Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Kim Neely, and this is the trauma informed SLP.
[00:00:06] This is a podcast where we learn how to promote safety and empowerment to build resiliency in everyone we know, including ourselves.
[00:00:16] This is video two of my burnout series where we get into surprise, surprise drama.
[00:00:26] And before I get into the meat of this particular episode, a little housekeeping stuff really quickly, I filmed this initially as a video. So it was recorded and filmed. And now you're listening to other than this little track that editing Kim is putting in, you're listening to the audio that was extracted from what I recorded that day. So because of that, I used sparkle fingers. You know, I think that's from bring it on, I believe, the cheerleading movie, but kind of adjacent to jazz hands, I did that gesture as sort of a way to diffuse tension when talking about, like, really difficult topics. So if you happen to hear me bust out some sparkle fingers or maybe some jazz hands, I might have just done jazz hands. It's a related gesture, but it is a different gesture. As most theater kids would let you know. That is what I'm talking about at that point. Just a way to hopefully diffuse the tension. Also, due to this, please do forgive any other maybe kind of weird. I visual to audio conversion issues.
[00:01:29] Like, if I say something and you feel like you were missing some sort of important context, it could be due to that. I am still editing myself right now, and my ADHD brain has this way of really ignoring me, listening to me when I've edited to a certain point. So if I miss some things, apologies and please do forgive me. And that is also to let you know that if you're a visual person and if you would like more visuals with your information, if you would like some, you know, screen grabs of the articles I'm talking about, or maybe just a little more visual silliness with some funny edits, feel free to check out this particular episode on my YouTube channel, and I will make sure there's a link for that in the show notes below.
[00:02:16] With that all said, I hope you do enjoy the episode. Let's get into it and sparkle fingers, guys. It's going to be okay. Whew.
[00:02:25] We're gonna be all right. We can talk about tough stuff. It's okay. Sparkle fingers through it. Yeah.
[00:02:33] I don't think I have any particular content warnings for this episode, per se.
[00:02:38] I'm not really gonna get into specific personal things that might happen. That is trauma. Although I will talk about, I guess. Yeah, content warning for bullying and gaslighting, just as examples but if at any point you feel like you need to pause, take a breather, take care of you. Please take care of you. You do you okay? I would not be very trauma informed if I did not care about your mental health. On the last video, we discussed burnout, and like, the academic definition, essentially, of what burnout really is, which the only actual agreed upon characteristic is exhaustion for burnout and all those other characteristics that also get lumped into that cynicism, you know, just general, like, malaise and bleh about it, that actually starts to overlap with traumatic stress. So on today's video slash episode, if you're listening to this on the podcast, we're going to be going over the relationship or connection, essentially, that we see in the literature, in the academic literature for burnout and what we call traumatic stress. I'm going to define traumatic stress do kind of a quick, quick and dirty definition for trauma, just as a. Just as a way to get us all on the same page. If you want a more in detail, if you want a more in detailed. That's not how we say that. If you want a more detailed explanation of what trauma really is, I recommend going into podcast episodes, old past podcast episodes, I believe the fight flight, freeze. Oh, my episode is the one where I went into a lot of the physiology around trauma. But we're gonna do a little touch on the definition, and then I'm gonna define what traumatic stress is and primary traumatic stress versus, like, secondary traumatic stress, because that's something we're going to get into next video, probably. Because this video is probably going to be long enough that I'll probably have to kick that over into the next video. Let's get going. Let's just. Let's just get in. Let's just do this. Let's do this thing. Sparkle fingers. Don't be too scared. It's gonna be okay.
[00:04:50] So what do I mean when I say trauma? When we're talking about trauma, traumatic stress, somebody who has experienced trauma, someone with trauma. Trauma, trauma, trauma. Okay. It's everywhere. Everybody talks about it, and the meaning has definitely gotten distilled colloquially. People use it to describe things that maybe aren't really truly trauma in the, like, clinical sense. So trauma is a neurophysiological response to an adverse event or multiple events that sends a person or a group of people into survival mode. So fight, flight, and or freeze responses. What happens in the moment of this event is the resources these people have or the person has to cope with it becomes really overwhelmed, and that overwhelm ends up, leading to these long lasting adverse effects, including chronic feelings of fear, feeling vulnerable, feeling helpless. And at the core of it, for me, the biggest thing I think of with trauma is that it has created a physiological response in the person. And it's a weird term to define because it's always retroactively defined by how the person responded, how their body and brain responded to a past event. So two people could go through the same event. One could develop trauma, one might not. The one who developed trauma, we would know. They developed trauma because they've had this huge physiological shift that's essentially resulted in their sympathetic system, their fight flight free system that gets overactivated and hangs on for a lot longer than their parasympathetic, the rest and digest system. So their body is just constantly going into survival modes and staying there a lot longer. And when you do that, the thing about being in a survival mode is it makes the midbrain, your midbrain emotional centers, particularly your amygdala. It kind of does a new phone. Who dis? Or like a Mariah Carey, I don't know her. To your anterior cingulate cortex, your higher order thinking. So you're still conscious, you're still able to process up here, but this part of the brain isn't getting as much information and it's not really in control of what the body is doing because there's a disconnect between essentially that amygdala area of our midbrain and that upper, higher level of thought, that prefrontal cortex reasoning area. So that's the main thing to think about when you think of trauma, because it's very hard sometimes to realize that you've had a traumatic experience because it's retroactively defined and because it really only gets defined when somebody notices they're starting to have these long lasting adverse effects.
[00:07:29] So traumatic stress, what I call traumatic stress, what you might hear me call a trauma response, is essentially what I'm saying is using a very broad term for if you've had this physiological shift due to anything that happened in the past or multiple events that's happened in the past, but maybe it doesn't fully meet the, like, ten different or so criteria you need to meet the DSM five definition of post traumatic stress disorder. Essentially, you can still have some level of traumatic stress related to something, even if you're not full on having clinical PTSD. Right.
