My bipolar moods (with severity)

[Changing4Best]

I've been kinda thinking about something this morning. If a person has a lot of trouble dealing with some particular thing in their life, like for instance, if it comes up often in their posts and threads here, and if it comes up in their life a lot too, they should do everything in their power to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. That is what I am doing. I have had the subject of BULLYING or being picked on or teased coming up in my life for the last 6 months or so (and really, on and off throughout my whole life too). Talking about it in therapy just wasn't handling it. In fact, my therapist finally even said, basically, without saying so directly, that I needed someone else to help me handle this. So that is why I am taking her advice and reaching out and working on getting a Trauma Therapist. Even reading books on the subject was NOT HANDLING this. It is something that has to be dealt with in some way that I have not dealt with it yet.

Well, I am not the only person in the world who should come to this sort of conclusion about a repeating theme in their life. There are others who could benefit from this idea, so that is why I am sharing it here. I hope and pray that those individuals will find the help that they need, in order to overcome that which is coming up repeatedly in their lives. I wish that those who protest about something would look to themselves and whatever help they can find, to help them deal with whatever it is, once and for all!

I am in a CONVINCED mood at a 10 that this is something that would help many, not just myself.

 

[Changing4Best]

I feel kind of crippled right now, my whole existence up in the air, kind of everywhere. I'm between therapists, as I have said, but there is more to it than that. My future rests in the balance, it's in someone else's hands, there is so much about my life right now, that seems so out of my control.

My boss considers everyone where I work to be her "babies." She is mad at me, because one of her "babies" left, "because some people are trying to get me into trouble." He claimed. The "some people" is basically me and one other guy he has bullied. He's trying to get that guy to take him back into his life, but that guy isn't interested in being bullied further. Like me, he has HAD ENOUGH. So we 2, the bully's targets, are standing our ground. However, it is hard. The bully claims that we have wronged him! No one will tell us just how that is, how we supposedly harmed him. No, we have no way to defend ourselves, in other words.

I have far more to lose than the other target of his bullying does. You see, I work there and he does not. If my local boss can find a reason to fire me, I fear she will attempt to do so. However, I have another boss too. He is above my local boss, I think. And I think, so far, that he is on my side and will not allow me to be fired. I think my local boss is watching me like a hawk though. One wrong move and I am "toast." And when you are being watched like that, it makes you self-conscious and nervous and it is so easy to make a mistake! Too easy....

So tomorrow is another day of work. It will be another day that I have to watch myself and be careful not to make any mistakes. This is so stressful. I hate it.

My only hope is that time will heal my boss's wound. Maybe as time passes and other people come and join our group, she will forget about the "baby" she lost and focus on all the "babies" (new and old timers too) that she still has.

In the meantime, I sure could use some prayers!

 

[Deleted member 12723]

Praying:):hug:

 

[Changing4Best]

My friend was not at the place where I work today. I missed him. I was on the verge of tears for a lot of the morning (but relieved that I cannot cry or I would have embarrassed myself), hoping that he will be back soon. He is the one that has endured a lot of the bullying, like I have. We don't discuss that anymore. Of course! However, we talk all about all kinds of other stuff. So when he is not there, I find myself feeling lonely and alone, even in a crowd sometimes. You see, the bully's friends are still there and they make fun of me sometimes and even now my boss has shown me a side of herself that I was unfamilar with before. Namely, she calls others by their names, but she calls me "you." Like she will be asking someone by name what fruit they want with their lunch, but to me it was, "What kind of fruit do you want?" Period. No name used. It was very impersonal. I also saw her teasing some others that I don't ever recall her doing before (with sarcasm), and I also saw her laughing at others teasing others, something I don't recall her ever doing before last Friday either.

I did finally send a letter to her boss today, asking that we be given some kind of training against bullying. I sent him a copy of a couple of pages from the book, BULLYING AMONG OLDER ADULTS by Robin P. Bonifas. I told him about the person who had been bullying us and that he has since left. I also told him that we all love our Director there, and think that she is doing a good job. It is just that this issue of bullying is something that is widespread all around the country and there is very little known about it and very little in general is being done about it at nursing homes, senior centers and assisted living facilities across the country. Yet, the book states that it is at epidemic levels! I just hope that he takes my letter seriously. I also hope that it does not backfire on me. I know that there is a chance that it could.

So, continued prayers again and again would be appreciated. Thanks to those who are praying!

