How to Deal with Adult Bullies Without Losing Your Sanity

Written By Caroline Smith

Many of us had a few bullies in our past middle and high school days, but what happens when you encounter fully grown adults who use those same, immature tactics from grade school? As someone with extensive experience with being bullied and excluded and who struggled to stand up for myself back then, I’ve learned a thing or two about how to deal with them in adulthood, and if you are as conflict-avoidant as I used to be, you might find this episode useful.

In today’s podcast episode, we’ll discuss the best way to deal with adult bullies without compromising your peace of mind by exploring what’s at the root of the bullying behavior, what NOT to do in response to this behavior, and what you should do in response.

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Transcript

Welcome to The Introverted Misfit Podcast with me, Caroline Smith, where we discuss topics related to the human experience of connection and communication with a slightly awkward, introverted twist.

In today’s podcast episode, we’ll discuss the best way to deal with adult bullies without compromising your peace of mind.

I’m sure everyone of you listening to this podcast can think of that one person in the office, in school, in your family, or even in church who is just mean, spiteful, and petty for no good reason.

And I’m not talking about the ones who may have unintentionally said or done something that hurt someone’s feelings, because we all have done that and will continue to do that for the rest of our lives.

I’m talking about those people who go out of their way to cause trouble pretty much everywhere they go.

They are constantly looking for overt and passive aggressive ways to make certain people’s lives miserable, and a lot of times no one really knows why they are that way, but everybody knows not to mess with them because they know they might step on a landmine.

Those are what I like to call “adult bullies”: people who have always been bullies and just refuse to grow out of their ways even though they are well out of high school.

I’ve actually talked about my own experience with bullying and exclusion in my childhood in my podcast episode titled, “When Being Bullied as a Kids Makes You an Emotionally Withdrawn Adult,” so you can imagine my surprise when I grew up to become an adult, only to realize that bullies still exist!

It’s really interesting to watch how chaos seems to follow them wherever they go, and even though the chaos is clearly visible to everyone else, the bully can’t see it, or they don’t want to see it.

But this episode is not going to be about how you can make them have some self-awareness, because in all honesty, you can’t really make anyone do anything.

Today, we’re going to focus on how you can navigate having to work and interact with them in a way that preserves your peace of mind, and I’m going to start by giving you my general advice for dealing with adult bullies:

Don’t. Don’t even entertain the antics at all.

But of course, the answer is not always that simple, so to supplement that answer, we’re going to spend the rest of this episode exploring what’s at the root of the bullying behavior, what NOT to do in response to this behavior, and what you should do in response.

  1. What’s at the root of adults who bully?

    I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “Hurt people hurt people,” and in a lot of cases that’s true, particularly in the case of the adult bully.

    It’s certainly not the case for everyone, because I’ve known some people who have been hurt and they internalize that pain instead of externalize it, which means they are more anxious and withdrawn rather than destructive and aggressive to others.

    In other words the internalizers tend to be mean to themselves, and the externalizers tend to mean to everyone else.

    In the bullies case, this saying, “Hurt people hurt people,” is definitely true because that behavior is incredibly external.

    What I’ve seen in my own indirect and direct experience with bullies is that something terrible has often happened in their lives — usually in childhood.

    And because they had no control over those terrible things that happened to them, they now feel like they must have control over everyone else in their lives, including you.

    The methods they use to gain control include purposeful rumor-spreading, messy and passive-aggressive behavior, just overall having a mean an nasty attitude and being very demanding and snappy.

    The key thing you need to remember is that their behavior has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them.

    Their behavior is a defense mechanism in response to trauma that they’ve endured.

    It’s like the character Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol.

    If you’ve never seen that movie, you should definitely go watch it especially since Christmas is very soon, but to give you a summary Scrooge is a terribly mean old man to everyone.

    He’s mean to his employees, children, strangers, everyone.

    And you don’t actually discover why he is the way that he is until later on in the movie when we discover that his childhood was full of abandonment, emotional neglect, abuse, and exclusion from the other kids.

    Then everything about his life starts to make sense.

    If you really want to get technical, their behavior makes perfect sense, and I am in no way justifying it, but when you think about it, their brain is trying to adapt to very harmful circumstances in the only way it knows how.

    So their brain is saying, “You are unsafe in this environment, so I’m going to make you do things that will keep you safe, even if it means hurting others in the process.”

    “The people who you are surrounded by don’t care about you, so I’m going to make it so that you only care about yourself, because that’s the only way you’re going to survive in this environment.”

    That’s what’s going on in the mind of a bully.

    My grandmother, who is 96 years old, was a public school teacher for many decades, and she always used to tell me that whenever she saw students who were always acting out, 9 times out of 10, you can look at their home life and the child’s behavior starts to make a lot of sense.

    Now, I’m not trying to say that it’s your job to figure out exactly what’s going on in their minds, but I’m just trying to drive home the point that there’s nothing wrong with you that makes their behavior right or acceptable.

    Remember, their behavior is not about you; it’s about them and their past pain, so the first step is to release those feelings of shame.

  2. What NOT to do in response to bullying behavior.

    Generally, you should not engage in low EQ tactics.

    That means two things: do not respond with equally low behavior, and don’t try to stay on their good side at the expense of others.

