What is abuse exactly ? When am I in a situation where I am being abused, and when am I in reverse abusing someone else ?
This question has been haunting me lately.
There are cases when abuse is “obvious”. When I shared about descending from a lineage of black slaves from the French Caribbean, everybody would agree with me that slavery is abuse. Especially as it happened in the past, faraway from Europe, and has been officially abolished over a century and a half ago.
But what about today, in our everyday life ? What concerns me is to be able to detect when a situation is no longer “normal” and should be acted upon to end it, before it creates too much damage.
When we look into the work space, we enter a gray zone, where abuse is more or less tolerated. It is obviously less and less so, and many policies and trainings have been put in place in most (many?) companies to deal with it. The simple fact that I can talk freely about the subject is because of how commonly acknowledged it is now that work is a place where abuse happens.
But the question is, how bad does it have to get, that it can be denounced?
Could we stop it before there is an obvious victim and harm can be easily proven ?
Could we find a way to prevent it and repair it before it needs to go to court ?
Recently I had to face what I felt was a complex situation. I started to work with someone who at first glance was performing very well in the work environment, being smart, organized, reliable and good company to work with. But slowly, I began witnessing more and more often strange and inappropriate behaviors.
What felt like it should have been simple constructive discussion, working to find together the best decision to solve a situation, transformed into impossible negotiation that could only be concluded by either complying with his ideas, or not doing anything. It had the appearance of a rational discussion, but reason was bent to resemble a closed endless maze.
I started to realize that what was at stake was no longer a rational work problem, but probably his own sense of worth that was oddly tied to earning recognition for project realizations.
I noticed how it was gradually worsening, as the guy could not bear what he felt was a dangerous sharing, or loss, of his power.
It was basically becoming impossible to collaborate on anything to find a concerted agreement, it had to be his way or mine, in obvious contradiction with an environment that heavily promoted collaboration.
I could also sense that I was not the only one experiencing this difficulty. That same behavior had caused growing damage with other workmates that were his subordinates, that did not have the power to escape the situation. Their mode of protection was to comply with imposed decisions that were sold as “collaborative, and then pretend that nothing special had happened.
And the tensions that I heard of that that person had had previously with other people, some of them having left the project, started to furiously look like pieces of a puzzle that were fitting into a way scarier picture than I had expected.
I had more power granted to me in that context than others, and made a choice to use it to stop the situation.
To be honest, a major factor in my decision to act was the fact that it was a pain in the a.. to work in those conditions, and I don’t feeI I can put up anymore with so much waste of my energy.
But the main reason I acted to stop it was because I felt that if I let the situation go unchecked, his relationship with subordinates would easily degenerate into moral harassment. And I suspect it had already happened in the previous cases I had heard about.
But it was at a stage where it would require a lot of energy to prove, and might still be dismissed as not “bad enough” to act upon.
And I really feel that’s how we let abuse happen under our watch. Slowly crawling from tolerable discomfort to irreparable damage.
Interestingly enough, the person took my acting to stop him as an attack, and behaved like he was the victim of an abuse of power.
That started a new thread of thoughts in me, adding an angle to my reflection. What struck me is how bad I felt. Because I could feel how hurt the guy was from my decision.
I felt I was the perpetrator.
It makes sense. When you abuse your power, and you cannot recognize it, anyone that takes that power from your hand becomes your enemy. And what better way to fight that, than to cast yourself as the victim of the situation.
As long as you can not acknowledge your part of responsibility in a situation, you cannot change your behavior, and you can only portray yourself in the role of the victim.
I realize that I have a deep belief that when people act inappropriately, like that person was doing, bullying people while posing as a great guy, they have a reason for it.
A reason that usually has more to do with their upbringing and experience as children than to the present situation, that had led them to create harmful beliefs for themselves, such as “to be loved and have a right to exist, I must be the one on top”.
And I truly believe that the only way to solve a situation like this and prevent it from happening again and again, is to help the person see the deep roots of their behavior so they can get free from their toxic beliefs.
But I can’t make it happen for the other person. I can say things, point toward a direction, I cannot make the person see inside themselves what is too painful to look at.
Especially if I am the one taking the responsibility to act up.
That made it a very uncomfortable situation for me. Empathy is what the guy needed to grow out of the situation. Yet, I had to cut my empathy towards him, lest it would prevent me from acting, and stopping him from abusing the people around him.
I did not find a way to act that would stop the current situation, AND allow for helping him out of the situation.
And I have now to accept that I can’t be sure I was right, and that I have no power on another person growing up out of their toxic beliefs and behaviors.