 

[Changing4Best]

I feel like I am "just" the hired help, the necessary evil, only because my client needs me, not because I am loved or cared about or wanted for any other reason by my boss. She used to love me. She wrote me a really nice birthday card about a year ago saying what a pleasure it is to have me around. I know if I get a birthday card at all this year from her, it won't have any such nice message in it this time. No, if anything at all, she might just sign it with her name and nothing more. And I will be in luck if I even get that much!

I have a life long problem. I am not very good at humor. I often don't understand it and when other folks are laughing, I am usually sitting there with a puzzled look on my face. I get puns. I love those. However, most other humor goes right over my heard. I do "get it" when someone is picking on me though. I may not get what is supposed to be so funny about it to the others that are laughing, but I do "get" that I am the "butt" of the joke and it is "on me" that the laughing is occurring. I can FEEL that. I feel it in my gut, usually.

My father had a sick sense of humor. His was often off-color and about sex. Of course, when I was very young, I had no clue what he was talking about or saying. As I grew older, I did start to realize that I was sometimes the butt of his jokes. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. Humor is not FUN to me. It is painful.

 

[Deleted member 12723]

I feel like I am "just" the hired help, the necessary evil, only because my client needs me, not because I am loved or cared about or wanted for any other reason by my boss.

As long as you tell yourself things like this, you will continue to feel bad about yourself I think that is how it was for me in my own life.

Try to set your feelings aside and begin to really examine what kind of thoughts you are thinking all of the time. I think your trauma therapist will be able to help you begin to sort out fact from fiction in your head.

We pretty much choose to be the people we become I think. Everyone has to begin somewhere and it is in our own thoughts unexamined which hurt us the most I think. I hope that you can begin to start questioning if your thoughts are an assumption or based on real evidence. Things that actually occur are real evidence.

I was made to be the scapegoat and big joke in my family of origin so I had a pretty low self esteem when i first started. It is a long journey and I still have a long ways to go but things have gotten so much better for me.

 

[Changing4Best]

Well, the bully came back to my place of work today. One of his many comments was, "I went to see a Psychiatrist and he said I was OK." This is, of course, in response to my last words to him, which had been in response to his comment to me to "Go see a Psychiatrist." I had replied, "That's what you need."

Now, of course, he is trying to say by this joke, and I am sure it was a joke, I doubt that he went to see one, that it is "Sheila that needs the Pshrink, not me." That is what it seems to me that he is trying to joke around about and say. Obviously it must have bothered him that I came back at him with saying, "That is what you need." That must have stuck in his mind, I guess.

Anyway, I held it together when I was there, I kept my cool, I said nothing to him. I kept my ears OPEN though. I could not do so all the time I was there, but I watched out for anything that was glaringly said about ME, in case I would need to let my boss know that he is still "at it." When I left work is when I had the super anxiety attack. You never know when one of those will hit and I have them both from Bipolar AND my cPTSD.

I did, yesterday, send a letter to my boss's boss asking for anti-bullying training at my place of work. I sent him a couple of pages from the book BULLYING AMONG OLDER ADULTS by Robin P. Bonifas. On the pages I sent to him, was a link to a website that has info on it about how to stop bullying at Senior service organizations, like Senior Centers, which is where I work. The pages also state that this is a widespread problem around the country.

I did put a good word in for my boss in the letter, saying that she has done all she can to handle this. I did say, however, and the pages also said, that info is very scarce about how to handle this kind of problem and that the book and the webpage with it have info in them that would be of great help.

It is out of my hands now. I know that this could backfire on me. However, I had to take the chance.

My boss has actually said that the bully has said that I have wronged him. (And that the others who have complained about his bullying have wronged him too). But she won't say what it is that we supposedly did to him. I think he has probably lied. The only thing anyone could say I did to him is to tell others about what he did to me. This I did long after I heard that he was backstabbing me to several people. I did not know what else to do. She (my boss) claims that she cannot take sides. That was why I wrote to her boss, also suggesting that this info might be of help for all our Senior Centers in the county (which he is in charge of).

This is a very vicious thing this man has done, not only to me, but to the others who he has bullied too.

As to my thoughts about what my boss might be thinking, I can only go by her treatment of me. It has changed. She used to be so very kind and friendly to me. Now? Not so much. I FEEL from her a kind of distance, a coldness, that was never present before all this came up. In fact, when I first went to her about the bullying, she seemed understanding, compassionate, willing to do whatever she could to relieve the situation. However, the tables turned once the bully turned against me, once she gave lectures to stop him from his activities. Then, obviously, he went to work, befriending all the people above me on the chain of command. Backstabbing me and the other targets to them and to her.

