Please support the next WBI workplace bullying survey

Since 2003, the Workplace Bullying Institute’s periodic national scientific surveys on workplace bullying have been the gold standard for understanding the prevalence and nature of this form of on-the-job worker mistreatment in the U.S. Designed by WBI co-founder Dr. Gary Namie and administered in consultation with Zogby Analytics, these surveys yield invaluable data that have been used and cited by the media, academics, and other researchers.

The WBI surveys cost money to administer, and that’s why Dr. Namie has launched a modest GoFundMe campaign to help pay for it. If you are in a position to support this vital public information source about workplace bullying in America, then please join me and go here to make your contribution.

Thank you for considering this request!

Mel Brooks, the Chinese Gourmet Society, and the stoking of creativity and mutual support

One of my favorite parts of filmmaker and comedian Mel Brooks’s breezy, funny memoir, All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business (2021), is a short chapter devoted to what he and his pals called the “Chinese Gourmet Society.”

For some nine years starting in the early 1950s (apparently — he gives no dates!), Brooks and a group of invited friends met for dinner every Tuesday night in New York’s Chinatown. While membership varied over the years, the group included:

• Irving “Speed” Vogel, one of Brooks’s long-time friends and a textile factory manager turned direct metal sculptor;
• Ngoot Lee, a friend of Vogel who worked for Bloomingdale’s as a calligrapher and furniture designer and knew of the best restaurants in Chinatown;
• Authors Georgie Mandel (The Wax Boom), Joseph Heller (Catch 22), and Mario Puzo (The Godfather) — all before they made it big; and,
• Julie Green, an “incredibly well read” diamond merchant.

Brooks doesn’t go into detail about what they talked about during those dinners, but he credits his friends and these dinners for providing “stability and inspiration” and getting him through some lean and difficult years. Indeed, as Brooks writes, the group had some dining rules that reflected their tight budgets and a commitment to this fellowship:

We had strict eating rules at the Chinese Gourmet Society. You were not allowed to eat two mouthfuls of fish, meat, or chicken without an intermediate mouthful of rice. Otherwise, you would be consuming only the expensive food. The check and tip, and the parking fees, if any, were equally divided among the members. It was compulsory, if you were in New York, not working nights, and in reasonable health, to be present at every Chinese Gourmet Society meeting.

We can only imagine what it must’ve been like to share a weekly dinner with this eclectic, talented crew, before many of them became prominent and very successful. How did their various conversations generate creative artistic and business ideas? How did they support each other when money was tight, success was far from assured, and assorted life challenges presented themselves? I’m quite sure that those dinners, in addition to providing an enjoyable social outlet, stoked both artistic genius and mutual support.

***

I have long been fascinated by, and sometimes envious of, these small, informal, intentional cohorts of interesting, smart, creative people who meet regularly over meals in a spirit of fellowship. I even have a small collection of books built around other examples of these groups, including, among others:

• Laura J. Snyder’s The Philosophical Breakfast Club (2011) shares how four men who first crossed paths at Cambridge University — Charles Babbage (mathematics and computing), John Herschel (astronomy and photography), William Whewell (multiple fields of science), and Richard Jones (economic science) — began meeting over Sunday morning breakfast during the 1800s to exchange ideas and plant the seeds of the modernization of science.
• Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001) focuses on the lives and ideas of four remarkable members of a conversational club that met throughout 1872: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (law), Charles Sanders Pierce (philosophy), William James (philosophy and psychology), and John Dewey (education and philosophy).
• Philip Zaleski & Carol Zeleski’s The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (2015) tells the story of how writers C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and other intellectuals formed a literary club, the Inklings, that met weekly in various pubs and other locations around Oxford University during the 1950s, “to drink, smoke, quip, cavil, read aloud their works in progress, and endure or enjoy with as much grace as they could muster the sometimes blistering critiques that followed.”

While these groups offer their own fascinating stories, one of the great appeals of Mel Brooks’s Chinese Gourmet Society is its comparatively motley membership, untethered to a prominent university. Their work and creative aspirations were more commercial in nature, while having the power to shape our popular culture. I’m also betting that the more disparate occupations of the Chinese Gourmet Society members made for greater varieties of conversations and sharing of information and ideas.

(I readily acknowledge that these groups I’ve talked about above are noticeably lacking in gender and racial diversity. It is very likely that many similar stories remain to be told, or have been told and I am simply unaware of them.)

***

The formation of these groups and larger tribes cannot be forced or contrived; any genuine sense of fellowship has to be somewhat organic in its formation, bringing together the right mix of personalities, intellects, dispositions, and interests. Food and drink help as well!

Although I have never been part of any ongoing group like the Chinese Gourmet Society, the Philosophical Breakfast Club, the Metaphysical Club, or the Inklings, I have experienced these fellowship experiences on a short-term, in-person basis, typically through the work I’m doing on workplace bullying and employment relations generally, human dignity, and therapeutic jurisprudence. Here are several pertinent blog posts:

• “Conferences as community builders” (2015) (link here) — About the biennial Work, Stress and Health conference co-sponsored by the American Psychological Association, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and Society for Occupational Health Psychology;
• “Tribes for brewing ideas and engaging in positive change” (2015; rev. 2019) (link here) — A piece contemplating how to nurture tribes to engage in collaborative change;
• “Launched in Prague: The International Society for Therapeutic Jurisprudence” (2017) (link here) — How we launched an international learned society devoted to advancing therapeutic jurisprudence at the International Congress on Law and Mental Health, in Prague, Czech Republic.
• “A workshop as annual ritual” (2019) (link here) — A look at the annual December workshop of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, held in New York City.
• “A veteran cohort of the workplace anti-bullying movement gathers in Boston” (2023) (link here) — Practitioners and scholars addressing workplace bullying, many of whom are associated with the Workplace Bullying Institute, gathered for an interactive workshop in Boston last year.