[00:08:09] It just means the impacts of that, whatever that past event was, whatever the trauma event was, the impacts were enough to create these long lasting effects and to create this, like, physiological shift. And I will say traumatic stress can have a lot of overlap with things like grief and grieving, the loss of a loved one, the loss of a relationship, loss of like a career, a job, major shifts in our life, things like that.
[00:08:34] It can overlap a lot, right? And you can have trauma like signs or symptoms, but it might not necessarily be trauma if the person's able to gain access to connection and healing and compassion and empathy while they're in the midst of that grief. More definitions, last little bit of definitions we're going to round out here. What I'm calling primary traumatic stress means it happened to you. Primary trauma means it is an event that you are a part of, right? So if someone was part of a car accident, for example, or something, the people in the car in the accident, if they develop a trauma response, that car accident can be a primary traumatic event for them. They're having a primary traumatic stress response from that car accident. Okay?
[00:09:18] And the physiological shift from that event occurs, and the event happened directly to you. So secondary traumatic stress, sts, I might call it sts, but secondary traumatic stress is the same thing that in the research literature. People call compassion fatigue, people call it trauma exposure response, people call it vicarious trauma. But secondary traumatic stress, as far as I can tell, it seems to be the landed upon terminology in most current literature that I could find on this. And that essentially means you are experiencing the same physiological shift of a trauma event happening to you. You're experiencing the long lasting adverse effects, the feelings of fear, vulnerability, helplessness, all that stuff. You're feeling all that and you're having this physiological shift, but it's in response to an event that happened to someone else or to other people, or maybe something you witnessed, but we're not directly part of. Okay, so it's essentially being exposed. That's why people call it trauma exposure response. Sometimes it means you are exposed to other people's trauma and you might develop a traumatic response in relation to that as well. And the reason I wanted to define secondary traumatic stress for you guys on this particular episode is because there are studies that have been done that have found a lot of overlap between burnout and secondary traumatic stress, particularly in healthcare professions and educational professions. In terms of where my literature came from, that Cisloc et al meta analysis from the last episode, the 2014 meta analysis, they discovered that the association, the connection between secondary traumatic stress and jaw burnout is really high, then other folks have taken off the mantle. This Shoji et al, I believe, is how you say their name 2015.
[00:11:12] They did a longitudinal study where they found they were kind of trying to figure out which came first, whether it was burnout or secondary traumatic stress in people in and caregiving professions like medicine and healthcare and education. Right. And they found that the burnout leads to an increased risk of developing the traumatic stress. So if you hit that point of exhaustion, right, you're at an increased risk of developing traumatic stress related to traumas you see at your job that you're exposed to at your job, which kind of makes sense because the more exhausted you are, the less you're probably going to be able to keep up with coping mechanisms and strategies that help you stay more resilient against developing that trauma. Right. The other thing I'm going to bring into this video, and this is just me, this is my hypothesis. Okay? My hypothesis, guys. I think it's fair to say that if secondary traumatic stress is essentially the same physiological response as primary traumatic stress and burnout and chronic exhaustion from burnout, that exhaustion piece of burnout puts you at a higher risk of developing traumatic stress. Secondary traumatic stress. I think it's a fair hypothesis, essentially to say that the correlation likely extends to primary traumatic stress as well. Right. Regardless of whether it's primary secondary, the more exhausted you are at your job, the higher your chance of developing some level of trauma response. I think it's fair. Hopefully you agree with me. If nothing, leave me a comment. And I'm going to put it out there as a hypothesis because quite frankly, not very many people study workplace mistreatment as being potentially traumatic to employees. But that's what we're talking about today, essentially. Toxic work environment, workplace mistreatment. This stuff can be traumatic depending on how you respond to it retroactively. Mm hmm. So now we're at the meat, the nice juicy meat of the, of the, of the episode here today. Haha. Why am I doing this with my hands? I don't know. I'm doing like weird claw things on the side of my face. Okay. In thinking of how to structure this with primary traumas at work, I am actually going to start higher up and funnel down, which is kind of how my brain works in general. I tend to start big picture and funnel down to how it relates to other things.
[00:13:32] So what that means is I'm going to start with kind of organizational, systemic things that might lead to primary traumatic stress for the broader workplace at where you are. And then we're going to look at the interpersonal things, the one on one relationships that could potentially lead to some level of traumatic stress or maybe even just a re traumatization for the primary traumas from systemic organizational things. The two things I'm really going to talk about, it's two things. One's kind of a, it's kind of like three things, kind of, but one relates really heavily to the first. So I don't know. But main areas I'm going to focus on are the conservation of resources, which is a theory that relates to scarcity mentality. So we're going to talk about that. Those two things are kind of the same thing. And then we're going to talk about organizational dehumanization.
[00:14:32] The first big systemic thing that relates to scarcity mentality is this conservation of resources theory. I found this. I'm referencing an article by Hobfeld et al. 2018.
[00:14:42] Conservation of resources is a motivational theory that posits that employee stress occurs when a central or key resources are threatened or lost. So you have central, key resources, you need to do your job, but you lose those resources and, or when there's a failure to gain these key resources after a lot of effort. So you've been advocating for it, maybe you drew up a budget for it, and it looks all good to go, but you still don't get it. So the principles within this conservation of resources theory, there are three key principles under this. One is that resource loss is disproportionately more salient or more like important than resource gain.
[00:15:30] Okay? So essentially, if an organization or a workplace constantly takes things away from people, the employees are going to end up being more and more stressed out, and they're going to remember that those resources were taken away. They're going to remember that as more important, and they're going to have a clearer memory of that than things that got added to the workplace. So if you take away a central resource, but then you add, like a pizza party, you know, not a salient. The resource loss is more important in that case, if that makes sense. Right?
