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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: Dealing with co-workers that hate you
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 08-18-2004 04:00 AM
The best thing is that you're already on the right track of trying to figure it out.
There are a number of things going on: not the least is that you've been exposed to a smaller variety of social structures, you're hitting new ones & one that is in particular hostile, & you have fewer experiential examples like others may have to match it to or have developed strategies for analyzing new ones. It's not a matter of being 'young', but of exposure, experience, & collection of analytical & working 'tools' for the job.
In almost anything that has to do with development, whether its one person's psychology or an independent social structure, looking for a military manual or cookbook "answer" to problem 14a is not going to work. The best term I can give people to make them understand is that something that does something is a machine, & machines that don't all just come straight from one manufacturer & are installed & upgraded by only one tech do not in any way look the same, have the same design, or work the same way.
It's like opening up a rack in some new location. It's rarely & wonderfully straightforward & well done, usually it's "Oh my god, what the hell is all this?" Then you have to start tracing lines, thinking back along what was done (Okay, they needed to add this & they ran this stupid wire up to here), & why (Here's where they got a crummy tech who would or could only jack stuff together one way), etc. Even in a rack there's a lot of psychology. And you can't just start tossing out things you think are unimportant, you find that over time for weird, emergency, or stupid reasons strange things have happened, like
a picee of automation is robbing power from the exciter supply, etc. The back of a rack is usually very much a social situation.
There was a study by a woman sociologist (forgot her name, I'm not going to go digging, I intensely envy Ken Layton's facility & recall of part numbers) who decided to do a study of why playground behavior of boys was more hostile than girls (pushing, hitting, etc.) She made a list of social situations which elicited the behavior, then studied the responses of groups of girls & boys. She was amazed to find that girls were just as hostile, even more frequently, but their responses were not physical, but social sabotage (some complex & requiring lots of planning!) against someone like spreading rumors, getting others to join in a campaign of insults & belittlement, trying to manipulate others to isolate them socially, stealing cherished belongings & boyfriends, etc. The term for it is Social Hostility, & that's what you're facing. Like all statistical spreads, it wasn't just girls doing it, but some boys, but at the age of the playground study, the 'subjects' in the male group had more access to physical violence by overlooking, gender expectations, no matter how they'd developed that tactic (finding it themselves, learning it from other adults, etc.)
After this, more folks started looking at similar situations, & it plainly was what a lot of dysfunctional adult structures & activities were. Physical retalitation is suppressed for adult society, so those who developed socially hostile behaviors, male or female, are the ones operating in mostly-non-incarcerated society.
The further studies of dysfunctionallly socially hostile girl groups matched up schematically with studies of poor-performing families & corporate social groups. For girls, they could be traced back to one or more 'queen bee' types, & others which could used to support them through their inexperience in social structures. In families, abusive parents & children (who are for all practical purposes owned by parents) who must adapt & mollify the behavior somehow for reasons of physical or psycological survival), in corporate environment, mainly by threat of financial or career ruin & a perceived need by some with inexperienced or otherwise rather spongy personality types propping their self-image up by adapting to the inexperienced 'this must be how thw world works' viewpoint.
In common also is that the social hostility proceeds from mostly one direction, & must be supported. There was a book about "Queen Bee" girls (you can look at it as an easy lab slide slice for the other similar structures) that described how these individuals, were the earliest in the structure to learn socially hostile behaviors & use them to prop up their own self-esteem. Always they themselves are motivated by fear, having been giving the impression by parents, other people, images in the media, etc., that they are lacking & deficient in some way. They then consolidate in a social situation through a means like prior residence, 'political power' (dad owns the pool people want to swim in, etc.) more hostility skills, and so forth an essentially narcissistic 'machine' to prop up their ego. They can only function with 'secondaries' that can be manipulated through fear also, fear of being excluded from a group, insulted as 'stupid' or not cool, exclusion from desirable activities, etc., who have not really completely formed an independent self-image.
The main thing is it's motivated by fear. The behavior is distinct & hostile, (previously would have been simplistically called 'anti-social'), doesn't make a lot of sense, except to briefly mollify someone's fear. It's a funny noise you hear, listen for it, find out what's causing it, it's the usual thing coming from somewhere.
These structures usually are of limited 'use', except as initiations of other structures after the central, fear-driven, narcissistic (or hoping-to-be-seen as narcissistic, in someone fear driven) person's role diminishes. They exist mostly to prop up one person, when that person's utility is diminished, whatever else the structure has independently spawned through the others proceeds, very much to a degree of how much power the original person held (like daddy owns the pool). A lot of organizations fall down because of this: the structure created could not be independent of the central person due to resources.
There's a thing called "Social Identification Theory" which describes how some people form their idea of who they themselves are through the social groups they belong to. People do. But it is *developmental*, for less experienced folks the self-image can be more directly tied to the group they want and/or do belong to (even into the late 20s); as people get older, they belong & have belonged to more & different social groups, so their self image is not so much directly tied to a particular group they belong to. They just see themselves as having some things in common with some members of those groups, as they analyze & become more familiar with the different structures & individuals in them. You have very little chance of manipulating John Pytlak, Gordon McLeod, Bob Maar, Steve Guttag or many others by social hostility. It won't work now. You can disagree with them, & present points for consideration. About the only common thing you can manipulate them through is direct access to their bank accounts. And after the immediate laugh over a joke, it's analyzed, the impracticality of it is recognized, & they're not even worried about that.