***

I think it remains to be determined if Zoom and other communications platforms can be the central enablers for fostering such fellowship opportunities. My basic hypothesis is that Zoom, et al., can serve as a valuable connector between in-person gatherings, but that periodic face-to-face exchanges are a necessary component for sustaining successful cohorts of this nature.

Of gaslighting, DARVO, and flying monkeys: What fuels the emotion-laden descriptions of workplace bullying and mobbing?

(Flying monkey image courtesy of Clker.com)

Workplace bullying and mobbing. Yes, generically speaking, it’s about the experience and conditions of work. But at a human level, it’s often about apprehension, fear, and even terror. And for someone experiencing full-on work abuse or recovering from it, it’s very likely driven by the dynamics of psychological trauma.

A new lexicon

Andrea Adams, the British journalist who popularized the term workplace bullying during in the late 1980s, knew well about how terrifying, cruel, and malicious this form of abuse could be. In a 1994 speech before a British trade union (link here), she observed that, in the course of her investigations:

…people have described this experience as everything from psychological terrorisation, to emotional rape, to entering a war zone. Their accounts are all so similar that l can now predict when somebody contacts me, what they are actually going to say and the way in which they identify bullying, and their physical and emotional responses to it.

Adams’s journalistic explorations would be echoed by academic research. I frequently invoke an important study by communications professors Sarah Tracy, Pamela Lutgen-Sandvik, and Jess Alberts, “Nightmares, Demons, and Slaves: Exploring the Painful Metaphors of Workplace Bullying,” Management Communication Quarterly (2006) (link here), which found that bullying targets’ narratives of their experiences “were saturated with metaphors of beating, physical abuse, and death.”

Once a targeted individual learns about workplace bullying and mobbing and certain terms used to describe its variations, a familiar vocabulary may come into play: These terms are often woven into narratives that describe their experiences in very emotional terms. They include, among others:

Gaslighting — In The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life, (2018 rev. ed.), Dr. Robin Stern defines gaslighting as:

a type of emotional manipulation in which a gaslighter tries to convince you that you’re misremembering, misunderstanding, or misinterpreting your own behavior or motivations, thus creating doubt in your mind that leaves you vulnerable and confused. Gaslighters might be men or women, spouses or lovers, bosses or colleagues, parents or siblings, but what they all have in common is their ability to make you question your own perceptions of reality.

I have written frequently here about gaslighting, including its use as a work abuse tactic (e.g., links here and here).

DARVO — As explained by Dr. Jennifer Freyd (President, Center for Institutional Courage; U. Oregon, emerit):

DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim — or the whistle blower — into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.

I have written about DARVO in connection with aggressors claiming victim status in workplace bullying situations (link here).

Flying monkeys — As explained for PsychCentral by Christine Hammond (link here):

When the narcissist wants to evoke some punishment on a target they dispatch their henchmen (aka flying monkeys) to do their bidding. Unfortunately, this can and often does include abusive behavior such as guilt-tripping, twisting the truth, gaslighting, assaults, threats, and violence.

She further details the roots of the term:

The term was coined from the movie The Wizard of Oz in which the Wicked Witch dispatches monkeys to fly and get Dorothy and her dog. The monkeys obey her command, doing her dirty work for her, taunting and terrorizing Dorothy as she tries in vain to get back home. And so it is with narcissists and their flying monkeys.

Thus, we are most likely to hear references to flying monkeys in the workplace bullying and mobbing context when a boss directs their minions to harass and abuse a designated target. I have dubbed this behavior “puppet master bullying” (link here), but the choice of terminology is less significant than understanding the underlying behavior itself.

The neuroscience of bullying and mobbing at work

Why do so many targets of severe, continuous bullying and mobbing at work invoke emotional terms and descriptions in characterizing their experiences, rather than provide ordered narratives of their stories? For insight, I once again turn to Dr. Bessel van der Kolk‘s indispensable The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014).

Dr. van der Kolk summons neuroscience research on brain functioning to explain what happens to some people when experiencing or reliving a traumatic event. In essence, the side of the brain associated with emotions, intuition, creativity, and imagination — the so-called right side — becomes fully activated. During brain scans when individuals are asked to recount traumatic events, it lights up like the proverbial Christmas tree. By contrast, the side of the brain associated with logic, raw facts, linear thinking, and sequencing — the s0-called left side — shuts down. During these brain scans, it goes dark.

With this in mind, it is utterly understandable why targets of bullying and mobbing at work often describe their experiences in emotion-laden terms. Many will experience difficulty reducing these experiences to the kinds of sequential narratives that HR personnel, union shop stewards, or employment lawyers typically seek in trying to grasp what happened and whether an individual can provide facts to support their claims. This can further undermine a target’s credibility and make them appear unstable and unreliable, when in reality it is often the trauma talking.