We now are the "bad guys." The problem that won't go away, because the bully is such a "nice guy." And I know how charming he can be. I experienced that charm for awhile, a short while, while he was learning how to "get" me. He is a real artist as what he does.

A friend of mine who is trained in psychiatry and such says that she has pegged him as having Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She was the bus driver present when he last verbally attacked me. She just got her degree and will soon probably be leaving Transit and joining a practice. I will be sorry to see her go. However, I trust her evaluation of him, since she has seen him in action on numerous occasions and with a lot of different people. Others who I have spoken to who have observed him have also found him to be an undesirable person. I am not alone in my estimation of him, nor am I alone in having been bothered by him. I just don't know what to do to protect myself!

 

[Changing4Best]

Everyone at work was acting kind of strange. People were teasing one another a lot more than usual. I'm not great with being teased, or when the joke is on me, which in one case, it was. Also, my boss called someone "Fatty" today, which I felt was very unprofessional! I sure would not want to be called that. I would object, I think, if she called me that or something like it. I did not see the look on her face when she said it. I suppose if she said it with a smile, it might not have gone over quite so badly. However, she was behind me, so I could not really tell how it went over with who she said it to, either.

 

[Nessa7]

Have you thought about keeping a record of what you observe happening at the Senior Center? Some of the things you have mentioned are unquestionably inappropriate and grounds for a complaint. I worry that they may be able to use your poor memory against you if you don't have concrete examples to give them.

 

[Changing4Best]

I am so sad right now. I overheard a conversation at work that I think was
about me, about my having spoken out about what the bully did to me.
One person was saying something like, "It's none of my business... and
you know it's a sin, it says so in the Bible." And I think she was
saying that I should not have spoken out (about a month ago) about
what the bully was doing to me. The reason I think this is because the
girl that used to sit next to me moved over to that table where this
conversation was taking place, and she had been very outspoken about
the fact that I should not have been talking about what the bully did
to me. She said she didn't like it when people talked behind other
people's backs. Now, after a long absence, she is sitting at another
table and this other girl, who was also outspoken against sticking up
for others when they are being bullied by a bully, was the one who was
saying this, loud enough so that I could hear it from across the room
today. She kept pointing in my direction too.

Like, it is OK for them to talk about ME behind my back, but Heaven
forbid, I should speak out against a bully who has bullied me!

Adding insult to injury, the Senior Center Director just had to tell
us a story today about how her father jokes around about her mother
and even says stuff in front of her mother that is totally nasty, and
this is seemingly OK with her. Like, her father is a comedian/
musician who tells jokes, and the joke was that everyone was supposed
to bring a bag with them for lunch, so he just brought his old bag
with him instead, his wife. And then our Director laughed. Everyone
else laughed too. I was the one who said, "Oh! Mercy!" And I did not
laugh. But I might have been the only one who didn't.

So, in other words, it is OK for men to make their wives the butt of
some joke on the stage. Our Director was brought up this way. It is OK
in her family, so it is OK at the Senior Center she is in charge of
too, because that is the way she was brought up. So I just have to
live with it.

I feel defeated and deflated. I feel as if I just can't win for losing.

So I came to the conclusion that I am just there to do my job. I take
care of my client. I also use the senior center bus to get around
town, to run errands and such. That is all. It is no longer a social
club for me. It is no longer FUN for me. It is just a job.

I need to focus on what God thinks of me, in other words, not on what
man or woman thinks of me. I have heard a slogan somewhere to the tune of,
"It is none of my business what others think of me. It only matters what God thinks of me."
I am going to have to adopt that slogan. And I am going to have to work at adopting it, because I am a very sensitive person.

 

[Changing4Best]

Have you thought about keeping a record of what you observe happening at the Senior Center? Some of the...

I agree with you, but it does not seem to matter. I think by what I just wrote above, that I see the writing on the wall. There will be no handling this there. I will have to handle it with my therapy and in my own heart and soul and with God.

 

[Changing4Best]

There is this sound in my bedroom that sounds like dripping water. I cannot figure out what it is and it is driving me crazy! My bathroom is next to the bedroom, and I keep checking to see if maybe a faucet is dripping or something, but I cannot seen to see anything dripping. I fear there may be a leak in the pipes in the wall or something like that. Our building management is infamous for NOT fixing such things. There exists such a leak in a wall from one of the other apartments upstairs and it caused mold to build up in the tug of the 1st floor apartment below where the leak is. Still, to my knowledge, the leak has never been fixed there. UGH! I am allergic to mold, so this is scary. At a 10!