[00:16:06] The second principle is that people have to invest resources in order to protect against resource loss or to recover from losses and also to gain resources. Okay? So essentially, you've got to spend resources to get more resources. Okay? Like, I don't know, call me crazy, employers in the United States, but maybe, maybe you gotta pay people livable wages in order to have employees who actually want to work for you. Just, just a thought. Just a thought. Number the third, the number third. The third principle is when resource loss is really high, the resource gains actually increase in value. So it kind of seems contradictory to the first one. But remember, this is when resource loss is high. So let's say the company has constantly lost, lost, lost loss, lost a bunch of resources, taken away all these different resources. But then you get, like, one win, right? One thing you were advocating for comes through and you actually gain that resource. Now that resource has increased in value because it's like, you worked so hard to get it, but also, like, you have all these losses and you got this one thing. So if we take this conservation of resources and we bring it back to that discussion about burnout, that Maslaka and Leader 2016, like in our last episode, they found that cynicism, that cynicism aspect of burnout is more linked to job environment in terms of poor quality of social relationships at work and the lack of critical resources. So that cynicism piece sounds like it might relate a little bit to this conservation of resources theory. If there's a lack of critical resources, the cynicism is going to go up. And as Sislock et al. Found, cynicism is actually much more highly correlated with traumatic stress than burnout.
[00:17:58] Interesting, interesting. This basically gets into the danger of scarcity. So if there's a scarcity of critical resources, then there's this pattern that tends to happen. You end up with a decrease in resources, which increases the stress for everybody. All the expenses people need, all the time, people need, all the energy they need to put in to cope with that loss gets increased, right. Everybody feels a lot more stressed out, which leads to decreased resources across the board, quite frankly, because, like, people run out of energy to constantly cope, right. Then you have fewer resources left to cope with the ongoing exposure to any kind of indirect trauma or any kind of unexpected stress. And then professionals end up being more at risk to develop the traumatic stress. So this ends up creating this huge spiral of, like, this chronic increasing stress, decreasing resources, increasing stress, decreasing resources all the time. And that downward spiral puts the entire organization into survival mode, essentially some kind of fight flight, freeze response. Okay? Everybody's working within this, like, survival mode mentality of we have got to protect the resources we have and we've got to not give up the ones we have, and we need more, but we can't get more. So everybody hoard all the resources, right? And then the spiral keeps getting worse because the loss spirals lead to increased burnout, which leads to increased risk of traumatic stress from the staff members. And then the staff members, a lot of them end up leaving. So you end up with high staff turnover, and then you have a loss of that resource of employees. Right? And the issue with this, when you're in this downward spiral where it's like constant scarcity, you got to hoard your resources. We're not going to survive without them, blah, blah, blah, right? Everybody's going to get into survival mode, which means no one's really cooperating very much with each other. You know what I mean? It's going to leak into the entire culture of that workplace. The whole culture is going to become this fairly toxic. Like, this is Sparta stuff where it's like, no, you can't have a pencil because I only have these five pencils to get through the rest of my year, and nobody touched my pencils. You know what I mean? And that pencil example I just said, that is called service rationing. Okay? So staff end up developing this service rationing idea where it's like, I can't help in all these ways, right? I only have this much, this many resources and this much energy to help. So I'm gonna ration it out really slowly as a slow trickle throughout the year because I can't give it all up at once. Cause then I'm out of it. I don't have any more left. Right. Staff develop that mentality as a way to bridge this disconnect of their ideal of how they would really like to work.
[00:20:45] But then compared to the reality of how they have to work, right, when they have all these obstacles they have to navigate throughout their day, it becomes an essential coping mechanism. So when you think of, like, school teachers who have to spend their incredibly meager salaries on their own supplies for classrooms, the teacher might have this amazing idea for this amazing activity that's going to be so awesome. And, like, most of their students are just going to love it and they're going to learn so much. But it turns out that activity requires all these extra resources or extra, you know, materials. And it's like, where do I get those materials? You know, maybe they go to other teachers to ask if they could borrow those materials, but then those teachers are like, no, you can't borrow those. Those are all I have for the year. That's it. Right? So you get into that where it's like, these teachers want to be so giving, giving, giving, giving of their students, but because they can't go out and buy all the materials because they don't get paid enough to do it, they don't have that resource. They don't have the financial resource to do that. And then they have this mentality of like, here's what I want to be doing for my students. But here's what I can do. I have to settle for something not quite ideal, and then I have to ration out what I can do. Essentially, what can be done right. The danger of the scarcity is that it really often leads to people doing some kind of unintentional harm toward other people. So I'm going to read this quote from this book by Vander, Duttlipski and Burke from 2009. I'll put it up on the screen for you. But trauma stewardship is its title, and they say the danger of scarcity is that most people are not stealing office supplies or embezzling money. Instead, they may be unknowingly abusing their power in their client interactions or developing policies that are not mindful and consistent with the values of the organization or competing with other organizations instead of collaborating. Now, the example they gave in this book, I love this example. I've included it in my talks before, and I'm going to include it here because I think it's one of the best, most salient examples of this. There was an example of a, I believe it was like a politician or somebody kind of high up in national, like, nonprofit world and domestic violence shelters. They were visiting a domestic violence shelter for women and children, and this person was kind of a high up, renowned person visiting. And when they went there, this leader overheard one of the advocates, one of the like staff members at the shelter, preventing a child from taking a banana from the kitchen counter because they had this big stack of bananas. They were putting it out for meals or whatever, and this kid wanted to go and grab a banana. And that advocate said, oh, no, I'm sorry, but the bananas are not for children. For the kids perspective, there's a giant pile of bananas. Bananas don't cost a whole lot. You know, maybe that kid was really hungry at that point, but then that kid gets told, you can't have the bananas. So now the kid is going through these emotions around that rejection and they have to be hungry and that they might feel they kind of did something wrong. That child now doesn't feel that safe and secure here. Right? They don't feel that they have access to necessary resources like food at the shelter when they want it. Right? So you're unintentionally causing this kind of harm because in that advocate's mind, to their mind, I guarantee if anybody asked them, it would be, well, we've been told we have to watch how many bananas