    Let’s start with that first point.

    Have you ever heard the saying, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind?”

    I think that statement holds true here.

    I want you to picture that one person you have in your head who is a bully, and picture the chaos that you have witnessed them cause in everything they do.

    Now, can you imagine the type of schools, charities, medical care facilities, political establishments, churches, that we would be fostering if every single person was behaving just like that bully?

    We wouldn’t even be able to function as a society.

    And that’s why it’s generally a bad idea to counter their low EQ behavior with equally low EQ behavior.

    The second point: don’t try to stay on their good side at the expense of other people.

    I want to demonstrate this concept with a short story that I made up as I was scripting out this episode, about the conniving tiger and the naive deer:

    One day, the tiger goes on the hunt for prey, and it finds a lone, naive deer.

    The deer makes a deal with the tiger, and it goes like this:

    The tiger agrees to spare the deer if and only if the deer will lead its fellow deer to the tiger so that he will have all of the food he wants.

    This agreement lasted for a while until one day, the deer could not hold up its side of the deal, because there were no more deer left!

    In his greediness, the tiger had eaten all of them.

    And so, in the end, the tiger turned on the naive deer and devoured him.

    The moral of the story is that trying to appease someone who just wants control is going to come back to bite you, because when that bully has no one else to control and victimize, they just might turn on you.

    I could even give an alternative ending to that story:

    Let’s say the tiger doesn’t devour the lone deer, but instead leaves to find somewhere else to hunt.

    Now, the deer is left with no one, because the naive deer turned its back on all of those other deer.

    So maybe the bully does spare you; you’re going to be left friendless, because no one else trusts you, and it’s going to be difficult for you to regain the trust.

    That’s why it’s a bad idea to try and spare yourself by forming teams with a bully.

  3. So now, how should we respond to bullying antics?

    We already talked about how responding with low EQ behavior is a recipe for disaster, so instead, I’ve got two options that I think are better:

    Either maturely confront them about the behavior and set boundaries with them, or mentally and emotionally remove yourself from the situation — in other words don’t give them your energy.

    I want to be careful not to tell you exactly what to do, because depending on your personality and your unique situation, the right response might vary.

    However, I can weigh out the pros and cons of each strategy so that you can more effectively decide for yourself.

    Let’s start with the choosing not to give them your energy.

    The good thing about this option is that in the right situations, you save yourself a lot of mental and emotional turmoil by just disconnecting from them.

    For example, let’s say this is a coworker that you really don’t have to work too closely with, or maybe you do work closely with them.

    You can decide, “I’m going to avoid them as much as possible to save my energy. Or if I do have to interact with them, I’m just going to make every interaction professional while removing my emotions from it. I’m just going to do my work and move on with my day.”

    That protects your peace because you’ve completely disconnected your sense of self-worth from them, so even if you do have to physically interact with them, your mental and emotional energy is protected.

    The bad thing about this option is that if no one challenges the bullying behavior, that person is just going to keep doing it, which is not good in the long run.

    And it’s especially not good if this bully is someone you have to communicate with on a consistent basis.

    It’s kind of like a toddler: if you try to “keep the peace” with a toddler by letting them get away with everything, they are going to grow up thinking they run the show.

    Now let’s look at the second option: maturely confront them about their behavior and set boundaries.

    There are 3 good things about this option: you let them know that their behavior is unacceptable, you let them know you are not going to tolerate it, and you give them a chance to possibly change this behavior.

    The bad thing, or should I say the negative thing about this option is that trying to behave maturely towards a bully is rarely going to work the first time, because their behavior has normally been enabled for a long time. Why? Because everyone is scared to confront them.

So those are the options to give you a better sense of direction, but I understand that it might still be difficult to decide what to do in a situation like this.

So if you were asking my advice, I would say maturely confront them about it first, and then if it’s clear that they are not going to change this behavior, just let it go, and don’t give them your energy.

Mentally and emotionally detach yourself from every interaction you have, and keep it professional.

It’s not worth your time nor your energy.

I mentioned earlier in this episode that I was bullied and excluded a good bit in school, and as a result, I became a very withdrawn adult who struggled with severe social anxiety, to the point where my counselor at the time was going to refer me to a psychiatrist to be medicated, which I ended up not doing.

And as someone who knows firsthand how social anxiety and conflict avoidance go hand-in-hand, I struggled with confronting people in my adulthood who definitely deserved to be confronted about their bullying behavior.

When I finally overcame my social anxiety and my fear of conflict to become the socially confident, introverted woman I am today, I experienced true freedom for the first time in my life.

If my story sounds like anything like you, you can actually work with me 1-on-1 in my 12-week coaching program for socially awkward and anxious introverts, called Communicate with Quiet Confidence.

You can learn everything you need to know about the program by going to theintrovertedmisfit.com/coaching, or checking for the link in the description of this episode.

That’s all for today’s episode.

As always, if you enjoyed this talk, please don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button, leave a review and/or comment whether you’re tuning in on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from, and share this podcast with a friend. Thanks for listening, and have a great day!

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Caroline Smith

Caroline is the founder of The Introverted Misfit, a community committed to helping socially inept people become more socially confident in themselves.

https://theintrovertedmisfit.com
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