative mistreatment and lessens its grip over you. Although this may be the most difficult personal change you ever try to do, the payoff is worth it.

Conflicts with people are an inevitable part of life. In fact they are a test for us to learn how to develop our best and strongest character. If you see a conflict as something very uncomfortable and something to avoid, then you probably won’t be inclined to develop the assertive skills to resolve these messy situations effectively. Unfortunately unresolved conflicts seem to come back and haunt us until we face them with courage and a willingness to do something different in working through them. Assertiveness is the only long-range “cure” that works in these situations.

In a sense, conflicts offer us an excellent opportunity to step up to the plate and be our best selves by learning and growing past our fears, worries, and insecurities. However, conflicts make us all feel very uncomfortable emotionally, and the thought of having to risk more discomfort to communicate our feelings and work past the conflict, is not very appealing. We may even lack faith that assertiveness will actually work. It is much easier to retreat into safety or explode into the attack mode. That is probably why most conflicts are more destructive than productive. And that may also be the difference between a good person who achieves reasonable success by sidestepping conflicts and a great person who taps into phenomenal success after working through major conflicts effectively.

It seems that sometimes we oversimplify things or make them more complex then they need to be. The simplicity just on the other side of complexity is worth its weight in gold. This is the case of a simple division of feelings into positive and negative, without going any further. Positive feelings serve the purpose of reassuring us that we are moving in the right direction with our thinking, choices and acting. Negative feelings serve the purpose of alerting us to the possibility that something may not be right in our approach to a situation. The negative feelings are trying to tell us to slow down and rethink things.

Being tactfully assertive with confidence and composure is a difficult skill to master, but one that has enormous benefits in helping you feel the way you want to feel. And by letting a toxic bully—even a parent, coach, employer, teacher, or peer—continue to have control over you by making you feel lousy is something you should consider having the courage to confront and try to change.

If you are in a bullying situation with a toxic person, or someone you know is who is asking for your advice, here are a few points to translate into your own terms to apply in these situations.

• Notice what the negative feelings you are having may be trying to tell you. Are you doing something wrong that is making you feel this way? Is the other person telling you something you need to hear apart from the nasty package it is being delivered in? Can this negative situation push you to a positive place?
• The starting point in all this is to take time out to look long and hard at the particular situation you are in to see something positive and of value that you can appreciate, in order to take the power out of the negative emotionality that has an iron grip over you. In any situation, there is always something positive of value to you that is waiting to be seen as a secret key to unlock the door ahead. Keep looking until you find it.
• The way you look at things has a tremendous effect on the outcomes you get. If you allow yourself to feel like a shamed, hopeless victim in response to someone else’s wrong behavior, nothing much will change. On the contrary, when you see how you may be inadvertently doing something (often nothing) to continue the mistreatment, then you have a valuable clue to change your approach to the other person, which is likely to change that person’s response.
• Some conflicts are not solvable for one reason or the other. The object is to know the abilities and confidence you have, think about how you can apply them to get the best results and then try to resolve the conflict at hand. Then if by chance you don’t get the outcome you want, you can at least feel better towards yourself when you look in the mirror, knowing you did in fact make your best effort. The sad reality is that not all negative situations and people are winnable. But even with unsolvable conflicts such as these which you are forced to quit or leave, it is a good idea to learn something positive from them that will improve your self-esteem and interpersonal competence in the future. All the difficult situations in life are tests offering valuable lessons to make future tests easier to get an “A” on.


William Cottringer, Ph.D. Is President of Puget Sound Security, Business Success Coach, Sport Psychologist, Writer and Photographer from Issaquah, WA. He is author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too, The Bow-Wow Secrets and Passwords to the Land of Plenty. He can be reached for comments and questions at bcottringer.pssp.net or (425) 454-5011.