we give out because we don't have that much money to buy more right. It probably came more down to the amount of money they spend feeding everyone at the shelter and the fact that nonprofits, especially like domestic violence shelters, often don't get a lot of support in this nation. So that person was operating on the scarcity mentality of, if I give you a banana, that means somebody else doesn't get one. And this conservation of resources and scarcity is not just about, like, pencils and bananas and stuff. It's also very possible that within this sort of setting, and I think this. This particularly happens in educational systems here in the United States and school districts and such, particularly the public school system, because budgets keep going down. Educational budgets, budgets get slashed, slash, slashed. But then the people at the top, superintendents and stuff, first off, they still get. They actually usually do get paid little wages. They start to see the employees as resources rather than as people. They start to see them as somebody to ensure the bottom line. Right? Ensure we have enough bananas to go around. Right. Instead of thinking of how that might impact that person, for telling the kid that they can't have a banana, which could also emotionally harm that person because they might think, oh, my gosh, I didn't mean to hurt that kid's feeling. You know, like, you can have this whole spiral of stuff when you say no to something like that, but, you know, the boss might be like, good job, though. You held the bottom line. That's what we need here. And when that happens, when you're in that sort of situation where the employees are just numbers, or as Pink Floyd would say, another brick in the wall. That's Pink Floyd, right? Pretty sure that was Pink Floyd. So the more the bosses start to see employees, it's just resources that just are there to toe the company's bottom line kind of a thing. The bosses might start to order more of the employees time. You know, the more of their energy, they might have a lot higher, more unreasonable expectations for, like, you need to be able to check your emails even if you're off the clock. You need to be available to me 24/7 for my needs because I'm the boss, you know, kind of a thing, right? And they get these unreasonable expectations on their workers. And then the employees end up feeling all of this impact of unattainably high productivity expectations. Maybe they have social expectations after work that are just exhausting the constant availability. All of this stuff, it starts to feel very much like you're not human. You might start to feel like you're being dehumanized a bit. And it turns out there is actually, a term for that. It's called organizational dehumanization, which is what we're going to talk about next.
[00:26:53] The definition of organizational dehumanization. It's from an article that I'm going to link below, but it's logios, I believe, et al. I think that might be how you say it. They define organizational dehumanization as the experience of an employee who feels objectified by his or her organization, denied a personal subjectivity, and made to feel like a tool or an instrument for the organization's ends. Now, I have examples of organizational dehumanization from my time as a speech language pathologist. But probably one of the most salient examples I can think of is from my time back in my musician days as a teller for a major bank. And I came into it from, you know, restaurants. Now, restaurants have something called upselling, where you're, like, trying to sell a more expensive dinner or something to someone if they ask, like, your recommendations or you're trying to upsell a special or something, right? Which I was honestly never very good at doing. So, coming into a bank as a teller, this is before the 2008 crash, so this is a while ago, but I found out bank tellers have sales, and I was like, what the heck do they mean, sales? Well, turns out they mean the bank products, which are accounts, credit cards, lines of personal credit, other various things. And as a teller, one of the jobs you were supposed to do was to either open up or put in, like, a credit card, like, application for somebody. For example, Orlando, refer them to a banker. To have the banker open up extra checking accounts, savings accounts. And there is this one manager of the teller line that was very interested in making sure everybody hit their sales gold, because she was very interested in getting a promotion, which she did. To be fair, she. She did get her promotion. To be fair, she was definitely toeing the company line. And whenever she came and stood next to any of us on the teller line, she would ask, how are you doing today? And we always answered with how many sales we either got or attempted to get or how many offers we made. We never answered with how we're actually feeling. How's our life going? Are we tired? Are we feeling kind of under the weather? Are we doing pretty good? Are we excited about something in our life? She was not interested in any of that. And so everybody on the teller line knew pretty darn well. When she said, how are you doing today? She was asking about the sales numbers. I feel like that's probably one of the biggest examples of organizational dehumanization in that sense that we as tellers knew that this manager didn't particularly care about us as people because she wasn't really taught to care about us as people. She was also dehumanized, I'm sure, and taught to really only think about the bottom line, what the hires up wants, what the bosses want, right? Like, here's how you get promoted. You got to do what we want, right? So I'm sure it was a trickle down of that general dehumanization that occurs across large corporations, like giant global banks and stuff. But that's like, you don't. You definitely don't feel like a person when you know. You know that when someone says, how are you? They're not actually asking for how are you? They're asking for how is your job going today? How well are you doing? Your job today? Is what they're actually asking. To be fair, we had a second manager there. When she asked us how we were doing. She actually wanted to know how we're doing as people. And she was like, she asked me one day, she's like, why do you guys always tell me your sales stuff as soon as I ask that? And I was like, oh, it's because we know that this other manager, that's what she wants to know. Like, she doesn't really want to know about us as people. And she was like, oh, well, I want to know, like, how are you guys doing as people? So in this article from Lagio Sadal psychological need thwarting comes from self determination theory, which is a big theory that essentially talks about how internal motivation and a sense of autonomy and empowerment really impacts people's psychology. Essentially, when you essentially deny someone their psychological needs or purposely withhold it from them, it ends up frustrating people. Okay? So they found that organizational dehumanization really frustrates the employee's need for autonomy to feel like they have some sort of responsibility, their need for competence to feel very competent, which, if you remember from our six workplace domains that really impact burnout. Need for competency is one of the most important ones, which is kind of interesting. And their relatedness, their sense of being connected to a community of people there, being friends with people at work, for example, it frustrates all of those things. Okay? So need thwarting has these huge implications for individuals, well beings, and their attitudes and their overall mental health. And a lot of times, if people are in these environments, and this is also still from that article, if people are in these environments where their needs are constantly being thwarted, and they're being seen as not human. It results in these really maladaptive coping strategies that end up producing a lot more impacted mental well being. And, like, negative attitudes, cynicism. Like, all that stuff starts to come out of that. Like, I'm trying to cope with the fact that I don't even feel respected as a human in this space. So it leads to this big issue with the actual employees not really being