Developmentally, you're already at least 300 yards in front of those people at the new place. Your reliance on social groups for personal identification is already diffusing because you belong to a few already - home, friendships, and even more advanced experience with other groups from participating here, you've seen differentiations of personality & behaviors in this group. What you're getting perplexed about is the dysfunctional operation of *that* group. You're picking up a funny noise, you want to know what's causing it. This also means, independent of that group, you've got to get more information analytically. This isn't a personality or maturity points thing people get to wear like a badge, it's every day stuff. Every tech walks into a booth that's a technical morass with the humility of knowing that it's just going to be sorted out, but with the confidence that you can grind it out if you don't get paralyzed with aggravation & remain analytical, sometimes drawing on outside resources, etc.
So there's a good point to bring up something else that's a little outside. It's your life. You already do what's called risk/benefit analysis, everyone does, from the inception of any intellectual capacity. Do I want to throw a brick at the 1/2 ton behive for the exhiliration of seeing what happens, or just enjoy reading about it? Do you really want to be there? Are things going to get better? Everyone's gone into a social culture at some business somewhere that was so screwed up (incompetents running stuff, managers keeping them on because they are deferential, incompetents enabling it because they think they must adapt their personalities for their own ego preservation of holding a job, due to self-esteem issues, etc.) Some places are just so screwed up that, for the cost, nothing can be done, whether the cost is time, money, or aggravation. You've got to make that choice. Enjoy needlepoint & making choir robes? Others likely share that enjoyment others, but joining the Klan will probably not be very rewarding as an avenue to meeting others with that shared interest. Risk/benefit analysis is what everybody calls it; I think its an inefficient phrase, & since everyone plays poker, I think its best thought of as Stakes/Payoff. How much are you gonna put down, how much are you likely to win or lose, and most importantly, what are the odds?
When you're dealing with these folks, you've unfortunately got to be technical in the preparation of your response since it's got to be designed. Folks here will talk about the need to tell someone to get their head out of their ass, but saying that is not practical. That's simple causal troubleshooting & very useful & often accurate, it's not effective in fixing the mechanism. They will construct a response which can solve the problem for *that* funky machine's breakdown. Some people are faster with responses, due to having to be defensive in verbally hostile families, etc., but you don't have to worry about taking longer about figuring out an appropriate response, even if it's after the other person has left. I know of a socially hostile radio owner/manager who's always been problematic; many engineers have left when they've had enough. As he relied more on narcissistic, ego propping behaviors like social hostility enabled by power differential, he has become just nuts in the things he asks for, attributes blame for, etc. His present engineer is an excellent engineer, but personally, he is not Groucho Marx nor has never felt he should be, that's not him. The manager hates him; nobody else will stay on, the engineer's making good money. It's lovely the way it's driving manager nuts: "I can't stand (the engineer)! Every time I say something to him, he just looks at me like I'm crazy!" Which is basically what's happening: if the engineer was trying to look at him like he was crazy, the manager would pick up on that through recognition of one of his own socially hostile behaviors, but the engineer is honestly just looking at him & in his own personality recognizing something that's weird, shifting into his analytical mode, & wondering "what in the world is this? What can this be coming from?"
Since this is new, there's some basic stuff told people who find themselves without experience in socially hostile situations at
http://psychologytoday.psychtests.com/articles/mentalhealth/thinking_rel.html#hostile
That's bottom-level happy stuff, you likely don't have any problem with that. You're probably a little more advanced, to the point of, as you're doing now, analysis. One thing often told people who are vexed trying to figure out in socially hostile situations is to 'beware of mind reading', i.e., if someone says to you that your shoe is untied, don't reflexively read into it that they're doing it to get your goat. That's true to a base-level point, but people who *always* react that way are just doing the analysis that *everyone* does, but most others have experience *outside* of people who have only said things to be hostile. One or the other can be true: experience, & the speed & facility of analysis that comes with it, makes the difference. Don't stop thinking, don't reject the obvious, especially if the obvious (your shoe is untied) is the only meaning there.
AND ANOTHER THING: Randy quickly picked up on the physical side of things. A socially hostile environment is a *construction*, a mechanism for propping up egos along the line. When it's not working on someone, those people often get EXTREMELY fearful of ego loss of face, social rejection, the subsequent collapse of self-image that's been built only on externals, etc., & will become violent. Somebody screams at you & you say that you'd like more respect, or you just look at them, or you walk away - their brains will blow up. If they hit you: defend yourself if you can, & then call the cops.
Be yourself, as was said, & you'll make friends with the others who may not have staked their own self image on maintaining hostilie structures. Don't associate with the people who are instigating the hostility to prop themselves up. They're motivated by fear from within, not externals. Broke, can't be fixed. Need a new one. Learn to say that, techie boy.
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Daryl C. W. O'Shea
Film God
Posts: 3977
From: Midland Ontario Canada (where Panavision & IMAX lenses come from)
Registered: Jun 2002
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posted 08-19-2004 01:43 AM
Here's what Microsoft Word AutoSummarize has to say on Williams post. (Just for fun William, I read your post, lots of good info!)
quote: Microsoft Word AutoSummarize
The term for it is Social Hostility, & that's what you're facing. Physical retalitation is suppressed for adult society, so those who developed socially hostile behaviors, male or female, are the ones operating in mostly-non-incarcerated society.
The further studies of dysfunctionallly socially hostile girl groups matched up schematically with studies of poor-performing families & corporate social groups. There's a thing called "Social Identification Theory" which describes how some people form their idea of who they themselves are through the social groups they belong to. People do. Your reliance on social groups for personal identification is already diffusing because you belong to a few already - home, friendships, and even more advanced experience with other groups from participating here, you've seen differentiations of personality & behaviors in this group. A socially hostile environment is a *construction*, a mechanism for propping up egos along the line. When it's not working on someone, those people often get EXTREMELY fearful of ego loss of face, social rejection, the subsequent collapse of self-image that's been built only on externals, etc., & will become violent. Don't associate with the people who are instigating the hostility to prop themselves up. They're motivated by fear from within, not externals.
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