Tainted Motives: My Experience with Workplace Hostility

-What you're about to read is the hardest thing I've ever written. It's the story of my breakdown - the workplace trauma that forced me to confront buried childhood abuse, that drove me to the edge, that ultimately led me to rebuild my entire life and career. I share this not for sympathy, but because workplace hostility is an epidemic that destroys lives. If you're in a toxic workplace right now, please know: leaving isn't weakness. It's survival. And what feels like an ending can become a beginning. -

I have written about this period of my life so many times over the past few years - There have been angry versions, sad versions, accusatory versions and whimpering versions – none have felt right to share. The facts haven’t changed but the tone and my acceptance of the events have wildly fluctuated over the years. I think this is the version I want to share, or maybe it’s not – maybe I’m just ready to get this off my chest. Maybe I can help someone that finds themselves in a similar situation. Maybe sharing it will help me to put this experience behind me and move on.

From late 2014 until the end of 2019 I worked for an Insurance brokerage in Oregon. I can't say that it was ever a good place to work – it lacked professionalism and I frequently felt apprehensive about the choices they made as a company. At first it just seemed like poor management – leadership qualities were all but absent and order was often maintained by using fear, intimidation, and micro-managing. I thought that if I could keep my head down and avoid engaging that I’d be ok and, for a while, that worked. Before I get into my experience working at the brokerage, I will provide a little background on my work history. It's spotty, to say the least. The brokerage was my 22nd job and, by this time, I was worried about what that said about me. Well-meaning people frequently told me to stop being so picky and stay at one because my resume was riddled with gaps and it made me look unreliable. I knew it was true because despite how many places I would send my resume to the only places that would invite me to interview were the types of places that I sought to avoid. I thrive on having a routine and I was ready to commit myself to one job - I just couldn't find the right place. My reasons for leaving each role varied, and to this day, I stand by each decision. I hadn't been at the brokerage long before I realized that it was likely the worst place I'd ever worked and they had an employee turnover was like nothing I’d seen before. I started to take note of all of the things they were doing, and not doing, as a company – things that would have made me quit in the past but this time I was determined to stick it out. Being able to see how short-sighted decisions, poorly executed planning, a lack of transparency, and unqualified management affected overall productivity inspired me. It was easy for me to see how making a few strategic changes would lead to a completely different outcome. This discovery led me to enroll in grad school to get my MBA. I made the decision to stay at the brokerage while in school thinking all the time spent here would look great on my resume. This decision was ultimately the catalyst that broke me mentally and eventually resulted in my retiring from the workforce.

It wasn't long after I enrolled in my graduate program that things started to really change at work. I’ll likely never know why this manager became so fixated on me, but the only thing that makes sense is that I was being quiet-fired. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, quiet firing is when an employer wants to get rid of an employee but they don’t want the hassle or cost of firing them so they treat the employee badly enough so they choose to quit on their own. Why would anyone do this? Because if an employee quits on their own accord then unemployment may not need to be paid. It's grossly unethical but the behavior tracked as the brokerage was notorious for cutting necessary costs and seemingly had no problem bucking rules, regulations, and laws if it meant putting more money into their own pockets. My job duties began changing and diminishing over time – when I quit I had roughly three hours of work for each eight-hour shift. I would ask frequently if there were any side projects I could work on but the answer was most often no. With nothing else to do, I would do my school work while my manager glared at me and whispered to other employees. I don’t know if she was talking about me or just trying to make me believe she was, but the way she kept her eyes locked on me made me feel uncomfortable and ashamed – like I was neglecting my job duties rather than just trying to stave off hours of having nothing to do. Throughout the day I would feel a tingle on my scalp followed by a wash of unease. Each time I would turn she would be focused on me. When our eyes would meet she’d look away - sometimes one of her eyes would stay trained on me for a beat or two longer before joining the other. The image of this along with her persistent arctic gaze still haunts my nightmares. This occurred often enough that I could still feel her eyes boring into me, even when I was home alone. I asked her once what it was that I had done to make her treat me like this and she stated she had no idea what I was talking about and that I was making it all up in my head. The anxiety became pretty intense and I started consuming more and more alcohol in the evenings just to relax. I also started calling off more and more because I couldn't bare the lonely, isolating uselessness of sitting at my desk with nothing to do. I was so close to graduating by this point and I didn’t really have time or energy to look for another job, so I stayed. Until one day in October I left for lunch and couldn’t go back. I went home and wrote a letter of resignation and explained why I was quitting. I didn’t receive a reply and that didn’t surprise me – I had visited HR three different times, each time speaking with a different representative, in hopes of remedying the situation but nothing was ever done – if anything, her leering intensified after each visit. In all, I sent two letters and visited HR three times. I haven't gotten a single reply. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do - there isn't anyone to report this behavior too. If I want the brokerage to acknowledge the inappropriate behavior of their employee and ensure that this won't happen again then my options are limited to litigation or public shaming. Neither feels like the right choice, but here we are.