able to regulate their own behaviors and their own emotions. So basically, the employees are going into survival modes and they can't calm themselves down from that. So they're just fighting or checking out, freezing peace and out mentally of all the stuff. Or maybe they're avoiding things. They're in extreme flight and they're just constantly avoiding whatever they possibly can. Right. So that can lead to this unintentional mistreatment of others, because you're trying to protect your own psychological well being so much that it's to the detriment of others. Like, you're not really paying attention to what's going on with other people and how your behaviors might be impacting other people. I find this interesting because this need thwarting. Obviously it existed before COVID shutdown. Obviously. But hello, Covid, shutdown. Like, how many of us still don't feel like we ever got back to air quotes normal after Covid shutdown, despite so many of our employees saying we're back to normal now everything's back to normal, quote unquote. And it's like, there is no more normal, man. We had a global pandemic, which could be a primary trauma for a lot of people because people did lose family members or ended up with chronic illnesses themselves or had the fear of developing that or not being sure if they were going to survive it or not if they caught it. Plus the societal isolation that people felt huge impacts there. And then what I experienced, especially in my school district, and I think a lot of people did, and some school districts might have handled this a lot better, but it was basically all we got for our psychological needs around the shutdown and everything we had to kind of, like, just sort of give a try at during shutdown was, whoo. Good thing we made it through that tough year. Now we're back to normal. Good job, guys. We survived. Done. Moving on. Like it. Nobody addressed it. Nobody addressed the impact of being isolated, how people felt about the whole thing. Nobody addressed the psychological difficulty and the struggle of going through that, the emotional difficulties and struggles. It's like, yeah, you didn't address any of the needs people had in order to reconnect with each other after going through something like that. And then it's like surprise, surprise, everybody struggles to reconnect. Everybody's in more of a survival mode and fighting and more cynical and more negative than they ever have been, because it's almost like they went through this huge, major potential trauma for a lot of people and then were explicitly treated like they should just forget it and move on, which is essentially the main coping mechanism our society teaches us, but is not a healthy one and is not one that really works, especially when you're talking about a system that was already essentially broken, and then we had shutdown on top of it. So if the brokenness didn't break the camel's back before, the camel's back is well and broken now, because shutdown definitely just obliterated it. Okay. And the need for confidence, the need to feel competent at your work is the most salient of the negative impacts of organizational dehumanization. So essentially feeling like you're not, you're not seen as competent, you're not treated as competent. That impacts people the most in a negative way. And it might be due, the authors here speculated it might be due for the fact that competence does play a really major role in terms of getting promotions, getting raises, getting positive work review performance reviews, having your opinion respected by your bosses or your colleagues. It makes sense that competence would be considered very important.
[00:35:47] The net effect of all these different systemic issues is essentially a very toxic work environment, or at least how the work environment might end up being very toxic from this kind of top down perspective, right? From the very tippy top of the organization and how it trickles down and sort of saturates everything, right? Because the cycle of conservation, resources, scarcity just sort of throws everybody into survival mode so often, and then people just end up being kind of out for themselves, right? And there's a lot of infighting probably happening. It's very likely because everybody's in some sort of fight or flight mode. And despite most people maybe not really want wanting to be the kind of person who's constantly fighting or who feels really petty, you might end up that way anyway just by being in survival mode all the time. So basically what you end up with is this really big misalignment of the values of why you came into, especially like a helping profession, why you came in to do that job in the first place, or who you are as a person, who you want to be, what your character is as a person. You might have this huge misalignment of those values compared to how you feel at work and how you end up acting at work. And that's just a recipe for really negative impacts to mental health. Even if it's not traumatic. It might be traumatic for some people. It might cause a true physiological shift, but it also could just be just really difficult, and it might really just change a person in a way that they didn't really want.
[00:37:16] Now, that's not to say that a work environment couldn't be toxic. From the bottom up, you can definitely have situations where an individual has perhaps personality traits, characteristics, maybe a personality disorder. Who knows? They have something about them that can be very toxic. And if you're a target of that person, it can definitely create an incredibly toxic environment for you. It's kind of that bottom up, there's an individual sort of treating you like crap, so you sort of feel like crap most of the time. And that absolutely can happen. So let's talk about that. These are primary traumas from interpersonal relationships, that one on one stuff. Now, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with interpersonal relationships at work, okay? But I'm mainly going to focus on two primary topics where you see this talked about a lot online, which is bullying in the workplace, which I'm going to consider essentially, where like, implicit bias, microaggressions, internalized ableism, all that lovely stuff, it kind of goes for quality time, kind of all gets dumped into that workplace bullying thing. And then also workplace gaslighting, because we definitely can be gaslit at work. And I think what makes things particularly pernicious about these interpersonal things in the workplace is usually in the workplace there is some kind of power differential. That's like an overt power differential, right? Versus, like, a lot of times, mistreatment in interpersonal relationships, like whether it be friendship or romantic or child and parent, there is a power differential for sure. That's how the mistreatment is created, essentially, is by creating the sense of some kind of power differential, or there actually being an overt power differential in terms of I'm bigger than you, therefore you do what I say kind of a thing. But in the workplace, I think it's also this really overt. Like, this could be your boss, your supervisor, your manager. It could be someone who, they're a colleague and they're a peer, but they're besties with the manager. So they actually do have more power over you because they've been there longer and they're best friends. And you know what I mean, and, like, who can you really go to for help if the bestie of the manager is mistreating you? That's what I want to. Want everyone to think about when they're thinking about these potential areas for primary traumas in the workplace to one on one interpersonal relationships, is that power differential that might exist and very likely does exist. So bullying involves repeated exposure to aggression in the form of verbal hostility, teasing, badgering, and social exclusion. And it happens over and over and over again. Right now, I found a workplace bullying survey. I don't know how incredibly accurate it is, but they found that in 2021, 30% of Americans suffered abusive conduct at work, with. With another 19% on top of that, having witnessed it, 49% of people are affected by it, and 66% are aware that the workplace bullying does happen.
[00:40:21] They found that bullying occurred most often during remote work in the form of virtual meetings rather than email, which makes sense. A lot of times, bullies do not put their bullying message in writing. They don't want it in writing. They don't want a paper trail. They want to just say it. Right? And of those bullied, 52% are non management employees, which is the power differential there, and 40% are managers. I don't know if that stat for the managers means those managers are being bullied by their other managers. It could be middle management. Right. So they might still be being bullied by someone above them with more power differential. That's also possible. And women actually tend to bully women at twice the rate that the women bully men in the workplace. And I'm assuming they mean cis women and men. But I don't think the survey actually really clarified that. So maybe it's just whoever identifies as women versus men, but it's not too surprising. Right? I feel like by a certain age in the United States, if you have moved jobs, you know, maybe five times, you probably have seen some instance of workplace bullying, or even if you've just been at the same job for many years, at some point, probably someone was bullying somebody in that workspace. Unfortunately, it does seem, at least to me, anecdotally, to be that prevalent. Right. So what does it mean if you're being bullied in the workplace? Well, some of the examples of being bullied in the workplace is you might receive extremely harsh criticism in front of the other employees. So somebody, like, corrects you or uses you at a bad example of what not to do in front of other employees. That never feels good. People might start withholding vital job related information, so they might refuse to answer questions if you're asking. They might refuse to assist you when you ask. These all kind of diminish that sense of psychological safety. But essentially you might be going and being like, when is that meeting? Or are we having that meeting? And the people might not even tell you. We're not even going to tell them we have that meeting happening. And then you might get in trouble for the meeting happening, but you were never told it was happening. Another example would be routinely making unfavorable or unreasonable assignments. So basically being set up to fail. So your bully might hand you some sort of assignment that's impossible to do in the deadline they gave you, and you just have to make it work. That's also bullying. They might deliberately exclude you from the meetings, for example, like, yeah. Explicitly saying, like, they're not invited to this particular meeting because we're talking about something. I'm gonna have to talk to them later individually about it or something, you know? And there also just might be the non verbal behaviors of, like, eye rolling or snickering or finger pointing, staring at the person, kind of giving you that feeling like everybody's talking about you behind your back like that, like, party with the girls in the solo cup meme. So none of that's great. None of that's great, right? And if you're going throughout the workplace, I think what's so pernicious about it in the workplace, at least from my experience as someone socialized female agender, remember? So I don't really identify female, but I've been socialized female. And being especially in a female dominant field, like speech language pathology, I feel like this workplace bullying stuff, it was like a shock to me when I actually experienced it because it's like I thought coming into a highly educated profession, that there's an expectation of professional behavior. And so workplace bullying, I think, becomes really tricky because in some environments, it can be just as immature as middle school gossiping and stuff and can be just as dramatic. But in other ways, it can be really implicit and insidious and really kind of hidden and tucked under some really passive aggressive comments, for example. And like, my brain doesn't pick up on those things. So for all's I know, somebody could have just been ticked at me for months until I actually pick up on it. And then I'm like, oh, well, now that relationship's already probably ruined because they thought I just didn't care. And it's like, I didn't know they were upset with me because they were passive aggressive and I did not pick up on it, you know, so that stuff can happen a lot. And I think it becomes a real issue if you're socialized female, especially in the United States, because a lot of times when you're socialized female, growing up as, like, a kid into a young adult, I think a lot of us are kind of taught to be the placaters, to be the ones that are people pleasing. Right. And so if you don't do that successfully, you feel like you're a failure. Right. If somebody's actually upset with you and actually bullying you, you feel like you're kind of the failure. You feel like you're at fault for it somehow. And that's, I think, a really horrible message that we get from society, which I'll get into, I think, at the next series when we talk about internalized oppression, I'll get into that more. But I just want people to be aware that workplace bullying does occur. That those examples, it's probably not in your head. It probably is a real thing, you know, especially if there's a power differential and you're talking about someone who's either been there forever is besties with your boss or someone who is in a position of authority over you. More officially, they definitely can be doing bullying behaviors. And nine times out of ten, I think one of the biggest red flags is they don't want what they say to be written down or recorded. They don't want any hard evidence that they're actually saying and doing what they're saying because it's legal. So it's always verbal or something like that, or very passive aggressive. Oh, I just forgot to add you to the invite kind of stuff, versus more overt clear indications that you're being bullied.
[00:45:51] I will also say the other funny thing about workplace bullying is I personally bumped the microphone. Microphone bump number three.