Months after quitting, the anxiety had diminished a bit and I was able to ease up on drinking. Without the numbing comfort of alcohol, I was forced to confront the trauma – and it came pouring out. The way my manager had stared at me made me feel uncomfortable in my own skin and filled me with dread and a sickly unease. I kept telling myself that it was only staring and I could handle the discomfort – but I couldn’t. The pervasiveness of her antagonistic gaze had brought something up from deep within me. Time and again I would recall the crawling, itchy-skin heat of her eyes prickling the back of my neck, but that wasn’t all that my agonized mind was presenting to me. Day after day, for months, dark thoughts ricocheted around in my head unprovoked - horror-filled images from my childhood that I didn’t remember. These tortured memories weren't mine, and yet, my body confirmed that they absolutely belonged to me. The feeling of feral terror that came along with the memories was familiar – I had felt this wild-eyed, unhinged intense fear in the past during moments of extreme distress - the type of all-consuming panic that would make my blood run cold and my thoughts a jumbled mess. For months I laid in bed, my thoughts scattered, jagged and confusing, and painful – I wanted to die. Transfixed with thoughts of death - all I wanted was an end to the ceaselessly churning clatter in my head. But I have the most amazing kids in the world and I wasn't ready to leave them, so I found a therapist and I committed to repairing my long-neglected mental health. It’s been four years since I left that job and I still have regret for staying there for so long, even though I had no way of knowing what would happen. My manager couldn't have known either. Neither one of us was aware of the memories that lay dormant in my head, just waiting for the right moment to emerge. The effect of trauma is deeply personal and can only be resolved within oneself -our individual struggles are all but invisible to others. We have no way of knowing the battles others have waged. Sadly, this manager is still employed by the same company and I’m not the only one that has stories of intimidating behavior centered around her. The parent company of this brokerage does nothing to discourage her abhorrent behavior and, at this point, they have been notified enough times that I feel comfortable saying that this behavior must be allowed because doing nothing is akin to giving permission. And she will do it over, and over, and over because she has no reason to stop.

As for my current mental health - I’ve been working to heal the trauma – both the old and the new. I’ve recently started my own business and this blog. I also made changes to what I will and won’t tolerate from people in my life. I am notably sensitive to bullies and toxic personalities – they exude a dark, suffocatingly palpable energy that makes my thoughts race and my skin feel cold and damp. This personality type gets a rush of endorphins at seeing their personal suffering reflected onto others and they will often try to wheedle you until your contempt for them matches their own internal loathing. Hurt people hurt people - it sounds like a silly redundant phrase, but it's true all the same. I know it to be true because the pain of my experience poured out of me when I was drinking. I was emotionally reactive, jumpy, agitated, and irritable. I snapped at the people I loved most, I was unforgiving, and had a low tolerance for life's curveballs. Beat down by life, I started to become the monster that created me - a cyclical wheel of destructive energy. While my experience resulted in a deeply internal, self-suffering depression, my reaction to trauma was just one possibility of many. When I hear about instances of mass violence occurring at a workplace, I recall the isolation, the loneliness, and the frustrated-shame I felt working at the brokerage and I wonder if the senseless violence was someone's misguided way of handling their own trauma. Most of us need to work in order to provide the basics of survival for ourselves – food, shelter, safety, heat…all of the things at the base of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. We can never know how someone will react to having their means of survival threatened, or callously yanked away, nor do we know what they have already lived through. Having to fire or lay people off is an unfortunate, but often necessary, cost of doing business. While the act itself may be necessary the tact with which it's executed is up to the deliverer. Please consider the impact that a loss of income will have on employees lives and do your best to be empathetic and kind.

I wrote this in 2024, four years after leaving that job. Today, I run two businesses teaching organizations how to build antifragile workplaces and helping individuals become antifragile humans. The trauma that almost destroyed me became the foundation for everything I now teach. I'm not sharing this from the bottom of the pit - I'm sharing it from solid ground, to show others the way up.