[00:46:00] Okay. The other thing that I think is interesting about workplace bullying is this stuff, I think happens a lot in fields with the bigger the power differential, the more likely you're going to encounter stuff like this. So, like in academia, in research, it's a known issue that you can be bullied by your primary, investigate your mentor, basically, the person you're working under. You can be well and good and bullied and gaslit, which I'm going to get into next by them. And then, you know, whether you finish or not is kind of up to you. But, like, you have to dance around. Why did you leave? You have to dance around. Why didn't you finish that degree? Why didn't you finish that research? You kind of have to dance around the answer because you're not supposed to say workplace bullying and gaslighting. And people do tend to talk about it, but only after they've left that field. So then people within that field still aren't hearing it right. They still don't know that that's actually what happened. Does that make sense? The other place you hear about a lot is a performance. Performance is another area where there's a huge power differential between the people who have the money, the producers and executive producers in the studios putting out the stuff and casting people and the little up and comer people with their little resume and their little headshots. There's a huge power differential there. So the bullying can be very big in those and very overt and very, like, way beyond bullying, straight up into horrific abuse, because the power differentials are so big that the victims truly feel like they. If they say anything about it, their career is ruined. So I'm just putting that out there. Just so you know, if you ever feel like you're in that position, whether you're a performer or want to be a performer, or if you want to go into graduate school, or if you are a graduate student working in a lab, working in a research profession where your mentor or maybe someone else in the lab is really mistreating you, you're not crazy. And seek some mental health help. For sure. That's true for anybody, anybody who's been gaslit or anything. So, workplace gaslighting. We hear about gaslighting a lot. This is another term that the meaning's kind of been diffused and sometimes is not even used correctly anymore these days by people online. But gaslighting is when someone psychologically manipulates another person, and they do it over a long enough period of time that you, as the victim, you start to doubt your own perception of events and your own sense of reality. I have had people gaslight me many times in life, and when it happened professionally, it was a bit of a shock to me. I didn't expect a gaslighter to show up at my workplace. I had already had experience with gaslighting, so I recognized it for what it was, and I tried to stand my ground as much as I could, but it is very hard, and it is very malicious. And even if you're aware you're being gaslit, there still can be those spirals of self doubt of maybe it is me, maybe they're doing this because I am a problem, right? But nine times out of ten, if you're asking, am I the narcissist in this situation? Am I the problem in this situation? You're probably not as much of the problem as the person actually doing the gaslighting. Okay. Just so you know. Like, I don't know. This is. This is my shame scale. I do a shame scale of one to Jeffrey Dahmer. For some reason, Jeffrey Dahmer is the name I put in there, but anyway. And I'm like, if somebody's trying to gaslight me into convincing me that I'm the worst person in the world, I'm like, am I Jeffrey Dahmer level bad? Because, no, I'm nowhere near okay. I might be making mistakes. And I definitely. When. When I was in a situation of bullying and gaslighting, workplace wise, I made mistakes out of anxiety. I had such massive anxiety about everything I was doing that I made a lot of mistakes. And I also avoided a lot of tasks, too. I did a lot of unprofessional avoidance of things, especially near the end there, of, like, uncompleted things because of the anxiety and the, like, the emotional upheaval, the flight response, because of the survival mode, because of how awful it made me feel. But, like, those mistakes didn't mean I was deserving of, like, that mistreatment. You know what I mean? Gaslighting at work feels. Does feel a little different from relational gaslighting, like, from friendships or romantic relationships or parents or something. And it's also a little bit different than just like, oh, this is just a tough job, or this is just a poor fit because that's what you hear. That's part of the gaslighting off often is like, you're just not a good fit for us. Right. But the main thing with gaslighting is whatever that person is saying in terms of their criticisms about you, it's never based on anything solid. There's never, like, facts. There's never, like, quotes from people actually saying things. There's never honestly even names they'll give you of who said what about you. And it's not based on any sort of proven data, so you can't take any action. There's nothing you can do to repair it because there's nothing solid and objective and concrete because it's gaslighting, because it's probably not actually as bad or as. Or even happening the way that person's reporting it to you. Right. It's only based in the perception of that gaslighter or the group or even the whole organization, if the whole organization is very gaslighty in their culture, you know, and it's honestly a lot of times when places want to push you out of a job, meaning they don't want to fire you because they don't really have a right to fire you, but they want you to leave. Sometimes places will start doing stuff like this because they just want you to leave, which sucks. So the environment might generate like an overall negative narrative about you if you're the victim of this gaslighting. Because people, that person, whoever's really doing it, might be damaging your reputation. They might just kind of pick at your reputation with other people within the organization. So if somebody's like, oh, I think they're really great and really competent and really cool, they might be like, well, maybe, yeah, of course, on some things. But then on these other things, right, they might do other things to, like, plant little seeds of doubt in people's mind. This mistreatment, because it occurs over a period of time. People start to get these ideas, they start to have their own minds changed about you as a person.
[00:51:51] And you might have really clear, hard data, evidence of collaboration and positive results and accomplishments that you've done, but it won't matter. It won't matter to the gaslighter. Like, the stuff that they're gaslighting you on is always going to override any hard evidence of you're actually doing a good job.
[00:52:11] And then if you ever confront them, that gaslighter is 100% going to deny that they're doing that. I mean, they might escalate it and become even more aggressive towards you if you do try to confront them, so oftentimes the answer is not to confront them in private meetings, maybe even with a mediator. But even then, if you try to tattle on them, usually they double down and it gets worse, which is also my experience in a professional setting when the gaslighting was occurring quite heavily.
[00:52:38] If you're in the kind of position in an organization where they're actually going to protect you against this kind of gaslighting, like if you're, if you own your company, if you're somebody out there who owns something or is in a really high level position to make or initial changes, what you got to do for these people who might be gaslit, these red flags, you have to protect the whistleblowers. There has to be a process under which if somebody is going to tell you about a gaslighter existing in your company, there has to be some sort of steps to protect that person. Okay. What often happens to people, though, however, is you might report the misconduct, and you get praised for reporting it. I'm so glad you told me about it. But nothing happens, and there are no steps to protect you. So then the aggression and the gaslighting gets worse or the bullying gets worse. Case might be mishandled because mediation is not actually the appropriate thing, especially in the case of a gaslighter or someone using very clear, abusive tactics against someone.
[00:53:32] It's not going to address the imbalance of power. It's not going to redress any wrongdoings. A mediation meeting is not the right way to go about it. But that's what happens when people see it as just a personality clash. They want to mediate. You know, supervisors tend to fail to intervene. Oftentimes the victim, their experience gets denied or downplayed somehow. Like, oh, they. You just didn't understand them. It was just a miscommunication. And you're not going to feel very valued where you work anymore because of this. Then you might want to just leave, right? Like I said, this is something that happens a lot. When people want to push you out of a job, they'll start treating you kind of like this. Especially what I found, at least in women led businesses, they tend to do stuff like this a lot to, like, try to get rid of. Yeah, just. Just lame. Like, my. My near divergent brain is like, can we just be honest? Like, jeez, can we be a little more upfront? Good lord. But sometimes they can't because they want to get rid of you just because they don't like you as a person, and they don't actually have any hard evidence to actually warrant a firing. And they don't want to be legally liable for firing around what is possibly discriminatory. So they use these passive aggressive gaslighting type stuff to get rid of you. You know, sometimes, hey, let's lighten up the mood with sparkle fingers and jazz hands. And sparkle fingers and jazz hands. Woo. Because I feel like that just got really dark and really heavy. Oh, my gosh. But, you know, to bring this interpersonal bullying stuff back to that more systemic level stuff, a lot of times these primary traumas, if it's like some sort of bullying or gaslighting situation, what usually happens is the company, the organization itself, is not going to protect the victim of it. Right. For their mistreatment. I mean, there's so many stories of whistleblowers who get. They try to report mistreatment and then they get dismissed or not supported by HR or whatever.
[00:55:21] Kick in my pants when I tried to go to the HR of that bank because of unethical sales happening around me that I wanted to report. And they were just like, are you sure that's what you're seeing? That was pretty much the only answer. That's probably not what's actually happening, because HR is there to protect the company. It's not protect me, but silly neurodivergent brain. I thought they were being real when they said they wanted to know about ethical breaches of conduct.
[00:55:47] Silly neurodivergent, duh. Right? But that's the thing. It really throws, especially, like, audhders, adhders, autistics. It throws us for a loop when we have these rules we're supposed to follow and no one else is following them. Right. We don't feel very protected under that situation. It's very confusing, and it's just a giant mess. Right. But really, in reality, the broader culture and the workplace systems that fall out of society and how we handle things and the avoidance of litigation, legal liability, there's a scarcity of resources. There's all this stuff that happens, and all the stuff that falls out of that is. Ends up being the hurdles that we all face psychologically when we're at work. Basically, it ends up being this big chidi from the good place chili pot of, like, mess, you know?
[00:56:40] And that's where we get all this toxicity from, essentially. We sparkle fingers, though. Yay.
[00:56:47] Oh, Mandy. Let's start to conclude some of this.
[00:56:53] If you feel like you've been the victim of bullying, gaslighting, or some kind of toxic environment from the scarcity mentality, I really hope this knowledge can bring you some sense of validation and affirmation that, you know, you were likely not the actual source of the problem. Despite how your workplace might have wanted you to feel, you are not a failure if these things actually affect you. You are human. It is only human for you to be affected by these very negative things, because they have real, true consequences when it comes to our sense of psychological and emotional safety, never mind even physical safety, because I'm sure at work there are people who face harassment and stuff that threatens that. But our sense of safety is an incredibly critical part of how our brains function and how we can feel safe and competent enough to problem solve and reason and access our higher brain power. But if we don't feel very safe, we can't access that stuff. We can't work the way we want to work. We can't uphold the values we want to have. We can't display the personal characteristics that we want to display because sometimes the environment we're in just prevents it. This might be a really bad metaphor for that, but you could get dressed up, looking gorgeous, ready to go to the Grammys. But if somebody dumps a giant pile of dark mud all over you, no one's going to know you're so beautiful underneath all that, right? So, like, workplace environments can kind of be like that when it comes to potential for primary traumas, potential for burnout, this kind of stuff, it can be that, like, you are still you. You just might be covered under a pile of mud, if that makes sense.
[00:58:36] So I encourage you, if any of this rang true with you, if you feel like any of this stuff might have happened to you and you still continue to doubt yourself or you still feel some sort of shame around it, I do encourage you to seek some professional mental health help with unpacking some of that. Because the biggest thing that we do in our society here in the United States, because it's a very individualistic society, we're very focused on the individual. One of the main things that really toxic workplaces want to do, and honestly, society at large wants to do, is to try to convince you, the individual, that you are at fault for what actually happened. When actually it's much larger, systemic, broad societal issues that are actually at fault. It's that sort of, kind of more abstract.
[00:59:24] The whole society at large, the messaging they're sending is actually the biggest issue. When they try to convince you that you're the one at fault for it, it's just another way for them to set you up to fail. Right. Because you're never going to be good enough or work hard enough as an individual person to actually repair a systemic issue. I'm going to say it again for the folks in the back, okay? As an individual human, you can never be good enough, smart enough, or work hard enough to repair what is a toxic systemic problem. Okay?
[01:00:05] We don't have that kind of power. Right.
[01:00:09] I can stand in one inch of running water, but if you dump me in a river, I'm going to get swept downstream. Right. The system is the river. Okay? There's only so much you could do in the face of all of that. Right? So that is all to say that I hope this information is helpful. If you have the energy to advocate for changes, do so. But if you don't, just do what you can to take care of yourself. And ultimately, what I really hope big picture wise from this you take is to treat yourself with a lot more compassion and empathy because you're just one person working in a world that is just a bit of a mess. And like I said on my trailer, I just hope you feel a little less like crap when you hear that. Yeah, it's likely the system that actually failed you. Next up, we're going to talk about secondary traumatic stress, which is very important, especially, I think, in particular, for educational staff members, faculty in the education system, especially in the United states, and healthcare workers in general. It'll be good stuff for all of that. In the meantime, be kind to yourselves, be kindly to yourself. Try out the scale of one to Jeffrey Dahmer, because you'll probably always be hovering around the one. And yeah, I will see you, or at least your comments and stuff next time. Bye, guys.
